Panel: Reconstructing Historical Biography
Copanelists: Philip Holden and Katsue Reynolds
On December 5, 2005, the 9/11 Commission issued its final report card on the US government’s actions before and after the attacks. This paper will explore the implication of the recent publication of The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, written by Sid Jacobson and illustrated by Ernie Colón (Richie Rich, Casper the Friendly Ghost). In an interview with journalist Andre Mayer, Jacobson defended the government’s decision to create an illustrated version of the dense, 568 page report, arguing that even he had heard that most people who tried to read it in its original jargon-filled form could not understand it. “Ours is an illustrated version of a public-policy document,” Jacobson argued, “Our concept was to take the document per se and not embellish it but explain it best we could, using graphic words.” Jacobson sees this decision as a high point in our popular culture, allowing more of the US population to participate in a truly democratic discourse.
I will discuss how this report is historical biography. In doing so, I will define sequential art, differentiating between prose and graphic illustration language, and how that challenges Jacobson and Colón’s claim that they have created an unembellished report by creating a graphic illustration of the 9/11 Commission Report. I will consider if their work truly makes way for other traditionally marginalized groups to understand the democratic process better, or if it distorts or even obfuscates the truth. I will argue that sequential art contains few simple ideas: readers of graphic illustrated texts continually make complex connections between two often densely packed sequential pictures. Further complicating this genre is the concept of “creative nonfiction.” Art Spiegelman has created his own graphic work of creative nonfiction, In the Shadow of No Towers, which many understood as a tirade against the Bush administration’s handling of the 9/11 aftermath. In this paper, I will compare Spiegelman’s work to the illustrated version of the 9/11 Commission Report to see if we can find evidence of the authors’ intentions, and to see how successfully Jacobson and Colón fulfill their commitment to creating an unbiased account of the report. While many may argue that there is an inherent danger in justifying the creation of a graphic historical biography as government document vs. the original prose version, I will argue that like all cartoons, graphic memoirs, and biographies, each author reveals his or her own interpretations, and in the case of the 9/11 report, perhaps a not-so-hidden agenda. In this way, each author reveals his or her perception of the world they want others to endorse, and therefore each version of the 9/11 report becomes an important cultural artifact.
Mary Louise Penaz is a creative writer and Professor of English at Baruch College in New York, where she teaches writing and literature, narrative nonfiction, and graphic genre.