Comic book gives graphic account of 9/11 atrocities

THE official report on the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, already a surprise bestseller, is to burst into colour as a comic book.

Two veteran American comic-book artists, who are more accustomed to working with superheroes, have turned the meticulously detailed 500-page bestselling government document into 144 pages of cartoons. The book, due out in September, illustrates the fate of the four hijacked planes, according to the timeline laid out by the 9/11 commission set up by Congress.

It opens with Mohamed Atta, the alleged ringleader, and four other terrorists boarding American Airlines Flight 11 at Logan airport in Boston. Minutes later, at the same airport, five others board United Airlines Flight 175. Another five hijackers climb aboard American Airlines Flight 77 in Washington, even though two of them set off metal detectors. Four others board United Flight 93 at Newark airport.

And that is only the first page. As the plot unfolds the cartoons become more dramatic. In one scene, bloodied passengers aboard Flight 93 are shown fighting armed hijackers before the aircraft crashes into a field in Pennsylvania. “We’ve got to stop them! Two planes crashed into the World Trade Centre,” one passenger exclaims, preparing to punch a hijacker who has stabbed a passenger in the back.

The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, was commissioned by Thomas LeBien, the publisher of Hill & Wang, an imprint of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The book will be edited by Sid Jacobson, who created the Richie Rich comic series, and illustrated by Ernie Colon, who has worked on comics including Spider-Man, Green Lantern and Wonder Woman.

Mr LeBien, a former nonfiction editor at Oxford University Press, said that he selected artists who could give the book a “classic American comics drawing style”.

The book would tell a complex story with greater clarity, he told the trade paper Publishers Weekly. “Not enough Americans have read the original report.”

Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd.