USA: Neufeld’s Comix New Orleans: After the Deluge
Josh Neufeld, Comix New Orleans
A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge
Journey | Josh Neufeld, Oct-Nov 2009
An Excerpt from the Nonfiction Novel, buy it and see other works at www.JoshComix.com.
In A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, the new comix journalism novel by Josh Neufeld, the author weaves a tapestry of true personal stories revealing different perspectives of the effects of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans in 2004. Josh got his start drawing the unique Cleveland cult figure Harvey Pekar for Pekar’s autobiographical series, American Splendor.
After Katrina, Josh volunteered in Biloxi, then developed his book about New Orleans with Smith Magazine and Random House. This month he’s brought A.D. to new audiences on NPR’s On the Media, at McNally Jackson Books in Soho, and out at Portland’s literary festival, Wordstock.
Since HELO favors creative approaches to telling stories about how people survive crisis, Josh kindly agreed to run an excerpt and talk with us about his origins and plans. We selected the story of Denise because her view is much like that of so many people in other countries who flee their homes from war or disaster. Also, as you’ll see below, she’s a very interesting and witty character who calls it as she sees it.
Embrace her story below, and don’t forget to read below that our interview with Josh in which he tells us how he got into this, how he met Denise and what is his next possible topic for comix journalism. (Hint: You don’t want to ride the love boat along the coast of this Aden Gulf nation.)
Denise’ story starts here. Our interview with Josh is below.
HELO: Hi Josh. How did you get connected to American Splendor and its subject and creator Harvey Pekar?
Josh Neufeld: Basically, I wrote him a letter and sent him some samples of my artwork. In my opinion, I was as good as any of the guys he was working with already and he should hire me to illustrate stuff. I guess he liked that kind of forward, self-confident approach. He called me up within a couple weeks after I sent him that package of stuff and grilled me a little bit. I guess he wanted to see what kind of human being I was and if I was good people and understood his work. He said he would give me some work, eventually he did and it spiraled from there.
At that point, I was living in Chicago but it didn’t really matter because although he’s worked with local artists where he’s based in Cleveland in the past, it’s not a requirement to be there. He has relationships with artists from all over the United States and different countries where they just send each other materials back and forth.
HELO: American Splendor, the film starring Paul Giamatti as Harvey Pekar and including Harvey Pekar himself, was terrific. Did you have a chance to get involved?
JN: I got invited to the premiere in New York. My friend Dean Hafpiel was sort of involved. He was also an illustrator for Harvey. He’s also a guy I went to school with starting back twenty-five years. Dean introduced Harvey and his reps to the production company which ended up doing American Splendor, the movie, based on the comix. So he kind of made the connections which made it all happen. He had some artwork that was photographed in the film. Dean also did a whole book with Harvey called The Quitter, which was Harvey Pekar’s origin story.
HELO: The great thing about American Splendor, the film, not unlike the comix, was its metafiction quality, like in your book you show yourself illustrating about the story that you also star in.
JN: I think one of the really brilliant aspects of the movie was that it evoked the multiplicity of identities that Pekar has because of how all the artists have drawn him differently over the years. Everyone draws him a little differently. There is Harvey writing himself as a character as in the movie. Then there are the other versions of him that have appeared like the David Letterman version then there was the play that was made about him. It sort of continued that tradition of all these different Harvey Pekars interpreted by different people, so the movie kind of continued on that vein. It had him there, cartoon versions of him, and actors playing him. It was really brilliant.
HELO: What made you want to go to Biloxi and volunteer?
JN: I think the reason I originally volunteered was because I was still traumatized by 9/11 probably, being in New York when that happened and being helpless to do anything. Never really getting over that feeling of helplessness and powerlessness and anger. Then when Katrina happened and the government response was so inadequate and there were so many people literally in front of our eyes dying and trapped. Again, not being taken care of the way they should have been. It helped me to do something, to volunteer. This was one of those things when it all worked out, made sense. I didn’t have a family at that point, I had a freelance job in which I could take time off. And the Red Cross was able to pay for me to go down there cause I didn’t have the money to pay for myself. I did the training such as it was. And worked.
HELO: A lot of our audience members either live in cisis or they do this kind of thing for a living. Some get this kind of reflex cynicism about it. One gets stuck in bureaucracy and it can get to be hard. What kind of complex emotions did you have about it?
JN: First of all, I’m aware that there are people who really develop their lives to doing something like this, so I really try to under-play my volunteering cause it was so minimal and easy and negligible compared to what people who do this for a living do. It was no big deal at all. I was glad just to be part of the machine of what was going on down there. There’s always red taped, even for me to get trained. The training was great. It built into the system a way of weed out the diletantes and people who one day want to volunteer and the next day say “This is too hard!” Overall, I have to say there was at least where I was the Red Cross was really efficient and responsive to the needs of the community. We definitely did a good job and the neighborhood was better when we finished than when we started.
