LOS ANGELES, 12 September 2006 — The official report of the 9/11 Commission was that rarest of government documents — a gripping read that became a bestseller and won a national book award.
But who really had the time, energy and concentration levels to burrow through the tome’s 568 pages? Not illustrator Ernie Colon.
The 75-year-old artist, whose resume includes protracted stints at Marvel and Harvey Comics, gave up after just 50 pages. Then he had the kind of eureka moment that causes light bulbs to flash and exclamation marks to pop open in a bubble above the heads of comic book heroes.
Colon decided to team up with long-time collaborator Sid Jacobson to produce a graphic novel version of the report, which documents intelligence and police failures in the run-up to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
The result is The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation — a 130-page offering that looks like a comic book and reads like a comic book — complete with sound effects like “BLAMM” when a plane smashes into the Pentagon and “R-RRUMBLE...” when the massive south tower of the World Trade Center begins its terrifying collapse.
The book, which costs $17 in paperback and $30 in hardback version, was published in late August to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the attacks and debuted on the New York Times bestseller list at No. 6 in the paperback nonfiction category.
Reviews of the book have been mostly favorable. The Chicago Tribune called it “unexpectedly moving,” while the Florida Ledger called it riveting and said that “everyone should read it”.
The Houston Chronicle wrote this week that it “manages at once to be accessible and intelligent, and marks an important publishing experiment.”
For authors Colon and Jacobson, both in their mid-70s, the success is reward not only for the time they invested into distilling the often dense report into just 130 pages. It also vindicates the art form at which they have worked their entire careers.