“Blow up the Twin Towers? Possible, but what do I get out of it besides Batman’s death?”

23 Comic Images That Became a Little Harder to Revisit After the Events of Sept. 11, 2001

1. “Thousands are dead, many more injured.”
Twenty years ago today, the world experienced one of those once-in-a-generation events where people who were alive at the time can tell you where they were and what they were doing on that day. While it would take a long time for most of us to understand the long-term impact of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, in that moment it was clear to a lot of us that the world as we knew it would never be the same. One of the less important — but still real — outcomes of that day was the immediate effect it had on pop culture. As the makers of television shows like The Sopranos and Sex and the City moved swiftly to erase images of the World Trade Center from their opening credits, others quietly shelved or pushed back the release of projects that might upset audiences with images of collapsing buildings or crashing planes. But those were projects that were ongoing or yet to be released; harder to erase from our collective consciousness were images of the buildings and their destruction shown in pop-culture artifacts from the past. Case in point: this panel from 1985’s Uncanny X-Men #189, in which Rachel — a time-traveling mutant who was born in an alternate-future 21st century — views the New York skyline from the Statue of Liberty and remembers the New York she once knew, a dystopian hell where mutants like her are hunted down and the twin towers of the World Trade Center “lie in ruins” as the result of an unexplained event. 

2. “The twin sky-towers of Metropolis both wildly ablaze!”
The World Trade Center officially opened on April 4, 1973, and at the time of their completion the Twin Towers — the original 1 World Trade Center (the North Tower) and 2 World Trade Center (the South Tower) — were the tallest buildings in the world (a distinction they held until the completion of Chicago’s Sears Tower the following year). They immediately became a media sensation and an iconic symbol of the city, and they were referenced in hundreds of films, television shows and comic books over the following years. One of their earliest comic appearances was in the story “Whatever Happened to Superman?” in 1973’s Action Comics #428, which hit spinner racks just three months after the complex was opened. True, they’re called “the Twin Sky-Towers” here and they’re located in Superman’s Metropolis and not in Lower Manhattan, but still. Savvy readers knew the score. 

3. “Metropolis”
Years later, another Superman comic would turn out to have a much closer link to the Sept. 11 attacks. In Adventures of Superman #596, the story begins with the world recovering from the latest alien attack; images of a number of famous landmarks around the world that experienced collateral damage—including the L-shaped Lexcorp Tower in Metropolis—are shown. At any other time, these kinds of images in a comic book wouldn’t have been a big deal… but considering the November 2001-dated issue shipped to retailers on Sept. 12 of that year, it was suddenly a very big deal that a comic was showing the image of a smoking, damaged husk of a building that, from the angle it was drawn, looked eerily like the Twin Towers.

What made the timing of that particular comic even more unfortunate was another image a few pages later, one in which we see various viewscreens displaying images of post-invasion damage from around the world with one screen showing two damaged towers that look very much like the Twin Towers. Obviously, given the months it takes to create, print and distribute a comic book, it was nothing more than a terrible coincidence that the book shipped the day after the attacks. Even so, DC acted quickly to let retailers know they could return the issue if they wished (though few if any were actually sent back).

4. Marvel Graphic Novel #17: Revenge of the Living Monolith
Spoiler: this image from the cover of Marvel’s Revenge of the Living Monolith isn’t re-created inside the 84-page story, though the 1985 graphic novel does show plenty of other New York properties destroyed during a giant villain’s rampage. And that’s probably just as well; aside from the disconcerting image of one of the towers being smashed to pieces while panicking New Yorkers flee in terror, there’s also the uncomfortable fact the Living Monolith—also referred to as the Living Pharaoh during his less towering moments—is a super-villain mutant born and raised in the Middle East, similar to the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks.

5. “Blow up the Twin Towers? Possible, but what do I get out of it besides Batman’s death?”
In 1989’s Batman #441, the story begins with the villainous Two-Face trying to decide what his next move will be. “If I want to murder Batman, I’ve got to lure him to me,” he thinks to himself. “But how? What can I steal? What clues can I leave that are both obvious and yet subtle?” Such is the inner turmoil of a theme-obsessed Gotham ganglord. At one point during his plotting, he looks out the window and ponders blowing up Gotham’s “Twin Towers” (one of which sports a prominent antenna, much like the North Tower of the World Trade Center) as a way of accomplishing his goal. The towers are only saved from his murderous actions by a toss of his famous coin deciding their fate.

