Drawing Out the Truth

From The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon. Published by Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright Castlebridge Enterprises, Inc.

Back in late 2004, I hunkered down to read The 9/11 Commission Report. An independent audit of the 2001 attacks and the U.S. government’s actions before and after, the 568-page text opens with a thorough account of what happened on that auspicious morning. The first chapter, “We Have Some Planes,” follows the trajectory of the ill-fated aircraft: American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, which pierced the World Trade Center towers; AA Flight 77, which plummeted into the Pentagon; and UA Flight 93, which was supposed to strike either the White House or the Capitol in Washington, D.C., but thanks to its valiant crew and passengers, crashed to earth near Shanksville, Penn.

What immediately impressed me was the document’s controlled language. Devoid of gratuitous adjectives or adverbs, the text was a marvel of objectivity. Yet because of its austerity, the prose hummed along like a Len Deighton thriller.

Sadly, as it progressed from raw scene-setting to the history of al-Qaeda and the U.S.’s evolving war on terror, The 9/11 Commission Report took on an eye-glazing quality. What makes the opening chapter such a compulsive read is that the plot is so diabolical, the results so tragic. But in the thicket of the section on pre-9/11 history, I stopped reading. I’d accept it as a personal failing, but my experience was hardly unique.

“I had heard several stories of people who’d tried to read it, but could not understand it,” says comic-book writer Sid Jacobson over the phone from his home in Los Angeles. Anecdotal evidence suggests that, like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, the 9/11 report was a bestseller that few people read cover to cover. A one-time editor-in-chief at Harvey Comics and a former executive editor at Marvel Comics, Jacobson admits that when the report first showed up in bookstores, he himself didn’t crease the spine. “I didn’t read the book — I read newspaper accounts of it,” he says.

In January 2005, Jacobson got a call from illustrator and longtime friend Ernie Colon, who had a remarkable idea: Why not produce an illustrated version? Why not indeed, thought Jacobson. He signed on straight away.

An image of U.S. President George W. Bush in The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation. Published by Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright Castlebridge Enterprises, Inc.

It’s hard to let go of the campy associations of superhero comics, but The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation will likely change many people’s attitudes to the medium. Colon’s resumé includes drawing Richie Rich, Casper the Friendly Ghost and various Marvel superheroes, but he avoids (for the most part) those comic-book clichés — the inflated physiques, the maniacal faces of evil. People like Osama Bin Laden, hijacker Mohammed Atta, U.S. President George W. Bush and (now-retired) counter-terrorism adviser Richard A. Clarke are rendered through a combination of portraiture and more impressionistic sketches. The absence of superhuman valour is what makes the book so chillingly effective; it brings a true story to life in a way that few comics have done before. Jacobson says he and Colon had little trouble interesting publishers in the concept. (Their book was the subject of a bidding war, which was eventually won by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.)

The only other graphic novel on this subject that can claim the same gravitas is Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004). Spiegelman’s book is deeply subjective, as the New York-based artist enlarges on his post-traumatic stress, of “feeling equally terrorized by al-Qaeda and by his own government.” According to Jacobson, the difference between the two graphic novels is that only Spiegelman’s should be considered art.

“Ours is an illustrated version of a public-policy document,” says Jacobson emphatically. “Our concept from the beginning was to take the document per se and not embellish it but explain it as best we could, using graphics and words. I used, I would say, 99 per cent — if not more — of their verbiage,” he claims. “The quotes that I gave to the known figures were absolutely accurate. I did not add a comma.”

Jacobson — who in the making of the novel ended up reading the original document more than 10 times — began the process by extracting the key elements of the report. He would write captions, then describe to Colon what he thought should be conveyed, visually, in each panel. The artist would take it from there. (With Colon living in Long Island, N.Y., and Jacobson on the West Coast, their collaboration took place on the phone or by e-mail.) While there were many discussions about the right way to communicate the information, Jacobson says the process “worked well.”

In the same way that courtroom sketch artists grant us (partial) access to closed-door legal proceedings, Colon’s drawings make us privy to the post 9/11 meetings that occurred at the highest level of the U.S. government. But despite the authors’ professed impartiality, the act of paring a 600-page document full of nothing but black type down to a 136-page colour comic requires a few judgment calls — and some are bound to be flawed. For one, the book comes up short in elucidating the roots of al-Qaeda’s anti-Americanism. It’s not necessarily evidence of bias on the part of Jacobson and Colon, but it is a weakness in their reporting. That said, the graphic novel improves on the original report in a number of ways, most notably in its depiction of the course of the 9/11 flights.

“As I was reading the four different plane flights [in the report], I found it so difficult to follow,” says Jacobson. By placing all four flights on the same timeline, “we get a picture of what was planned and what occurred. That’s an important finding, an important showing.”

While The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation is being heralded by some literary critics as a sign of the maturation of the graphic novel, Jacobson reminds me of the long history of public-service journalism in comics.

“In the ’40s and ’50s, Parents Magazine did comic books — one was called True Comics, one was called True Sports Comics — to do biographies, current events, et cetera. I came to Harvey Comics in the ’50s; there, they had a special department that worked with cities and municipalities, government and the army to do books to bring out the vote, the strength of unions, how to put a gun together,” says Jacobson. “It was an accepted practice.”

While he admits that the original 9/11 report was “damning” in its conclusions about “what we [the U.S.] had done,” Jacobson is reluctant to add to the chorus of dissension. When I try to gauge his patriotism before and after 9/11, he hedges: “I feel as an American as I’ve always felt.” Sensing my frustration, he explains, “I don’t want to get my political thinking into this.”

He and Colon have already embarked on a sequel: an illustrated account of the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq based entirely on newspaper articles. Though he may be reluctant to speak his mind about 9/11, Jacobson’s commitment to educating Americans about its legacy says volumes.

The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation is in bookstores now.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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