All PostsThe 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón. Hill and Wang, 2006. 118p.
I’ll admit to skepticism about this comics adaptation of the 9/11 Commission Report, but I saw it start to appear on some Best of 2006 (already?) lists so I got a copy from the library. Having not read the original report, it’s hard to judge the adaptation in relation to its source material. But as a work of comics and a narrative of a complicated web of historical events, I can make some comments, rather to the detriment of the work.
The first chapter goes through the events of September 11th, 2001. It’s a logical starting point, as for most of the readers of the book (and most of the US) that day was the first real exposure to the issues at hand. In this sense the first chapter is well placed, but in the sense that 9/11 was also a great shock and emotionally charged event, the comic fails to convince. A major problem I had with the book as a whole is its lack of emotional engagement. The choices and style of the images side-stepped the real trauma that plays out in many of the events. For instance, at one point the text tells of people who jumped from one of the Twin Towers in a futile and desperate attempt to escape the burning buildings. The real-life image of this has to be one of the most disturbing and powerful of the events, yet the comics accompanying illustration, simple shows the burning building. The chance to increase the effect of the words with images is missed.
In this first chapter, the authors utilize a multi-page fold-out that acts as a timeline for the events around the four planes. The long stretch of page is divided into four sections, yet the way the images and text are placed on it, quickly confuses the events. The authors create a structure (a formally interesting use of comics) and then quickly abandon following it. There were points where I wasn’t sure what plane the image or text was referring to. What could have been a clear layout of the timeline is muddled. Interestingly, a couple pages later, another fold-out timeline showing various agencies awareness of and response to the planes is very clearly organized in the same way without confusing the issue.
After the first chapter, the book circled back and forward and sideways, recounting historical background on different angles, events following September 11, and recommendations from the committee. On occasion, I found the laying out of the historical details to be poorly organized (perhaps a fault of the original), as the shifting foci of the multiple historical sections, confuses concurrent events. But, for the most part, I followed the narrative and understood the various threads (but, I should say, that most of it was familiar to me from other sources (news, articles, etc)). In this sense, the book is success for packing a lot of information into a relatively small (particularly in comparison with the original report) space.
The actual use of comics in the book is much more problematic. The page layouts seem to delight in overlapping panels of varying sizes, causing many pages to look a jumble. This is exacerbated by the way narrative captions and speech balloons overlap multiple panels. One of my criticisms of Scott McCloud’s Making Comics was the brevity of the section on “flow” in comics, and this book is a great example of when flow goes wrong (where advice is needed). Take for example the bottom of page 25 (click on the images to see a larger size):
Because of the way the panels and captions overlap on the right side (top to bottom) the flow of reading completely bypasses the panel at the bottom left. Numerous times I found myself reading a page and either going right past certain panels, or finding myself having to read captions a few times to figure out the order they were supposed to be read.
Another issue is the often pointless use of speech balloons that reiterate, in silly dialogue no less, what the narrative caption has already told us. It indicates the way the book tries to move from reportage to dramatization. The adaptors almost sort of dramatize the events, but never really. We might see two characters and a word balloon or two, but the dramatization rarely gets more extensive than that, usually it’s just illustrations for the text.
The illustrations themselves have a diagrammatic quality to them. Hard, unvarying lines that maintain a high level of realism (all real people in the story were clearly drawn from reference) but only rarely show any flourish of expression. I don’t find it to my liking, though I can’t argue against its efficacy at communication.
There are a few images that struck me, such as these images from page 33 and 35.
Colon (the artist) seems to get a little more adventurous when dealing with explosions, smoke, and fire. The abstractions seen in these panels are unusual for the book.
In the end, I can see the interest in this book as an abridgment of the full report, a good way to get the major points, but as a comic it is rather lackluster and a poor example of the form. I can only imagine that it’s inclusion as a best comic of the year relies on its unique status as far as its content rather than anything great about the book as a comic.
Derik, I agree with your assessment of this book for the most part. The flow and overlapping panels were something I picked up on as well. It is frustrating enough for long time comics readers to find themselves lost on the page, having to re-read captions over again, so I can only imagine what the casual Barnes & Noble reader must have thought.
I also think you raise a very interesting point about the book’s lack of emotional connection, though I would disagree that this was a detriment. In fact, I would say that it was partly necessary. The Commission Report was not, in any sense, meant to be a dramatic retelling of the events, and God knows we have all been saturated with enough of the emotional fallout from the exhaustive television coverage. I see the book’s attempts to stay out of the emotion, confining itself simply to known facts, as not only admirable, but necessary in order to convey its later points about the government’s failings. Remember, this is, essentially, an audit report, a critical assessment of the federal government. In that sense, it’s not something that is written for a lay audience, and was no doubt a challenge to repackage in a popular format. I think Jacobson and Colon did a credible job adapting the rather dry, bureaucratic tone of the book in such a way as to make it accessible for a broader readership.
Thanks for the comments, Marc.
I guess my problem with the emotional detachment relates to the way the book is kind of sorta dramatizing the events but not really. I guess my issue is with the content of the images not really working with the form (report). Maybe it needs a different style of comics to really work in this way, and non-fiction comics like this are rare. Maybe this can be a precursor to similar but better comics.
Yeah, I struggle with the same issue. The question is – are comics a suitable format for this kind of document?
On the one hand, I think it’s great that this historic, and otherwise impenetrable work was made accessible to a wider, mainstream audience. I know I, for one, would not have read the full 600 page report, and there are some important ideas in the graphic novel version which one might not have picked up on if their knowledge of 9/11 was limited to TV coverage.
But on the other hand, taking such an unusual document and translating it into a form which is specifically designed to tell entertaining stories just feels like an odd combination. Despite their attempts to stay loyal to the source document, Jacobson and Colan are, on some level, trying to convert the Report into a story, and that’s the real problem I had with it. I also think that the book was over-illustrated. The pages felt crowded and overloaded with information.
Still, my conclusion after reading it was that, despite its flaws, the creators did a credible job adapting very difficult source material. Is it the best book of the year? Not if one judges it on the merits of quality comic book storytelling, but if you look at it as a new format for the industry (and it’s not entirely new, but is perhaps the most high profile example of a non-fiction comic), I do think it deserves some consideration and discussion.