Before Sid Jacobson and Ernie Cólón, authors of The9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, could say a word on their Today Show appearance last week, the criticisms were already flying. A setup to their interview showed a relative of a WTC victim declaring the book "inappropriate." The comic-book format, she and others went on to say, was just too flimsy or silly or unserious to cover this ultra-serious and very tragic event.

Never mind that the most appalling and evil event of the 20th century spawned one of the most successful "comic books" of all time, Art Spiegelman's Maus. Spiegelman's graphic take on the Holocaust was a critical and commercial hit, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. According to Nielsen BookScan, Maus remains popular, selling as many as 10,000 copies a year. So why the squeamishness now?

Of course the event is still fresh and painful, and some suggest that this book—or whatever book—is coming simply too soon. But The9/11 Report is not, like Maus, a personal memoir, but a re-creation of a book that the public has already made clear it wanted.

Do we really want to see the World Trade Center blowing up under the red-lettered comment—R-Rrumble?—as one does in this graphic adaptation? Perhaps not. But as Jacobson and Cólón—both men in their 70s, it's worth pointing out—insisted on their Today Show appearance, they undertook the unconventional graphic novel approach partly as a way to make the findings of the 9/11 Commission Report, the bestselling text on which it was based, accessible to younger people and others who may have found the 600-page original too daunting. It's hard to argue with that thinking, and the authors, along with the people at FSG and Hill and Wang, are to be congratulated. If there's some further question to ask, it's "Who should get the profits should the book perform anywhere near as well as the original?" So far, according to FSG spokesman Jeff Seroy, no decision on that score has been made.

But whatever happens saleswise is almost beside the point. What's important is that our supposedly old, stodgy publishing biz took a chance on a newfangled approach to its "typical" material. It would be all too easy to publish yet another "typical" book about the events of 9/11, to "play it safe," the way I think, for example, Oliver Stone did in his film World Trade Center, which was only a Shelley Winters character away from being a standard Hollywood disaster flick. We keep saying we want and need to "shake things up," but for so long that has meant letting polemicists like Ann Coulter (or Michael Moore, for that matter) say the outrageous, whether accurate or not. Why not have the graphic truth?

The Jacobson/Cólón adaptation of the 9/11 Commission Report may be, to some, an outrageous presentation, but it's also bold, factual and extraordinarily creative. It's a step forward in an industry that should welcome all the newthink it can get.

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