HELO: How did you get connected to Denise and the other characters portrayed in the book?
JN: Let’s see, different ways. Basically, when I decided along with the editor, my editor at the time at Smith Magazine that we wanted to do this story from the viewpoint of different characters experiences and different backgrounds we cast a wide net as journalists, the editor was a real journalist, so he had a lot of contacts and people in the field, and I also knew some people, and they asked people. Denise is the one that came from the least personal connections.
She was someone I heard on a radio show about a week after the actual storm. And I remember her testimony so well that I kept her in mind. Fortunately, I knew the producer of that show and I was able to get her contact information from him and whenever it was a year later I got in touch with her. I thought the hard part would be maybe asking people to take part and agreeing to be comic book characters but basically everybody we asked agreed to do it right off the bat. There were a few people who were hesitant in the beginning, but once we showed some of my previous work, they got on board and were with it.
HELO: We like how it highlights some of the details which are so often left out. Your characters offer so much of what’s typically missing. Like Denise, her cussing, her cat.
JN: I agree. I think there was never a question if I was going to censor it or make it tolerable for kids or something like that. Comics to me for anybody and if there’s a topic or subject matter for adult interest. Denise curses a lot, but so do a lot of people. I think I already cut about half of her curses to make it more effective.
HELO: So how much of it did you have to improvise? The journalists among our audience are going to ask to what degree is it true or speculative, the dialogue especially?
JN: I was lucky cause a couple characters had blogs and journals they kept from their experiences, so I was able to take stuff straight from their journals where they had quoted themselves and make it into speech and maybe colloquialize it a little bit. Yeah, I think of this as New Journalism of the Gustaf Hasford, Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson school where you use the techniques of fiction to get a real story. There I definitely made up some dialogue, but the events were true and the gists of the conversations were true. Like a dramatization of a real event. I didn’t create new characters or condense events or anything like that.
HELO: HELO is definitely including a lot of New Journalism, so we just want to be clear up front about how much is told accurately versus speculatively.
JN: In the back of the book, the characters are speaking to me and pretty much all of that is direct quotes and taken from their journals and blogs.
HELO: You’re probably concentrating on your book tour, but do you want to do more of this kind of comix journalism in the future and if so are you planning to do it on crisis stories or this kind of story?
JN: I thought it was really fulfilling on a lot of levels. I mean more fulfilling than doing autobiographical comix, which is what I’ve been known for before. You’re illustrating autobiographical stories. I found this very freeing. It felt like good work instead of self-involved egotistical work. I definitely could imagine doing more of this kind of work.
Joe Sacco is kind of a hero of mine and what he’s done with his comix journalism is really important about teaching people about parts of the world they don’t know about and conflicts between different groups and just educating people about under-reported stories and stuff. I think if I could do more work like that. It doesn’t have to be only crisis. It could be, one story which actually interested me was the whole Somali pirate thing. That’s just a fascinating new development.
HELO: Some of us have worked in Somalia, so we could help you with realisms should you decide to go that route.
JN: I don’t know how my wife would feel about me going on the ground or on the boats to report that stuff…
HELO: It’s not the safest part of the world, but I do think there are places safer than parts of the Bronx. Let us know and we’ll out you in touch with some of our Somali friends.
JN: That’s one reason I was really excited you got in touch with me when you told me about your magazine. It will be a really good resource in the future.
HELO: You know, my brother found a book by Joe Sacco and went all apeshit about it, telling me, look what I learned about Bosnia, despite the fact that I had worked there and he never asked me about it. The comix give people a new view, so it’s great you’re doing that.
JN: I have to be honest. I don’t think most people who read regular comic books would. My audience, I think, is people who are already interested, like people I’ve met on tour with A.D. are people who already have interest in the outside world. Whatever illusions I had about breaking through to the fan boys who only read X-men and teaching them about the world is a total pipe dream. Those people deliberately wall themselves off from the real world.
They like to read about people in tights and saving the world. If there were a real superman, Katrina wouldn’t have happened. That kind of stuff. But yeah, I think there are people who well connect to it because it is a graphic novel format or people can form a personal connection to the story which they couldn’t before. People told me about A.D. that it helped them to understand what it might have been like from the ground as opposed to these helicopter shots of people in their attics or the superdome. If that’s what can be done with this kind of work, then I’m really psyched to be able to do it.
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Want more? Here’s Josh on NPR:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112506242.