Tuesday, October 7, 2008

9/11 Graphic Novel

I enjoyed this graphic novel a lot; it is common knowledge about what happened on September 11th, 2001, and aside from documentaries, movies, and history books, I had thought that all possible mediums for getting different perspectives on the incident were running out - evidently this is not so. Putting the commission's report into the form of a graphic novel could have been done for more than one reason; whether to allow an artist to take personal liberties in how they want to depict the people in charge, or maybe just to spread the public knowledge on the actual report filed by the commission and what the findings happened to be - it is a lot easier to get a sense of what went wrong when you can combine the words you read with pictures of the situation.
The thing that I thought was most interesting was that it was based off of the actual 9/11 commission reports, and was cleared by the government to be turned into graphic novel form; right when I started reading it I could see how badly the government figures were being depicted, something that struck me as peculiar after how much effort the people in charge put into saving face. Granted they owned up to the fact that things were handled as badly as they could have possibly been handled, but the real extent of how seriously inept the countries leaders are shown to be in this graphic novel caught me by surprise.
Overall I enjoyed the way this was put together, and although the sometimes unfamiliarity and formality of the language made it a bit difficult to read without it seeming like an essay with pictures, I knew since it was based on the official report that I shouldn't expect too much else.

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