Blogmocracy in Action!
Guest post by: Mars!
Image comics, the number 3 (or at least used to be) comic publisher in the U.S. has decided to commemorate 9/11 by releasing a new comic book called “The Big Lie”. On the surface this comic looks like a good story about 9/11. A woman from the future goes back into the past to try and save her husband but no one believes her. If this were the “Big Lie” everything would be ok. But, according to this reviewer who has read the issue, it goes much further than that.
The comic starts off as an attempt by a woman in the future to travel back in time and save her husband who died during the terrorist attack. While explaining the attacks, the people she attempts to convince rattle off “Truther” beliefs and pokes holes in her story. There’s a reason this is also called “The Truther Comic.
It’d be one thing if the comic focused on one person’s loss during the tragedy, but the fact that it questions the events spinning it into one big giant conspiracy comes off as insensitive and exploitative during this anniversary. Even by the end of the story, the lab tech who starts off with such strong beliefs as to what happened, questions them, which shows her as a pretty weak minded individual. And even in all of the theories it throws out, it doesn’t go too much in depth into them, instead skimming each one without exploring whether it’s plausible. It goes so far as to include the theory that this was an inside job to be used as an excuse for Neo-Cons to expand American Imperialism.
The day was a tragedy, no matter what you believe the truth might be. On the 10th anniversary of it, we need to focus on those lost to terrorism and what’s come since. We were all changed, especially those who lost a loved one and this comic’s release doesn’t feel like it attempts to ask questions about the event, but throw out conspiracies without exploration of them, which feels half-assed and disgraces the memory of those lost. Instead of a reflection, we’re left with profiteering on a tragedy an act it accuses the Bush administration of doing itself. The Big Lie to me feels like a big insult.
Read the rest here: Review – The Big Lie
Here is what the author himself had to say about it.
“The meat of the story is her trying to convince these ‘experts’ that the terrorist attack is about to happen,” Veitch says. “So it’s essentially a taut emotional drama with the facts and questions surrounding 9/11 sewed into it.”
“For me, what’s great about the U.S. is our freedom,” Yeates says. “The 9/11 attacks were used to pass the Patriot Act, which took away some of our most important freedoms. So Uncle Sam here, while bloodied, is still trying to fight to get those freedoms back.”
Going into this project, he didn’t consider himself a “Truther,” yet living during the eras of the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, Iran/Contra and the invasion of Iraq, Veitch admits that he’s skeptical about any “official” story provided by the government.
“Reading the 9/11 Commission Report, it’s pretty clear that a lot of important evidence about the lead-up to the attacks and the collapse of the towers was ignored or glossed over,” he explains. “And I’m pretty angry about the aftermath: how Iraq was invaded based on false intelligence and the occupation mismanaged resulting in over 100,000 civilian deaths.”
Image Comics’ ‘The Big Lie’ asks some big questions
What is amazing to me is that if you deny AGW you are labeled a “holocaust denier”. But, if you deny the essential truths of 9/11 (ie: Fanatic Muslim scumbags attacked us.) You get a free pass. When do people stop getting a free pass for blaming our own country for the deaths of 3,000 Americans?
-Mars
