No one has done more than Art Spiegelman to make adults take comic books seriously. In “Maus,” his illustrated account of his father’s experience in Auschwitz, Mr. Spiegelman unhesitatingly claimed the gravest of subjects as suitable material for a comic strip; and his two strange and moving volumes made good on the claim. So warmly was “Maus” received, indeed, that the limitations of the genre were easy to overlook; recently, some writers have even claimed that the future of literature belongs to the “graphic novel.” But Mr. Spiegelman’s new book, “In the Shadow of No Towers” (Pantheon, 42 pages, $19.95) – as well as “Persepolis 2” (Pantheon, 192 pages, $17.95), the sequel to Marjane Satrapi’s fine memoir – serve to remind us that the comic strip has serious shortcomings as a literary medium.

The first installment of Ms. Satrapi’s autobiographical comic dealt with her childhood in Iran, from the 1979 revolution up to 1984, when her parents sent her out of her increasingly dangerous and oppressive homeland to study at a boarding school in Vienna. The novelty and emotional force of “Persepolis” lay in its child’s-eye view of the ayatollahs’ theocracy as it slowly invaded Ms. Satrapi’s world. What made the book successful, however, was not any insight into the historical, religious, and political transformations wrought by the Iranian revolution. Indeed, the book absolves itself in advance from any expectation of objectivity or analytical sophistication, exactly because it is a comic book – a childish genre suited to a child’s experience.

Instead, the best parts of “Persepolis” make the young Ms. Satrapi’s innocent ignorance their explicit theme: Her devotion to God (drawn as a kind patriarch with flowing beard) gives way to a passionate enthusiasm for communism, which in turn is displaced by a fierce patriotism during the Iran-Iraq war. Ms. Satrapi’s embrace of each shift in the nation’s political mood is, precisely, cartoonish – exaggerated, shorn of nuance – and therefore lends itself perfectly to a cartoon.

For the same reason, “Persepolis” and its sequel cannot do justice to subjects that are not cartoonish. In the first volume, this meant history; in the second, it is psychology. Picking up Ms. Satrapi’s story at the age of 14, “Persepolis 2” records her unhappy four-year sojourn in Vienna, her return to Iran and struggles to re-adjust – including a brief failed marriage – and her final departure in 1994 for France, where she still lives.

The book is most successful when it deals, like its predecessor, with Ms. Satrapi’s personal experience of the changing culture of her homeland. In her highly privileged stratum of society, women in particular are constantly negotiating the boundaries imposed by the puritanical “guardians of the revolution.” At home, they listen to American pop, drink alcohol, have parties, wear the latest fashions; on the street, they can be jailed and beaten for walking next to a man other than their husband. On one occasion, Ms. Satrapi is accosted by the morality-police while running to catch a bus – the movement of her behind, she is told, is obscene.

Yet the first half of the book, which shows Ms. Satrapi as an alienated, potsmoking teenager in Vienna, is much less involving. And this is due directly to the limitations of the image as a medium of interiority. A comic strip can indicate basic, stereotyped emotions – anger, sadness – but it cannot represent or recreate emotion in the way that prose can; a picture, in this case, is worth considerably less than a thousand words. That is why, even if childhood and illusion can be effectively captured in the graphic novel, adulthood and experience cannot.

The lessons of Ms. Satrapi’s book apply with still greater force to Art Spiegelman’s. The two volumes of “Maus” are genuinely moving because of their skillful management of the limitations of the comic-strip form. Mr. Spiegelman’s premise is that no one who did not experience the Holocaust can really know what it was like: “Some part of me,” he is shown telling his psychiatrist, “doesn’t want to draw or think about Auschwitz. I can’t visualize it clearly, and I can’t BEGIN to imagine what it felt like.” This is why Mr. Spiegelman’s deliberately artificial, quasi-allegorical style – he draws the Jews as mice, the Germans as cats – seems justified. If any representation of the Holocaust is destined to fail, then it is better to frankly embrace and even emphasize the distance between imagination and experience.

When it comes to the catastrophe of September 11 and its aftermath, however, Mr. Spiegelman shows little of that humility. “In the Shadow of No Towers” consists of 10 large cartoons, each designed to fill a page of a broadsheet newspaper; the lavishly produced book is bulked out by reproductions of the early comic strips that inspired Mr. Spiegelman, such as “The Kinder Kids” and “Happy Hooligan.” Despite its tragic subject, then, it is not really comparable to “Maus,” either in length or in genre – it is not a narrative of September 11, but a series of reflections on the day and, still more, on the political events of the subsequent two years.

