“I Tell You I Know Nothing”: Redefining Accessibility in Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón’s The Torture Report

ABSTRACT:This essay discusses the meanings and interrogation of “accessibility” in Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón’s The Torture Report: A Graphic Adaptation (2017), derived from the Senate Report on CIA Torture of subjects detained as suspected terrorists. I place the adaptation within a history of American comics documents, including both government comics and Jacobson and Colón’s own influential 9/11 Report adaptation and its successors, as well as within conversations about visual artworks in other genres, such as documentary film, that address torture. The book is also contrasted with several prisoners’ notes, interviews, and drawings. Report comics try to gain more readers for abstruse federal documents, but the graphic Torture Report’s strengths are arguably its breaks in accessibility—the authors’ admissions of not accessing the prisoners’ suffering and of possibly extending it, and their fear, shown in contrived, cross-temporal dialogues between torturers and the Senate text, that the US will disregard the report and continue to torture. Such questions and breaks can offer advice for future comics in this category.