The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation

I am a real fan of serious graphic novels and the use of the form to add power to the communication through words. If you have read, or tried to read, the official 9/11 Report you probably struggled in trying to organize and visualize all the detail conveyed in the words. I thought the report was very well written, but it is still hundreds of pages long and has a great amount of information that is easy to let slip into a cloud. The authors of this graphic adaptation have long experience in telling stories in comic books and are masters of the form of the graphic novel. As they read the official report they soon realized that they could use their skills to make the information more accessible to more people. Thomas Kean, the former chairman of the 9/11 commissions said of this project "when I first heard about it, I was very concerned. But when I looked at it, it was absolutely accurate." Chair Kean and Vice-Chair Hamilton thought enough of this work to provide the foreword in this book. I have to say that when I first heard about this book, I had no idea what it was. Would it be an abridged version of the report with photos? When I saw what it was and read it I was most impressed by the amount of information it conveys and how the pictures aid understanding, clarify timelines and activities, and add to the emotional impact of the report. This is not a dumbed down version of the report, nor does it change the meaning of the report, nor does it editorialize on what it says. This means that the strengths and weaknesses of the report are the strengths and weaknesses of this book. Where you agree with the report (or disagree), you will agree (or disagree) with this graphic adaptation. I think this is a terrific achievement and increases the value of the book. Certainly, the official version has more material than could be presented here (but there is a LOT here - just some of it conveyed in pictures) and must be consulted if you want to debate or criticize the report. Because the authors (artists?) of this book keep the same organization as in the official report, it is easy to compare the two. Honestly, this is an important part of American history and the official report is important to know. If you have found the official report a challenge, read this version. Get your kids to read it. Have a family discussion about it with everyone reading from this graphic adaptation. We will all be better off when everyone is aware of what really happened that day and what led up to it. Getting pieces of the story or speculation from TV and blogs really are not enough. I showed this book to some college students and they were quite enthusiastic about it and expressed a strong desire to read it because of its presentation format. While I would wish that reading a few hundred pages of text would not be too daunting for such students, the reality in our visual age is that this book will likely be read by more people than the official text

I have read both the original 9-11 Commission Report and this graphic adaptation. The graphic adaptation is an excellent accessory to the original report. Although some might find the "graphic novel" look off-putting, it contains the same information in the original report in a more accessible format. The fold-out time-line of the Sept. 11 events in the hardcover edition is an excellent resource all by itself. The softcover edition has the same information as the hardcover edition at less cost, except the softcover time-line does not fold out. I recommend either edition for a family library...the graphic adapation for the kids, and/or for adults wanting an easy-to-scan companion to the original 9-11 Commission Report.

I wasn't one of the millions who read the historic 9/11 commission report issued several years ago--or even purchased one. I had no desire to plow through over 500 pages of information and I wonder how many people read the entire document. When I learned about this graphic novel treatment and that it accurately reflected the full report, I ordered a copy. I'll admit that I don't read many graphic novels but I read every frame and every page of this document. It is a sobering account of the state of preparedness of the United States for a terrorist attack. According to the national chairman and vice chairman of the 9/11 commission, this book is reflective of the tone and spirit of the original report. Authors Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon have served the broad public with this well-done book. I recommend it for readers of all ages.

Comics have come a long way, even since the sixties when intellectuals started taking Batman, Superman, and Spiderman seriously. _Maus_ by Art Spiegelman, for instance, was the serious story of Spiegelman's father in the Holocaust, and Spiegelman's problematic relationship with him; it was a quietly magnificent history and memoir, and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. _From Hell_ by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell was an examination of Jack the Ripper's story that was as dense as a novel, and with lots of reference notes to boot. If you have been watching comics climb in respectability, they have just mounted upon another rung. It is hard to class _The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation_ (Hill and Wang) by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón as a comic book, for it certainly is deadly serious rather than comic, and it isn't a "graphic novel", the category by which the genre goes now. It is the famous _Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States_ but told in the comic book form. The original prose work, widely praised and even nominated for a National Book Award, was a bestseller when it came out in July 2004. It had 600 pages, while the current one has 133. Yet this is a condensation of the report, not a dumbing-down of it. Most of the words in it (in the san-serif capitals traditional to comics) come directly from the original report, which is in the public domain. There are some pages that could not have been done better in any format. The book starts with a timeline, four rows extending for twelve pages, counting off the hours of that morning for each of the four flights. The atrocities within each plane and each flight's violent end are drawn, and all readers following the streams will try to remember what was going on at the same time in their own lives that day, and when they started hearing about the crashes. Following one timeline is another, similar one for each plane, showing the "Awareness, Notification, and Response" of flight controllers, the FAA, NORAD, and the air defense sector of the region. Along with maps, these timelines make the flow of the events of the morning comprehensible. The style of the drawings is obviously that of the comic books in which both authors are experienced. These are not young guys promoting a new version of their art. Jacobson, 76, created the "Richie Rich" series and was the editor of Harvey Comics. Colón, 75, drew Richie, and also Casper the Friendly Ghost, before moving on to the more superhero-themed DC Comics. The book sticks to the original report, although it includes imagined pictures of events that happened within the airplanes and within the towers for which there is no documentation. Necessarily, the book does show that people working within agencies of the government were acting at cross purposes at times during the day, just as the FBI, CIA, and military intelligence had failed in the preceding months to share information rather than hoarding

What an artform and what fidelity to the subject!! I am contemplating buying more copies in the first edition just to put them away as an investment. This careful and skilled effort on such an historic topic might never be repeated; the human talent to do something like this might just not be around once the great generation behind this stops its work.