6. “Let me get this thing focused… oh, my…”
Also appearing in 1989 was the first issue of Damage Control, a lighthearted mini-series by Dwayne McDuffie and Ernie Colón that followed the day-to-day lives of employees at a New York construction outfit specializing in cleaning up the messes caused by superhero battles. This page shows the aftermath of a skirmish between various Marvel heroes and the Tinkerer’s size-changing robot, a fight that takes out several buildings and leaves significant cracks in both towers when the teetering robot slams into them. Not to worry, though, as one of Damage Control’s people demonstrates the value of having the right tool for the right job and transforms the giant into a normal-sized Volkswagen Beetle. Fixing the damaged towers turns out to be a tougher challenge. (“What the heck. Close enough.”)

7. “And the power breakfast club meets with terrorism… a quarter-mile high!”
Comics in the 1990s weren’t generally known for their subtlety, and this story was no exception. In 1994’s Doctor Strange Annual #4, the story begins with a terrorist attack at the top of the World Trade Center by zealots acting in the name of the story’s main villain. (She was a sorceress who derived her powers from negative emotions, and so her disciples spread fear and terror to fuel her in her battle against Doctor Strange.) Not shown in this image is a panel in which the “strength-enhanced fanatics” hurl their victims and themselves out the window — echoing the haunting images of people falling from the real-life towers before they collapsed.  

8. “Wow! And what a fire to fight! One of the World Trade towers is ablaze!”
Released in 1974, The Towering Inferno was the highest-grossing film of that year, and little wonder; boasting an all-star cast led by Paul Newman and Steve McQueen, it provided the kind of big-screen disaster-movie spectacle that helped mid-’70s audiences forget their real-life troubles for a while. The film became such a well-known piece of pop culture that it inspired similar disaster films and references to it in other media (see also: “Disco Inferno”), including a shout-out on the cover of 1980’s Marvel Two-in-One #59.  

The story inside finds Johnny and Ben out for a stroll when a man on an out-of-control horse gallops right past them, causing a car to swerve and crash into a fire hydrant. After that minor crisis is dealt with, they learn that the man, Norman, made a list years ago of the goals he wanted to accomplish by the time he turned 30, and “cowboy” was first on the list. Because they apparently didn’t have anything better to do, the two heroes agree to help his wife by keeping an eye on Norman for the rest of the day. Except they end up not doing a great job of it, as he next sneaks into a fire station to play firefighter just as the firefighters are called to deal with a fire at the World Trade Center. “These firemen are the bravest men I’ve ever seen!” thinks our unprepared cosplayer. No argument here.

9. “Once these shattered towers were the proud, resplendent World Trade Center.”
The World Trade Center would make another appearance in Marvel Two-in-One, this time in the series’ final and 100th issue in 1983. In that story, Ben teams up with himself… or rather a version of himself from an alternate timeline. In this less fortunate reality, Galactus succeeds in sucking the life energy out of the planet, leaving a shell-shocked populace to find a way to survive amid the ruins of a destroyed civilization. Into this chaos steps the Red Skull, who takes advantage of New York’s — sorry, New Amsterdam’s — decimation by establishing a new Nazi regime with the shattered remnants of the World Trade Center as his headquarters.

10. “He dies seven seconds later — as do the twin towers themselves.”
Films like The Towering Inferno and 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure proved there was a market for big-budget disaster films in the 1970s, and 1979’s Meteor was one of the last of these films to come out in that decade. With an all-star cast that included Sean Connery, Natalie Wood, and Henry Fonda, it tells the story of scientists and military types from both the U.S. and the Soviet Union racing to save the Earth from an asteroid massive enough to wipe off all life. But before the main event can happen, a number of smaller fragments cause all kinds of death and destruction, including one that destroys the top half of the Twin Towers before creating a massive crater in Central Park. Marvel Super Special was a magazine-sized publication that offered adaptations of popular films during the ’70s and ’80s; its fourteenth issue adapted Meteor with art by Gene Colan and Tom Palmer.

11. “Hera, help me stop the black lightning before it splits that building in two!”
In fairness, the scene shown on the cover of 1976’s Wonder Woman #225 is a bit of a tease; at no point in the story titled “Maximus, Emperor of Hollow Mountain!” are the Twin Towers ever in danger of being split in two by a bolt of black lightning. There is, however, a scene inside where Diana literally rides the lightning before foiling a mad billionaire’s scheme to… steal her natural charisma? Okay, then.

