SMITH Mag has just posted the third and latest installment of Josh Neufeld’s nonfiction webcomic A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge.
Neufeld, frequent Harvey Pekar collaborator and one of the original members of the online comics collective ACT-I-VATE, headed down to the Gulf as a Red Cross volunteer after Hurricane Katrina devastated the coast, and says his time there was “the closest experience I’ll ever have to a religious calling.” He chronicled that experience in a self-published book based on his journals, Katrina Came Calling.
When SMITH founder and editor Larry Smith saw it, he quickly suggested serializing a comic based on the survival stories of New Orleans residents. Neufeld agreed to 12 monthly episodes, and the two headed down to a devastated Big Easy to listen to stories and identify five real people who would become the main characters. They decided on a sixth-generation New Orleanian poet, singer and kickboxer; a man-about-town doctor based in the French Quarter; an Iranian-born owner of a family-run supermarket; the teenage son of a pastor from New Orleans East; and a twenty-something music 'zine publisher and his girlfriend.
A.D. is a sterling example of comics with a social consciousness, and is exactly the kind of thing we need to keep the human dimension of this unimaginable disaster and its ongoing aftermath in the public eye. SMITH has also done its usual great job of bringing it all together with a related blog, podcasts, video and a rich resource guide. Check it out to hear and see the actual people the story is based on. And for more on A.D., have a look at the recent interview with Neufeld at comicon.com.
