When Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, Josh Neufeld, a Brooklyn-based cartoonist and designer, volunteered with the Red Cross as a disaster response worker in Biloxi, Mississippi. While there, he kept a blog about his experiences and the devastation he witnessed. When he returned from Mississippi, he culled the blog entries together and self-published a book, which eventually found its way to the editor of Smith Magazine (an online mag dedicated to storytelling in various forms), who encouraged Neufeld to produce a non-fiction comic about Katrina.
The final result is AD: New Orleans after the Deluge, chronicling four New Orleans’ residents as they prepare, weather and, eventually, survive the storm. Neufeld sought out a cross section of the city’s population, profiling social worker Denise, a doctor named Brobson, Iranian-born shopkeeper Abbas, pastor’s son Kwame and zinester Leo.
‘We wanted to find a wide range of people,’ Neufeld says, on the phone to Time Out from his design shop. ‘We needed to find people who could speak of their experiences with the flooding, the lack of government response and the chaos.’
Social worker Denise, who lived at home with her mother, her sister and her niece, first decides to seek temporary shelter in the hospital where her mother works. But when the room her family has been promised is given away, she returns to their apartment above a boxing gym, only to have the roof collapse around her. She eventually makes her way to the convention centre, where the mob overrules the military. Brobson the doctor, who lives in the French Quarter, stays behind and throws a ‘hurricane party’. His property remains largely undamaged, and he’s able to get out to the local taverns and treat the injured and sick while urging the Federal Emergency Management Agency for more help. Abbas and his friend Darnell stay behind to watch over Abbas’s shop, but the two have to retreat to the roof of a shed when the flooding fills his store. Eventually, Darnell becomes so ill – from asthma and the fetid floodwater – that the two finally accept rescue. Kwame and his family flee to his brother’s dorm room to discover they can’t go home again, and Leo and his girlfriend Michelle watch from a friend’s house as their neighbourhood is covered in water.
AD ably recalls the horror of the days after the storm, and the uncertainty that continued to plague both the people left behind and those who escaped, watching from afar.
Neufeld spent months interviewing the subjects for the book, and in the final chapter, he draws himself into AD as the five recount what life has been like in the years since the hurricane. Though not new, non-fiction comics – or comics as journalism – are still a relatively novel form to most. Neufeld says he didn’t have to convince his subjects of the legitimacy of the art form, except explaining once or twice that comics don’t have to be funny.
‘One thing people have said AD brings to the whole trove of documents of the disaster is that you can sit with the individuality of the images,’ he says. ‘You can stop the camera, in a sense, and see that it’s not a mass of humanity that this is happening to, but these are individual people trying to deal with it.’
AD: New Orleans after the Deluge is published by Pantheon. Available to order from Magrudy’s for Dhs107.
