The comic book industry, like the film industry, has long had a love affair with public domain stories and, honestly, it's not hard to see the attraction. Whether they're doing a straight-up adaptation or a riff on a classic story, much of the creative heavy lifting is already done for them, and, if the story they're working with is popular enough, so's the marketing.
Old-school comic book creators Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon have hit on a new kind of public domain story beyond the traditional old gothic horror stories, fairy tales and works of Shakespeare—a federal government report. Of course, the particular report they're adapting is sort of like the Citizen Kane of government reports, The 9/11 Commission Report.
Unlike a lot of the official paperwork coming out of Washington, D.C., it was about as gripping and dramatic as a story, true or false, could be, mixing the standard plot fodder of a Tom Clancy novel with a relevance that was as urgent and immediate as possible. It was the very definition of a must-read, and in its original, 500-plus-page prose version, it was a bestseller, moving over a million units. That past success coupled with the timing of the release, just prior to the five-year anniversary of 9/11, virtually guaranteed plenty of sales and tons of media buzz accompanying the comic.
So if nothing else, Jacobson and Colon certainly get gold stars for inspiration. Not that their impulse in creating The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation (Hill & Wang) was necessarily cynically calculating; as far as I know, their hearts are in the right place, and the Commission itself seems to think so (Chairman Thomas Kean and vice-chair Lee Hamilton provide the introduction to the comic).
The pair are old hands in the field; so old, in fact, that many readers of the current generation may never have heard of them. Jacobson is 76, and was the editor-in-chief of Harvey Comics (home to Richie Rich and Casper the Friendly Ghost). Colon is 75, and drew the Harvey characters for 25 years, as well as doing some superhero work for DC and Marvel.
Though the idea of turning a government report into a comic is a fresh one, the storytelling is decidedly old school. Grasping for something to compare it to, its closest relative seems to be the old Classics Illustrated comics, particularly in its reverence for the subject matter. Bone dry and arrow straight, it reads completely objective, almost removed from the subject matter.
In other words, it reads like a report.
In that respect, it's a difficult work to recommend. Certainly the original, prose version offers more salient details (the comic book version is a slim 140 pages or so) and thus more potent drama. There's also a certain amount of cognitive dissonance that comes with reading the Commission's words in text boxes above coloring book-like illustrations of George W. Bush shaking his head.
Jacobson and Colon's version works better as a companion to rather than a replacement for their source. There are definitely passages where the graphic nature of the medium underscores the content more directly, as in the chapter on the hijackings themselves, which breaks all four flights into parallel timelines, and shows that potentially life-saving information was available before the planes started crashing, but it wasn't getting to where it was supposed to go. Likewise, the Commission's report card grading the feds on how well they've learned their lessons since 9/11 is more striking when the F's jump out in bold red ink.
But in seeking to simplify a report that was already told in simple language for as broad an audience as possible, Jacobson and Colon have inevitably dumbed it down a bit (you can't lose 300 pages without losing something). But then again, based on the government's poor grades, it would seem that a lot of our leaders haven't read (or haven't understood) the original report, so maybe a dumbed-down version is exactly what we need right now.