The 9/11 Report: A Graphical Adaptation (review: 2/5)

At the least, I can say that I’m now more interested in the original 9/11 Report than I was before. I really wanted this one to be good; it was just frustrating.
Jacobson and Col??n got off to such a good start with a slick 10 page fold-out timeline that tracks the four flights concurrently. It was a truly powerful experience to juxtapose the events of my own morning with what happened in the air. But it all went down from there. The illustration was disappointingly inconsistent, mixing some really clever, accurately rendered scenes next to some that are just a little sloppy. I’m not sure if scattershot, somewhat arbitrary imagery is due to the nature of the original Report. The lettering and narrative boxes really killed me, though. The box geography was awkward, so I ended up stumbling around the page. Out of hundreds of comics I’ve consumed, I’ve never had so much trouble doing the basic task of reading.

Regarding the actual Report material, it’s not so bad. For someone like me, who generally steers clear of popular politics, it’s a nice intro to the history, who is who among the terrorists, and who is who among the white men in suits. Here’s my #1 piece of loveably laughable advice the Commission offers: “It is crucial to offer a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination.”¹ Oh, I really wanted this to be good.

Some other links for your curiosity… here’s a good review over at Salon, an NPR interview with Jacobson and Col??n, and Slate offers an excerpted version online & an interview as well.

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¹*ahem* Some other important thoughts on bureaucracy…