9/11 Report To Become Graphic Nonfiction

By Ron Hogan on April 18, 2006 10:10 AM

Most of September’s releases are nowhere close to being on anybody’s radar, but the debut title in Hill and Wang’s “Novel Graphics” program, a series of nonfiction books employing comic-book techniques, was probably destined for controversy from its inception. Shortly after the preview blads for The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation went out in the mail, the New York Post ran a breathless item about the book, and that was enough to catch the eye of Reuters.

The Post story is suffused with tabloid-y melodrama, as well as falling prey to the “gee whiz, comics are grown up now” mindset that hampers most mainstream coverage of the comic book industry. Like the opening line, “It’s a giant leap from Jughead to The 9/11 Report.” Which is certainly true, except that the creative team of Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón worked together at Harvey Comics, the home of Richie Rich, not Archie Comics (and I’m pretty sure the Post reporter wasn’t thinking of The Black Comic Book, a 1970 project in which Jacobson and Ernie Colón parodied American comics by, you guessed it, making characters like Archie black). In noting that the Report is “not the first time comic artists have depicted events surrounding 9/11,” the Post also claims that “Superman saved lives at Ground Zero.” This is simply wrong: While Marvel did in fact depict many of its superheroes coping with the aftermath of 9/11, including Captain America’s (anonymous) presence among the rescue workers, DC has avoided confronting the events within its core comics. In fact, the company narrowly avoided a media catastrophe in September 2001, because it was in the middle of a company-wide storyline with the Joker instigating epic levels of mayhem…and they’d already sent out a preview image for one issue in which the Capitol sustained massive structural damage under one of his attacks. (They had to quickly retouch the image before the issue hit stands to replace the blown-out segments of the dome with brightly colored polka dots; as it was, some issues of Superman still depicted a battered White House.)

All the Reuters dispatch really adds to the story is elaborate descriptions of some of Colón’s most striking images (“passengers are seen bloodied and battling hijackers wielding knives”). The artwork is stark and compelling—which doesn’t surprise me, since I’ve been a Colón fan since I was a teenager—and may unnerve many who see them just as United 93 trailers already do. I’d hope to show you the images discussed, but Hill & Wang would rather keep the visual element under wraps for now, and we’ll abide by that—you’ll just have to take my word for it that this is not a simple comic book, but an effective use of graphic storytelling technique to convey a complex historical narrative. (Though not without precedent; in 1988, Alan Moore collaborated with Bill Sienkiewicz on Brought to Light, a heavily politicized history of CIA involvement in Central American political upheaval.)

UPDATE: If you really want to see some of the imagery (though not any of the graphic shots described in the Reuters piece), our sister blog Unbeige grabbed Colón’s splash page from PW Comics Week coverage back in February. The small reproduction obscures the effectiveness with which Jacobson and Colón have compressed the Report into a visual narrative, but you can get a rough idea, or you can take a look at PW‘s larger version of the image, which I’m pretty sure they haven’t kept behind subscriber-only walls.