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.

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.

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.