Jacobson, Sid 1929- (Sidney Jacobson)

PERSONAL:

Born October 20, 1929, in Brooklyn, NY. Education: New York University, B.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Los Angeles, CA.

CAREER:

Author, editor, lyricist. Harvey Comics, editor-in-chief; Marvel Comics, executive editor.

MEMBER:

ASCAP.

WRITINGS:

Streets of Gold (novel), Pocket Books (New York, NY), 1985.

Another Time (novel), St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1989.

Pete Reiser: The Rough-and-Tumble Career of the Perfect Ballplayer (biography), McFarland (Jefferson, NC), 2004.

(With Ernie Colón) The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, foreword by Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, Hill & Wang (New York, NY), 2006.

Writer of song lyrics, including "Wonderful You, Yogi, A Boy without a Girl, Warm, I've Come of Age, Don't Pity Me," and "At the End of the Rainbow" (featured in the film Iron Maze, 1991).

SIDELIGHTS:

Sid Jacobson is a songwriter, author, and editor of comics and cartoons. He has frequently collaborated with illustrator Ernie Colón, including for The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation. The book is a graphic interpretation of the nearly 600-page report published by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks. In the foreword, the authors note that they had the blessings of the commission's chair and vice chair. "It's quite astounding what the format is capable of conveying," commented Claire Rosser in Kliatt. The volume includes time lines of the planes involved in the tragedy and is divided into sections that follow those of the original report. Since Jacobson lives in Los Angeles, California, and Colón in New York, they collaborated online.

The result is an easy-to-follow history of the events of September 11, 2001, that has been praised for making the information more accessible, especially to younger readers, and criticized by some, including relatives of the victims who deem it inappropriate. The graphic form has been used in the past to depict tragic historic events, however, most notably in Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, in which he portrays the Holocaust. A Publishers Weekly contributor noted: "Of course the event is still fresh and painful, and some suggest that this book … is coming simply too soon. But The 9/11 Report is not, like Maus, a personal memoir, but a re-creation of a book that the public has already made clear it wanted." "The book includes the 9/11 Commission's sober determination that the invasion of Iraq was based on anecdotal evidence at best," commented a Kirkus Reviews contributor.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, September 6, 2006, Julia Keller, review of The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation.

Esquire, September, 2006, Tim Hefferman, review of The 9/11 Report, p. 100.

Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 2006, review of The 9/11 Report, p. 711.

Kliatt, November, 2006, Claire Rosser, review of The 9/11 Report, p. 38.

Library Journal, September 1, 2006, Ann Kim, review of The 9/11 Report, p. 36.

Pantagraph, September 9, 2006, Michele Steinbacher, review of The 9/11 Report.

Publishers Weekly, May 22, 2006, Rachel Deahl, review of The 9/11 Report, p. 9; August 28, 2006, Sara Nelson, review of The 9/11 Report, p. 4.

School Library Journal, December, 2006, Francisca Goldsmith, review of The 9/11 Report, p. 176.

State (Columbia, SC), September 20, 2006, Claudia Smith Brinson, review of The 9/11 Report.

ONLINE

FatMixx,http://www.fatmixx.com/ (September 2, 2006), Sujal, review of The 9/11 Report.

Slate,http://www.slate.com/ (September 10, 2006), Julia Turner, "The Trouble with Drawing Dick Cheney: Ernie Colón and Sid Jacobson, the Comic-Book Vets behind The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation."