Neufeld | A.D.: NEW ORLEANS AFTER THE DELUGE
By Elizabeth Hewitt
Watching most fiction films I compulsively peek at my watch entertaining myself with meditations about why movies with gossamer plots use up 120 minutes of my valuable time. Watching a good documentary is just the reverse, and I often want the experience to last longer—to provide the permanence that a DVD pause just doesn’t offer. I want—and I recognize the absurdity of my desire—the best documentaries to be more like books. Josh Neufeld’s A.D. is my dream come true, as it combines the best features of documentary film, non-fiction prose, and comics.
Neufeld tells the stories of five different people who experienced the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Some, including a young man about to start his senior year of high school or a young hip couple, leave New Orleans before the hurricane hits; others, including an Iranian-born grocery store owner and a sixth-generation New Orlean, remain. The latter, Denise, ends up in the Superdome, experiencing the abandonment that should still haunt our nation’s conscience. Neufeld divides his comic into sections that correlate with the storm’s narrative: the anticipation of its arrival, the storm, the devastating flood that followed, the diasporic dispersal of the city’s population that was left in Katrina’s aftermath, and finally the gradual return to the city. Each section is itself composed of the individual stories of the protagonists. Their individual tales of loss—emotional and property—are told with sensitivity and detail, but with no melodrama. Indeed, reading Denise’s harrowing experience at the Superdome waiting for relief that never came or seeing the brave stoicism of Abbas and his friend Darnell camping on the roof of their grocery, bringing supplies to stranded residents, I was struck by what was so ineffective about the other flood comic published this year, Some New Kind of Slaughter, which merely offered archetype and no humanity.
What was so splendid about A.D. is that it gives us such a multi-faceted portrait of responses to catastrophe and with no moralizing as to whose story was braver, about who did the right or wrong thing. Everyone suffers and everyone is a hero—but their heroism and martyrdom is neither romanticized nor mythic. It is exemplified in the particular and real events that Neufeld so painstakingly records: the loss of a lifelong comics collection, the rebuilding of a community church, the discovery of a family cat everyone assumed was killed in the storm.
Josh Neufeld’s magnificent comic started as an online venture at SMITH and in this original publication venue, he was able to attach other material (websites, podcasts, hurricane tracking reports from NOAA), which magnified the sense that A.D. is an archival testimony of this devastating historical moment. As he himself notes in his afterword to the book’s publication, despite the interesting advantages that came from this on-line publication, he always intended A.D. to be a book, since only on paper could Neufeld positions in his images “to frame and augment the drama.” Indeed, the composition of images is fantastic: moving between small and tightly-packed boxes to visual crescendos that splash across two pages. The design of the book is also just stunning: printed in two-tones, the tones change every several pages—from teal, to yellow, to violet. By the time we get to the Diaspora section, we have three color printing, and the effect is a subtle variation of the beautiful monotony of the previous 150 pages. Everything about this book makes it something to treasure and hold, even as the stories it tells are all about how treasures can be so quickly taken away.
