As with many other reviews and discussions of A.D., I learned a lot from Hoefer’s essay: it’s always fascinating to see the things that readers pick up from my work that I didn’t consciously intend to put there—and are really just an accidental result of the never-ending attempt to simply make “good comics.”

Hoefer’s essay is the latest (and greatest) in a number of academic resources related to A.D. that are available online. Since A.D.’s book publication, it has been used as a common read text for a number of colleges & universities, including the the University of Wisconsin, the University of Alabama, and SUNY Brockport. My wonderful and talented wife Sari Wilson wrote an extensive teacher’s guide to A.D., and there are other online resources, bibliographies, and so on for both high school and college students. Since Hurricane Katrina is clearly a historical event which we will be studying for generations to come, I figured this would be a good opportunity to list all A.D.’s academic resources in one place:

• Pantheon teacher’s guide—thematic connections, teaching suggestions, discussion activities
• UW-Milwaukee: English 101: Intro to College Writing—Writing and Visual Culture—tips on analyzing A.D. rhetorically
• Graphic Novel Hovel: a Universal Resource for Visual Literature—a high school English teacher analyzes the book’s plot, characters, themes, setting, style, and viewpoint
• Hurricane Katrina bibliography (SUNY Brockport)—extensive supplemental list
• Filtering Catastrophe Through Comics—a presentation I did for the Villa Gillet/N+1 panel “Catastrophe Practice”; with great debt to an essay by University of Chicago PhD candidate Margaret Fink Berman, which helped me organize many of my thoughts

P.S. Hoefer particularly connected to the online version of A.D. because of all the external resources herein, including the links within the panels, the message board, and the archived audio interviews with Denise, the Doctor, and Leo. In his essay, he mentioned a link or two which no longer work. In the six-plus years since A.D. debuted online I’m sure a number of links have changed or gone dead. Can I ask you readers out there to crowdsource the bad links? Just let us know which ones don’t work anymore, and we will fix or replace them. Thanks!

—Josh

It’s been a week since Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast and I’m just now coming to understand how devastating the impact was. A good part of the reason for this disconnect is that I am currently living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for the Knight-Wallace journalism fellowship. (One of the conditions of the fellowship is that you must live in Ann Arbor for the academic year, and you are forbidden from publishing anything professionally during the duration of the program.)

Weirdly enough, the first person I heard from after Sandy passed was Leo, one of the heroes of A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge. Obviously, a guy who lost everything in Katrina would be supremely attuned to the effects of the “superstorm” which hit the East Coast. He wasn’t sure whether I was back home in Brooklyn or still away, and was relieved to hear me and my stuff were okay. (Our apartment is on the fifth floor of a building in Prospect Heights—e.g., not near sea level.) In fact, thankfully, my family and pretty much everyone I know well in New York was relatively unaffected by the storm.

But as the days have gone by, we’ve been hearing more about others in our wider circle who weren’t so lucky. There’s the staff member at Wallace House whose family lives in Breezy Point (they lost everything), and one of my fellow Fellows, Amy Haimerl, who hails from Red Hook. Her husband Karl drove back to NYC the day after the storm to help with clean-up; Amy is coordinating efforts from afar via social media.

I think, understandably, my main focus has been on what’s going on in my hometown. This morning I was streaming WNYC radio, which was performing their civic duty of spreading the word about the storm, and cleanup and relief efforts. They were crowdsourcing listeners: people calling in from Staten Island, the Rockaways, and other devastated areas. As with Katrina, certain mantras were repeated over and over: the police didn’t know where to go or to contact to donate stuff or labor; FEMA was hardly in evidence; rumors swirled. (Although the New York City Department of Sanitation was getting high marks for their round-the-clock cleanup efforts. Let’s hear it for New York’s Strongest!) Again like with Katrina and New Orleans, there are so many communication gaps: people in one part of the city have no idea what’s going on in another.

And there are still so many regions without power; even now, a week later! The areas most badly hit—no surprise—host large numbers of public housing high-rises, and residents there, especially in the upper floors, are trapped with no elevator access, no lights, no heat, and often no way to get food & water. And the cold is setting in. (Word is that the Occupy Wall Street folks have been down in affected areas like the Rockaways doing great work.)

