Broken Frontier

Thanks to time travel, one scientist has traveled from the modern day to the far-flung past of September 11th, 2001. With an array of facts and videos at her command, can she warn the people in the World Trade Center and save the lives of thousands? Will she be ridiculed and mocked as a madwoman from the future? Will anybody care to read this story?

Beyond the New 52, The Big Lie garnered a fair amount of attention for being a book focused on 9/11 the week of the tenth anniversary of the attacks. There's no reason it should have; at its core, it's nothing more than conspiracy theory articles that always pop up online, but with characters and art. We may even debate the "art" section. When you read The Big Lie in a vacuum, it's purely a boring narrative. While there is a narrative thread interwoven in the book, the musculature of the story is straight out fact-reading. In fact, a few instances have Sandra showing off straight-out lists of facts researched in 2011.

It's hard to not read the book in a vacuum. Most of the readers of the book will have some opinion on September 11th. As the defining moment of the 00s, it's indelibly etched into the minds of millions. Most believe the commonly accepted notion that terrorists flew hijacked planes into targets. Many believe that the War in Iraq was driven as a reaction to this day, even if its connection was tenuous at best. Some believe that the government had a hand in the actions of that day, and desire more truth. A few experts have come out and argued elements. This book is for those people who question how the events went down in theory, but it comes off as preaching to the choir for those who believe it was a manufactured event.

There's only one narratively redeeming factor in the book, and that's the jokes regarding the iPad. If you did take an iPad back in time ten years, it would blow people's minds. Apple wouldn't revitalize their company and reinvent music to the face of the public until a month and a half after 9/11. A device as thick as a pencil and with the capability to play videos from a database curated purely by users? The iPad would be such future-tech to the simple era of ten years ago, and characters comment on it as such.

That's possibly the biggest condemnation of this book. Disregarding the content and drive of the book, the only redeeming factor is a running joke about time travel. In fact, the book that solidifies the argument against its speculative nature is the end of it, revealing the truth for this comic book universe. Comic book readers can accept that Bucky Barnes shot Hitler; that's a dramatization of an event years ago that makes a real-world event work in a fictional world. For 9/11, it's an event that's still fresh in minds and too close for comfort.

Visually, the book is a mess. Over-inked, awkwardly colored, and a visual device ends up becoming the most glaring of issues. Many of the pages feature the World Trade Center as the bleed. With stark black and gray tones, it adds a visual mess to the book that just interrupts panel flow and smoothness. Coupled with the fact that none of the real-world people in the book actually look like themselves (and the mayor of San Francisco comes off as a 1970s street pimp complete with purple suit and massive gold ring), it would almost be a blessing if Dick Cheney was drawn over-the-top as a shotgun-wielding Darth Vader. If anything, the book would reach a level of parody unheard of, and also have a caricature of Cheney that a reader could recognize.

It's not disrespectful, it's disingenuous. It doesn't present facts and arguments and lets the reader decide; it flat-out ends with the argument being superficially won. Presenting speculation as fact is something to be avoided. The Twilight Zone could do this story and add a sense of pathos. Rick Veitch does this story and takes away a sense of fairness, and fails to even write a tolerable piece of fiction.