12. “My plane’s heading directly toward the twin towers!”
This Wonder Woman story, on the other hand, puts the Twin Towers directly in danger, with the source of that danger being none other than Wonder Woman herself. In 1982’s Wonder Woman #287, a guest-starring Wonder Girl finds herself kidnapped by the minions of one of Diana’s arch-enemies, and it’s up to the Amazing Amazon and the rest of the Teen Titans to save her. But while Diana is en route to meet up with the young heroes, she loses mental control of her invisible plane, and the person taking control of it doesn’t care about the damage to the New York skyline the plane might cause while it’s under her control. Only some quick thinking from the Titans saves New Yorkers from the “plummeting rubble” as Diana’s plan crashes right through the towers.

13. “The World Trade Center… I–I wasn’t paying attention! We’re going to crash into it.”
At least Wonder Woman had the excuse of someone else remote-controlling her invisible plane; in 1986’s The New Teen Titans #20, her protégée nearly crashes into one of the Twin Towers—and causes a few heart attack-inducing moments for some poor office workers—because she was too focused on personal issues to pay attention to where she was flying the team’s T-Jet.  

14. “KRAKABOOM”
In the years before the towers collapsed, the World Trade Center saw its share of drama. A three-alarm fire broke out on the 11th floor of the North Tower in 1975, and in 1998 a three-man crew stole $2 million from a Brinks delivery van that had pulled up to make a delivery. And then there was the 1993 bombing in which terrorist detonated a rental truck full of explosives in the underground garage of the North Tower, blasting a hole through five sublevels and killing six people. Three years later, that event was re-created in Incredible Hulk #439, a story in which several high-profile American landmarks (including Mount Rushmore and the White House) are targeted by a mysterious terrorist group called the Alliance.

15. “To find the answer, we must look past the destruction to the floor just below the impact.” 
Following his hugely popular run on Amazing Spider-Man in the late 1980s, artist Todd McFarlane demanded — and got — his own Spider-Man title to write and draw. The adjective-less Spider-Man book was a hit right from the start, and in 1991 McFarlane did a crossover story with another fan-favorite title, Rob Liefeld’s X-Force, in which our favorite web-slinger teams up with Cable’s mutant strike force to battle Juggernaut and Black Tom Cassidy at the World Trade Center. In an eerie portent of things to come, explosives planted throughout one of the towers by Cassidy severely damage the structure before an enraged Juggernaut rams the wreckage down upon our heroes.

16. “Yipes! It’s heading for my brand-new twin office towers!”
It’s become a trend in recent years to point out the ways in which episodes of The Simpsons have predicted future events, but it’s probably worth noting that any popular entertainment is going to “predict” future events if it’s been around for a long time. Take Uncle Scrooge, who has been going on globe-trotting adventures with his nephews almost since Carl Barks first came up with him in the late 1940s. In 1997, writer/artist Don Rosa published “Attack of the Hideous Space Varmints,” a three-part story (Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories #614-616) in which Rosa had fun playing with the tropes of early sci-fi cinema. At one point, Scrooge’s money vault is lifted up into the air by an alien gadget and sent on a collision course with Scrooge’s new “twin office towers” that bear a striking resemblance to the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

17. “Welcome to the future.”
Published between 1984 and 1991, Marvel’s The Transformers was based on Hasbro’s popular line of shape-changing robots. Early issues in the series featured stories that were designed to introduce to young readers the latest Transformers toys that were available for sale, but as the series went on the creators branched out into more fanciful stories that delved deeper into the Transformers mythos. In 1990’s Transformers #67, for instance, readers are brought to the far-off 2009 — “one of many possible futures, but the future nonetheless!” — to witness a world conquered by the Decepticons, one in which the remaining Autobots are driven underground and their leader, Rodimus Prime, is strung up between the two decimated towers of the World Trade Center.

18. “Just another morning in New York.”
American comics weren’t alone in depicting images of the World Trade Center being threatened or damaged prior to 9/11. “Rain Dogs,” a strip by Gordon Rennie and Colin Wilson, ran in the British weekly comic 2000 AD for 10 episodes (Progs 1213-1222) in 2000; set in the near future, it tells the story of survivors of the “Big Rain,” an environmental event that turns New York City into an archipelago of skyscraper islands populated by your usual post-apocalyptic scavengers and cannibals. The strip’s climactic battle takes place on the top of the World Trade Center, where images of an explosion and billowing smoke look eerily similar to the events of 9/11 nine months later.