As a result, the success of the book depends on exactly those qualities in which the comic form is weakest: objective understanding, impersonal sympathy, political and historical reasoning. It quickly becomes clear that Mr. Spiegelman has nothing original to say about what happened on September 11, and why it happened; he has only marginally more to say about what he personally experienced that day. The first three cartoons deal with his memories of witnessing the towers’ collapse from a SoHo street and his panicked search for his daughter at Stuyvesant High School. Even in these panels, the sharply limited perspective of the comic book means that Mr. Spiegelman’s focus is entirely on his own panic – “I was sure we were going to die! I’ve always sorta suspected it, but that morning really convinced me” – and barely at all on the people who actually were victims that morning.

What really harms “In the Shadow of No Towers,” however, is the way Mr. Spiegelman’s feelings of fear and anxiety go on to express themselves as paranoid hatred – not of Osama bin Laden, but of President Bush. Mr. Spiegelman fills his book with reverberations from the political echo chamber in which so many Manhattanites dwell. (“He’s barely ever been in the Red Zone where the 44% of Americans who don’t believe in Evolution tend to gather,” Mr. Spiegelman writes, over a haggard drawing of himself holding an upsidedown peace symbol.) Here are the cliches of outrage that have replaced effective thought among large parts of the American left: “When the planes hit those towers I got knocked into an alternate reality where George W. Bush was president”; “This gang in power gets me so damn mad I could scream”; “His ‘president’ wages his wars and wars on wages – same old deadly business as usual.” This is not political argument, but phatic communication, designed to synchronize the writer’s and the reader’s feelings of indignation and moral superiority.

Ironically, “In the Shadow of No Towers” as much as confesses the real reason for the intellectual frailty of its response to 9/11 – though Mr. Spiegelman himself does not seem to realize it. In the ninth cartoon in the series, he delivers a tirade against the “displacement” he believes is “America’s latest craze.” Just as “we demolished Iraq instead of Al Qaeda,” he writes, so the New York Times has displaced its guilt over misreporting the Iraqi WMDs onto its ludicrously exaggerated guilt over Jayson Blair, and Mayor Bloomberg’s smoking ban is a displacement of New York’s anxiety over post-9/11 air pollution.

But Mr. Spiegelman does not seem to realize that the biggest displacement in this book is his own: his displacement of his fear of Al Qaeda onto the Bush White House. Mr. Spiegelman is hardly alone among New Yorkers in having participated in this psychological transaction: After all, thinking about Osama bin Laden is much more difficult than thinking about George W. Bush. To fear Mr. bin Laden is to fear the genuine threat of sudden death by terrorism; to fear Mr. Bush is to claim to fear a tyranny that everybody knows does not, in fact, exist. Indeed, by irresponsibly asserting that he is, in the words of one caption, “equally terrorized by al-Qaeda and by his own government,” Mr. Spiegelman and those like him make it much more difficult to get a hearing for important, reasoned criticism of government policy.

The other anxiety that is radically displaced in “In the Shadow of No Towers” has to do with Jewishness and anti-Semitism. The Islamists who hate America, of course, also hate the Jews; the last two years have been deeply unsettling to American Jews who had not fully registered the persistence of murderous anti-Semitism in the Arab world. This must be particularly troubling to a writer like Mr. Spiegelman – a child of Holocaust survivors whose best work was about the victimization of Jews. Yet to respond to the fundamentalist’s anti-Semitic hatred with his own anger and vigilance would not only violate Mr. Spiegelman’s bien-pensant pacifism; it would mean taking seriously the threat of massive violence against Jews, not just as a nightmare from the past but as a possibility in the future.

No wonder Mr. Spiegelman, like many others, finds it easier to displace this anxiety, too. The only episode of anti-Semitism in “In the Shadow of No Towers” involves a crazy old Russian woman who haunts the streets of SoHo, shouting curses; “Dirty Jew! We’ll hang you from the lamp posts, one by one!” And Mr. Spiegelman can vanquish this threat simply by telling the old woman that her Jew-hatred is irrational: “If you don’t stop blaming everything on the Jews,” he shouts at her, “people are gonna think you’re CRAZY!” But the real danger is that, in many parts of the world, blaming everything on the Jews, or on the Americans, does not make people think you’re crazy – it makes them admire you so much that they become willing to kill and die for you. Maybe it is fitting that Mr. Spiegelman’s evasion of this difficult, demanding, frightening fact should find expression in a cartoon.