The strength and heft of Art Spiegelman's first graphic novel in 12 years transcend and upend convention.

		"IN THE SHADOW OF NO TOWERS" By Art Spiegelman Pantheon ($19.95)

An artifact, a slab, a monument -- this is no mere book. Unpaginated, ungainly and heavy, it seems to demand its own space. A coffee table can't contain a statement so thick and unsettling, a cry that would outshout chaos.

In melding humor and anger, it contextualizes an event that seems to defy history. It wields merciless magic.

Unlike a work that's all text, you can "get through" this quickly. Absorbing it takes more time. It's Spiegelman's attempt to keep the memory of the World Trade Center from frying his brain.

Patiently created, with great emotional trepidation, this signals Spiegelman's fresh commitment to a world he's just beginning to trust again.

Now that there's a presidential election, he suggests, free speech is at least temporarily back in vogue.

Approach this as you would the World Trade Center if it still stood. Like a building, "In the Shadow" has a front door: The glossy black outlines of the two towers terrorists destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001, dominate this somber, fitful creation, as they did the darker, more subtly textured and more disturbing cover he produced for The New Yorker the week of the attacks on Manhattan and Washington.

Once you get inside this dark cartoon structure, 14 inches tall, 10 inches wide and an inch thick, the world disorients. After two pages in which Spiegelman catches us up on his history since his two "Maus" books won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, this smooth, bulky thing, backside populated by high-contrast silhouettes of ancient cartoon figures such as Olive Oyl, Dopey, Ignatz, L'il Abner and Mr. O'Malley, turns on its side and switches to dense, stylistically diverse broadsheet-sized panels, some of which took Spiegelman five weeks to produce.

What tempers these is time, too raw to add up to history, and comics. The latter surface as cartoon references. Time erupts in Spiegelman's explicit connections between 9/11 and "the Giuliani years, when the homeless all magically 'disappeared' " and the recent Republican Party gathering ("And September '04? Cowboy boots drop on Ground Zero as New York is transformed into a stage set for the Republican Presidential Convention, and Tragedy is transformed into Travesty ...").

"In the Shadow" depicts a world turned every which way and loose. It's 9/11 all over again, sky falling and all. Plate 1 stylizes Dan Rather, humanizes the stunned Spiegelman, ennobles the city's terrified populace and casts the two towers in an eerie, radiated orange, as if they're still burning.

Plate 2 suggests irony isn't dead, in a panel billboarding an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie against a soot-filled sky.

In that same plate, at right center top, Spiegelman and his wife, Francoise Mouly, seem all antennae, hearing the crash of the first plane as a red "Roarrrrrrrr!!."

The planes in the picture and in our recollection of that day's world collapse simultaneously, freezing the Spiegelmans (she's the New Yorker's art director) in the frame. As in an Egyptian frieze, background and foreground merge, the humans flattened by the dread of the moment.

Spiegelman realizes his daughter, Nadja, is at school at the foot of the towers, and he must rescue her. He and Mouly rush through town to reach her; in temporarily overcoming his nicotine habit, Spiegelman becomes the mouse from the "Maus" books, a Jew who mentally twins the smell of Manhattan soot with the smoke of Auschwitz gas chambers.

These ghastly aromas lead Spiegelman/Maus to figure that if cigarettes won't kill him, the nation's poor air quality will. All of which give his paranoia credence.

"In the Shadow" is about overcoming paranoia, about coming to terms with a world in which news rolls over the computer screen to be instantly commercialized.

The world Spiegelman so vividly and lovingly depicts is one in which rhetoric trumps passion, in which terrorist attacks become ads for war recruitment and in which he finds himself living in the "state of alienation," a country he says cries out for a third party -- but not the "Ostrich Party" of the R. Crumb-like Panel 5 centerpiece.

Spiegelman treats Washington as a separate nation. It's a New York scold of the current administration, and it's also a profound act of engagement.

He had quit creating comics for much of the '90s, and at the turn of the century he quit The New Yorker, which he viewed as too complacent.

"In the Shadow" puts Spiegelman back, garish, powerful and ticked off, in the polemics game.