19. “The skinheads’ building collapses, reducing the surrounding blocks to a puddle of twisted steel and shattered glass.” 
“Rebel,” a strip created by cartoonist Pepe Moreno Casares, was published by France’s Albin Michel in 1984 before appearing serially in his native Spain two years later. Like many other sci-fi strips of the time, it told the story of urban gangs fighting each other in a post-apocalyptic context, with Rebel (or Rebelde in Spanish) being the charismatic leader of one such gang; meanwhile, a corrupt oligarchy controls events from behind the scenes with the help of a puppet gang called the Skins.

In this near-future tale set in the early 21st century, war has already decimated one of the Twin Towers, with the other occupied by the Skins. At one point, Rebel and his forces stage an all-out assault on the gang’s headquarters and take down the remaining tower, to devastating effect.

20. Mortadelo y Filemón
The brainchild of Spanish artist Francisco Ibáñez, Mortadelo y Filemón first appeared in 1958 in the children’s comic-book magazine Pulgarcito. Mort (Mortadelo) is the taller of the two and a master of disguise, while Phil (Filemón) is the nominal boss of their two-man secret agent operation (though both are equally adept at messing things up). Aimed at a younger audience, the series often uses slapstick humor (similar to the Looney Tunes cartoon shorts) in which falling from great heights or being crushed by heavy objects rarely leaves any lasting impact. Another trademark of the strip was an abundance of background gags adding to the silliness, like the ones seen here in a story celebrating the strip’s 35th anniversary. Depicting the World Trade Center with an airplane crashing into one of its towers would likely have caused a few chuckles among readers in 1993; today, not so much. 

21. “That’s the World Trade Center, the tallest building in New York.”
Now called Scout Life, Boys’ Life started in 1911 as the monthly magazine for the Boy Scouts of America. Boasting a list of past contributors that include the likes of Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Alex Haley and Robert H. Heinlein, over the years the magazine has offered its readers a mix of adventure stories, health and fitness articles, and features about everything from science and history to video games and outdoor hobbies. Comic strips featured heavily in the magazine, with regular strips like Pee Wee Harris and The Pedro Patrol focusing on Scout-related storylines. The October 1981 issue of the magazine featured a strip titled “Look at Your World” that encouraged readers to “discover America” starting with a trip to New York City. Given their prominence in the city’s skyline, it makes sense the World Trade Center would be included among the landmarks visited by the boys in the strip… but the inclusion of a low-flying plane circling the towers stands out in these post-9/11 times.

22. “Kingpin in Fun City”
Running from 1974 to 1982, Spidey Super Stories was a joint production between Marvel and the Children’s Television Workshop, which produced the educational television series The Electric Company in the 1970s. The comic was based on a recurring skit of the same name that saw a live-action Spidey (played by puppeteer and dancer Danny Seagren) face off against various super-villains while “speaking” only in word balloons as a way of encouraging young viewers to practice their reading skills. While the live-action skits featured original villains like Dr. Fly, the Blowhard, and Silly Willy, the stories in the comic introduced its younger readers to other Marvel characters, like the Kingpin. “Welcome to Crime City” finds the Kingpin using funny money to purchase Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge, and New York’s other public amenities. No mention of the Twin Towers inside, which is just as well; this cover image of the Kingpin crushing them with his bare hands is unsettling enough.

23. “Next summer, go for the ultimate spin.” 
Released in early 2001, the original teaser trailer for the 2002 film Spider-Man was a two-minute mini-film about bank robbers escaping in a helicopter, only to find themselves ensnared in a giant web spun by our hero who’s seen swinging through New York City in the final seconds of the trailer. It was a huge success in generating a lot of excitement for the upcoming film… but after the events of 9/11, Sony pulled the trailer and its related posters from theaters. The reason? As the camera pulls back to show what’s happening to the captured helicopter, viewers saw that the giant web was anchored on either side by the Twin Towers; meanwhile, the original teaser posters showed a reflection of the towers in one of Spider-Man’s eyes. Director Sam Raimi later confirmed the helicopter scene was originally in the film but removed prior to release because of the attacks.