ARTelevision

The other day, I received a digital version of The Amazing Spider-man, 36, from a friend. After my usual carping about how the essential aspects of things are never quite captured by their digital simulacra, I settled down to reading and viewing the images in the famous 911 edition of this comic series.

The artwork is over-the-top, of course – beyond pop, into heraldic postmodern super-chromaticism – an ecstatic riot of line and hue that’s characteristic of current comics. There isn’t really a storyline. Instead, it is an extended meditation on the events of that day – just about three years ago now.

Spider-man is there among the multitude of citizens and rescuers. He gazes, dumbfounded by the terrible spectacle. His thoughts move in epic prose, somewhat ponderously, through disbelief and shock toward some ability to derive a sense of purpose, direction, and meaning in moving forward from the devastation of the scenes surrounding him.

He conjures up his superhero buddies who function as witnesses only – as if offering their silent support for the man inside the suit – Peter Parker. This is his home city, after all. The symbolic appearance of Captain America signals something universal and epochal is occurring and links this event to the events of the century past.

In the end though, it is a very dated conception. We’re unable to conjure up the emotions of that time. The events that have transpired seem to have somehow disconnected us from those moorings. I’m left with a sense of the ultimate randomness of things and not with a sense of their manageability. And that is disquieting.

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