Sari pointed out this morning that, as New Yorkers we’re used to manmade challenges—political red tape and corruption, socio-economic barriers, over-crowding, etc. We’re not used to dealing with natural disasters like this. It’s almost like we grew up believing things like this only happened to other people, far away—sort of like that famous Saul Steinberg New Yorker magazine cover, “A View of the World from 9th Avenue.”

So now we’re facing the reality of up to 40,000 people permanently displaced, maybe up to 40 public schools that won’t be able to re-open until next summer. Again, these are the images from post-Katrina New Orleans.

I had been thinking a lot about A.D. this week, regardless of the storm. Last Thursday I presented my work to my Knight-Wallace compatriots; on Friday I was in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, site of a series of devastating tornadoes in April 2011, to present A.D. to freshmen students there.

Back in 2005, when I volunteered with the Red Cross, and in 2007–2008, when I was working on A.D., I was an outsider come to document the post-Katrina Gulf Coast experience. Now, with Sandy, now I am an “expatriate” New Yorker forcibly removed from the event. I desperately wish I was in New York right now: to help, to bear witness, to be where I belong.

We’re all fine and got through the hurricane relatively unscathed. Our power was turned back on Friday evening, so we’re just getting resettled after a couple days of cleaning and what-not.

Michelle and I stayed in the apartment and lost power Tuesday night, and the next couple days weren’t too bad—we’d charged all our devices and were able to ride our iPhone charges til Thursday. We were well-stocked on books (of course), and Wednesday wasn’t too bad—it was perfectly fine sitting next to a window and taking in the breeze. Thursday wasn’t as forgiving, and by Friday afternoon we were debating whether we should grab a hotel room in the city (the French Quarter, as usual, either lost power only briefly or got back up super-quick—it was fully operational Wednesday afternoon, and I guess with some storm cancellations from Decadence Festival there were some openings) but luckily got power back before we made that decision.

We’re lucky, too—most folks still don’t have power, and to a lot of people it looks like Entergy is dropping the ball in a major way. My parents’ house is fine (they’re in Texas at a family friend’s ranch), but the estimate for their power to return is next Wednesday or Thursday! And the damage done to power lines, etc. has been fairly minimal. It’s crazy in N.O. proper, partially because this is the first storm where most people felt comfortable staying—back for Gustav in 2008 the levees weren’t nearly what they are now, and most people left. I remember for that storm we returned two days after the storm and didn’t have power for one more day, so our personal experience with Entergy this time around kind of mirrored that, but most haven’t been as lucky, and it’s the first time such a large number of people are personally experiencing the first days following a storm.

Part of the roof in the back of the house broke away on Wednesday night, which led to our roommate Jason’s bedroom ceiling caving in at one corner, but he was in Portland on vacation already, so he missed the whole thing. That was one reason I’m happy we stayed, because we heard it happen and were able to clear his stuff out of the way, so he didn’t lose anything but the rug we used to help contain the water. By the time we could really work on it the next morning, the kitchen ceiling (directly under his room) was starting to sag, so if we hadn’t been here that would’ve collapsed too. Other than that, there’s no collateral damage to report, so we’re lucky.

The shop has a couple cracked windows from where our sign came free and smacked into it, but the property manager who’d stayed behind in the back apartments was able to get it down and save it. We’ve been open since Friday, though, cleaning up and getting reading material to folks (and so far a lot of people have taken us up on it). Still no power as of noon today, but we’ve had a generator-powered, small a/c unit and fans, so it’s bearable.

As Leo wrote when he invited me to contribute, "the only thing we ask is that if you’re not currently living in the New Orleans area, your cartoon would be about New Orleans or something New Orleans-related." I welcomed the chance to revisit New Orleans in my comics—especially now that the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is looming.

After thinking it over a little bit, I decided to address the passage of time since Katrina, and the way that New Orleans is still dealing with the storm. I was inspired by a paper an A.D. reader shared with me. Sean Mallin is a PhD Student in the Dept. of Anthropology at UC Irvine, and his paper is called "Steps to Nowhere? Rebuilding Haunted Landscapes in New Orleans." I remembered being particularly struck by the lines (quoting Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose) "Everywhere you go now, there’s some memory staring you in the face. What it used to look like;" as well as Mallin’s passage, “Memories of things they had or the way things were ‘before’ haunt [New Orleans residents] on a daily basis. Just like the ‘steps to nowhere,’ all the ‘stuff’ washed away by the floodwaters maintain a haunting presence in the lives of city residents."

