September 10th 2001 I was in our Midtown Manhattan apartment drawing the fourth issue of Vertigo’s Angel & The Ape reboot. I’d been living in the city for almost a year and for most of that time I’d been working on the four-issue series. Writers Howard Chaykin and David Tischman set the story in New York and I was feeling the art was something of a love-letter to my new city, from the tops of the downtown skyscrapers to the steps of the uptown brownstones.
I’d just finished page one and, bearing in mind the top tip of never leaving yourself a blank page for the morning, drawn the first panel of page two, this scene-setting view looking south past the Empire State Building to the Twin Towers. And off to bed.
By mid morning the next day, when I should have been all caffeined-up and back at the drawing table finishing the page, no one was thinking too much about comics. Our little apartment had filled up with evacuees from the nearby DC offices, unable to get trains out of the city to their own homes, quietly watching events unfold on TV.
By the time that issue of Angel & The Ape went to press someone in DC’s production department must have been given the odd little task of removing the towers from the skyline in the panel. Too soon, too soon. Sensitive times and all that. Despite my kicking up a tiny fuss The World Trade Center is missing from the page in the printed book. Shame, I love New York and I loved those towers.
