Doug’s World

9/11: the comic strip

I’ll bet you haven’t got around to reading the report of the 9/11 commission. Yeah, me too. Government reports can read like, well, government reports. Dry. Dull. Ponderous. Downright governmental. Or so I’d have to speculate, having never actually read one.

But in the last few days, I finally read all of the findings of the 9/11 Commission. Sure, I know there are those who think it’s BS, those who think it’s brilliant, and a million other perspectives. But, being the one and only report that you and I have paid millions of our tax dollars to have a bi-partisan group put together to try to get to the bottom of what happened on 9/11 and why, I think it’s something we should know about.

I didn’t suddenly get a fit of civic responsibility and soldier through the report itself. Oh no, I don’t have time for that, and neither do you. Instead, I read the comic-book version. Seriously.

Comic veterans Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón (who created Richie Rich and worked on Wonder Woman, Spider-Man and many others over the last 50 years) have put together The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, a comic-book version of the findings of the 9/11 Commission. It’s a deliberate attempt to put this important body of information in a form that will be accessible to more Americans, to help inform the public and raise the debate from speculation to specific discussion of the facts of 9/11. (To the extent those facts are known or knowable, of course — but this report is the best we’ve got to date.)

They were painstakingly accurate in putting this book together, so much so that the members of the 9/11 Commission have praised it for following the tone, spirit, and facts of their findings. So this isn’t some special “version” of the 9/11 Commission’s report, it’s the actual report, delivered in comic-book form.

The armchair pundits will have a field day talking about how something like this is an insult to the intelligence of Americans, or a sign of how stupid Americans really are, or a gazillion other brilliant insights into what it “means.” I’ll leave those analyses to the knowitallogists — me, I just read the book. If you’re curious about the details of what happened on 9/11 and what is known about the events leading up to it, you might want to read it too.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 26th, 2006 at 8:04 am. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.