Five years ago today, a day after the western flank of Hurricane Katrina crawled over New Orleans, floodwaters continued to billow through dozens of levee breaches as they worked toward inundating four-fifths of the city. Thousands of displaced locals headed to the Superdome, joining the tens thousands who had sheltered there during the storm. In residential neighborhoods across much of the city, survivors who had defied Mayor Nagin’s order to evacuate — out of stubborn defiance or for a basic lack of the wherewithal to do so — adapted to the surreal reality that their city, an American city in the twenty-first century, had in many respects been abandoned by the powers that were.
Those who would survive would do so largely on their own.
But five years have passed, and New Orleans is rebuilding. There’s been a plethora of worthy journalism on the subject in recent days and weeks — a few examples here, here, here. We’re heading down there next week to see for ourselves and to work on a couple projects you’ll see in the coming months.
In the meantime, to tide you over, last year’s review of graphic novelist Josh Neufeld’s “A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge” (with a crucial footnote at bottom):
Graphic novels as journalism? On Josh Neufeld’s masterful “A.D.”
by Ben Fuchs
Bolstered by a glowing Sunday-edition New York Times book review, Josh Neufeld’s “A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge” plowed through a gauntlet of Batman-related titles to earn a spot on the Paper of Record’s Graphic Hardcover Bestseller List last month. However, for all the publicity Neufeld engendered through such critical acclaim and a modest book tour, the book’s tenure on the list ended after two weeks; apparently people are more interested in studying The Joker’s origin than in reliving Hurricane Katrina.
Neufeld, who built comic-geek street cred illustrating “American Splendor” for Harvey Pekar, truly began working on “A.D.” during the three weeks he spent working with the Red Cross in Katrina-ravaged Biloxi, Miss. after the 2005 storm: His blog on the experience spawned a self-published collection of choice works, which in turn drew the attention of SMITH Magazine. With the online mag as a platform, Neufeld expanded both his narrative breadth and the scope of his geographical focus (he migrated to a New Orleans angle after discarding, for logistical reasons, a considered examination of the larger Gulf Coast). Earlier this year, Smith — with Pantheon on board to bankroll — published “A.D.” in hardcover.
Neufeld’s work straddles a line between fact and fiction in a manner that might make traditional journalistic purists uneasy: “A.D.” is a novel, albeit one rooted in historically-accurate details, and Neufeld makes no claims to the contrary* (Ed: see correction below). Some of the book’s seven central characters, whose divergent narratives reflect the vastly different backgrounds of their subjects, are real people, while others are hybridized creations based on multiple real New Orleanians. Accordingly, Neufeld warns in the book’s first pages that “…some names and details have been changed for dramatic purposes….” As Neufeld told the Times in its “A.D.” review in August, “I did whatever worked to make the emotional truth of the stories much clearer. It’s what makes a certain scene emotionally satisfying in a way that makes the whole book add up to a novel.” But Neufeld’s intricate attention to detail (in addition to the obvious phone and in-person interviews he conducted, Neufeld “took tons of photos” in order to replicate precisely such minutiae as the contents of of one featured couple’s DVD collection) lends credence to Dave Eggers’ characterization of “A.D.” as “one of the best-ever examples of comics reportage.”
The human perspectives Neufeld provides certainly reflect a level of journalistic integrity rivaling or exceeding that exhibited by much of the mainstream media during and after Katrina. He wisely resisted the urge to overtly damn the federal agencies’ abominable reaction to the crisis (FEMA isn’t even a blip on the book’s radar), instead forcing readers to draw their own conclusions based on his characters’ hyper-localized trials. In doing so, we see thugs — left, along with everyone else, to their own devices by unresponsive authorities — maintaining peace at the city’s convention center, rather than raping and pillaging as had been reported at the time. (This isn’t to say that none of the atrocious rumors relayed ad nauseum by CNN and its ilk during the catastrophe played out as fact. But the erosion of these sensationalist outlets’ fact-checking standards during the meltdown was palpable, and their follow-up on such rumors during the recovery period was markedly insufficient.)
Neufeld, however, does mimic Anderson Cooper — as much a Gonzo student as a straight-edged, impeccably-coiffed WASP can be — by inserting himself into the story at book’s end. Neufeld introduces this narrative transition to bring closure to each character’s tale, portraying himself following up with the seven by phone from his Brooklyn apartment. Some of the characters initially moved away from New Orleans after the hurricane, while others stayed in the area; all have since returned to New Orleans or have plans to do so. By describing each of these stories in polychromatic form and without regard to the “official” assessment of conditions in the city during and after Katrina, Neufeld provides a raw, revelatory and intensely personal perspective on the largest domestic humanitarian failure of the 21st century.
Perhaps of equal importance in these sad, helpless days of print media consolidation and syndication, though, “A.D.” confers a considerable measure of legitimacy on a form of quasi-journalism Neufeld by no means invented (see: “Maus”): Comics and graphic novels as social conscience.
*EDITOR’S NOTE: Josh Neufeld contacted DCQ after this piece first ran to clarify a “misperception” that he says originated in the Times piece mentioned in the first sentence. In the article, Times critic George Gene Gustines concludes that the book “is a novel, not a documentary: Mr. Neufeld edited parts of the survivors’ stories and combined some characters.” Gustines goes on to quote Neufeld as saying that he “did whatever worked to make the emotional truth of the stories much clearer. It’s what makes a certain scene emotionally satisfying in a way that makes the whole book add up to a novel.” Neufeld wrote to us to clarify that “…in truth A.D. IS journalism, and IS a documentary. I did not combine any characters when it came to the main players and their stories (I did take out a couple of people — who we never meet — from certain scenes when it became too confusing)…I felt my job as artist was to synthesize the characters’ experiences into a complete whole that FELT novelistic. I guess it sounds a bit high-falutin’; what I meant is that I did what any good journalist does when writing their story: edited it and refined it to make it a good read.”