I try to get at those feelings in "The Persistence of Memory…," which tracks one New Orleans house (or, rather, one piece of property) through the storm, the flooding, the aftermath, and subsequent stages of destruction and renewal. To make it extra fancy, I attempt to show all this one shot, broken up into five panels, each representing a different time in the life of the property.

It’s a subtle piece, requiring close reading; I hope it works for you.

Sounds like Dan Baum mixed with The Civilians mixed with Anna Deavere-Smith (with maybe a little A.D. thrown in)! I can’t wait.

Should you be in New York next week, here are the dates and show times (only $15 ea.):

The Players Loft, 115 MacDougal Street b/w West 3rd and Bleecker, NYC 10012

• Monday 8/23 at 5:15pm
• Wednesday 8/25 at 5:15pm
• Thursday 8/26 at 8pm
• Friday 8/27 at 7:45pm
• Saturday 8/28 at 3:30pm
• Sunday 8/29 at 1:15pm

All shows are one hour long. To buy tickets, call 866.468.7619 or click here.

P.S. Mari and Deanna are raising money to have 23 Feet in 12 Minutes professionally videotaped. To contribute on KickStarter, go here.

At first, I was led to believe that the current spill wasn’t anything like the infamous 1989 Exxon Valdex spill. Unlike that event, which dumped almost 11 million gallons of oil into the water extremely close to the shore, the BP leak was "only" releasing 40,000 gallons a day from over 40 miles from shore. The implication was that there would be much more dispersal of the lesser volumes of oil into much larger quantities of ocean water.

But now it’s coming out that initial reports of how much oil was being released into the war were vastly under-estimated. Now we’re seeing the oil coming ashore, and those heartbreaking, all-too-familiar images of oil-saturated birds and water-life are being broadcast to our television screens. Now the tragic truth is becoming clearer.

The ironies for the Gulf Coast are obvious. Just as the region (in some ways) is emerging from the disaster of Hurricane Katrina (and Rita), now this. There are already reports of tourists canceling trips to the region—and to New Orleans in particular—for fear of unsightly beaches and contaminated seafood.

There’s a larger question of how a disaster like this is a direct result of our country’s—our world’s—insatiable need for oil. That’s something we all need to think about it. In the meantime, below is a list of organizations which are working to alleviate the effects of the oil spill. Some have even changed or adapted their focus from post-Katrina relief to this new ongoing disaster. Please consider donating something to their efforts while we continue to hope that a solution to the leak is found. (I’ll be adding these links to the A.D. resource page shortly.)

• Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana
• Matter of Trust
• Oceana
• Natural Resources Defense Council  
• National Wildlife Federation  
• National Audubon Society 
• The Greater New Orleans Foundation
  
• Oxfam America
  
• Catholic Charities

As Mr. Caine wrote, "My students were 11 when the storm hit, and so it felt pretty current to them. Yet they were still too young to understand the weightiness of the situation, and A.D. opened their eyes." Because of budget issues, Mr. Caine chose to use the original, online version of the book (on "SMITH Magazine’s fantastic website"):

… Online reading is a novel yet relevant way to experience text; as nonlinear web reading becomes more common, your online presentation of A.D. (with informational links for many panels) matched the style of literacy that students are comfortable with. In addition, the links lent gravity to the material, and served as important reminders that this was indeed nonfiction.

I’m really overwhelmed by this package. Not only does it thrill me beyond words to know that A.D. on SMITH has continued life, but to think that actual students are taking advantage of all the site’s resources is more than I ever could have imagined. (After all, I put most of those links together!) And the individual letters from the kids are really touching—filled with questions, comments, and appreciation. I still haven’t worked my way through them all, as I’m savoring each one individually. I’m so grateful to Mr. Caine for exposing his students to the unique educational potential of comics in general, and A.D. in particular. And of course for taking the time to let me know about his class’s experience.

I plan on sending the class a personalized hardcover of A.D. And of course letting Mr. Caine know that, should he care to teach Katrina through A.D. again in the future, that there’s a free teacher’s guide online, and that the more economical A.D. paperback is due out in August.

Three cheers for Danny Caine!