Press
Nation Associate
Former Nationista Pens Graphic Novel on Hurrican Katrina
Nation intern Andrea D'Cruz talks with Josh Neufeld — author of A.D. — about his brief career at the magazine and his graphic novel about New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina.
Fall 2009
I've come to Josh Neufeld's home to talk about A.D., his newly published
graphic novelization of the lives of five real people living in New Orleans
during Hurricane Katrina. The Brooklyn apartment where he lives with his wife,
writer Sari Wilson, and their two-year-old daughter, Phoebe, is one of those
places that subconsciously lifts your mood; it's a cozy nest of familial bliss
and socially conscious creativity. And it's all — almost, sort of —
thanks to The Nation.
Josh and Sari met almost two decades ago, in the fall of 1990: she was a Nation intern, while Josh recalls his Nation title at the time as "Business Department Assistant or something." At his farewell party some two years later, then editor Victor Navasky joked, "Well, we couldn't pay you much and it won't necessarily lead to a better career, but we did find you a girlfriend!"
It had been matchmaker Victor who created the position for Josh after receiving a remarkable speculative job-seeking letter, which legend has expanded to four pages, single-spaced. In it Josh earnestly swore he'd do anything for a job at The Nation, including working in the men's room. True to his word, he eventually ended up responsible for toilet paper restocking, alongside a lengthy list of other duties-including recycling, back issue indexing and syndicaion. "A pleasure to work with," Victor recalls him "being here all hours."
Josh had no journalistic inclinations at that time. His letter instead materialized out of the tension between his lefty-activist identity and an unhappy employment situation: "I was working at the Guggenheim doing special events and I was miserable. It's like the most establishment, Upper East Side, apolitical, old-money type of place, and I was organizing parties for stupid art exhibits that had no political or social context in them. There was a disconnect between what I wanted to do with my life and what I was doing, and The Nation represented the golden prize of meaningful work. I was very emotionally attached to The Nation. I read every single issue front to back; it spoke to my soul."
He had been scribbling out comics from the precocious age of four, but by the time of his Nation days his interest was waning, the result of another divergence: "At that point I was still doing superhero-type comics and silly fantasy-type comics, so there was a disconnect between what my interests were in the real world and the stuff that I had a talent for." It was a few years on that he gleefully stumbled across the alternative world of comics that got him drawing again: he discovered the autobiographical form of Harvey Pekar's American Splendor series — for which he would become a regular illustrator — and later, the political comic book journalism of artists like Joe Sacco (Palestine, Safe-Area Gorazde).
He began to tell comics about his own life, a pastime which culminated in A Few Perfect Hours (and Other Stories From Southeast Asia & Central Europe), a travelogue of his globe-trotting adventures with Sari in the year after he left The Nation. He also trod the journalistic and political path, working with Rob Walker — who briefly took over Josh's Nation job and is now the "Consumed" columnist for The New York Times Magazine — on the series Titans of Finance: True Tales of Money & Business, a deliciously satirical and entirely accurate (it's based on unembellished press accounts) take on the "superhero" suits of Wall Street.
From there A.D.'s appearance was almost inevitable. While The Nation was dedicating a much-needed mass of critical coverage to post-Katrina New Orleans, their old employee was out in Biloxi, Mississippi, volunteering with the Red Cross. He chronicled his experiences and the stories of the disaster victims in a blog (later the basis of a self-published book, Katrina Came Calling), which prompted a reader to implore, "Do a comic. Please." The result, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, is a grippingly visualized account of the collision of nature and humanity. Josh describes the book as being "mostly journalism" — although partly fictionalized. It was meticulously researched, being based on scores of interviews and photographs — "but it's a little bit political as well in the sense that I chose which stories to tell." The choices expose a differential experience along cleavages of class and race, and in the case of Denise, who ends up trapped in the Convention Center, "what happens when the authorities totally screw up and don't support people and leave them alone."
A.D. is by turns delightfully funny, without being trivializing, and deeply sad, without being sentimental. This tricky balance was struck with the aid of Sari — the two enjoy a charming kind of artistic symbiosis — "we would talk about if you have an emotional moment it needs to be earned, you can't just throw it in and expect people to go along with you on that just by pushing a button there and being manipulative."
The comic was originally published in parts online at SMITH magazine and from there was picked up by Pantheon, where it was edited by Lisa Weinert — another past Nation intern and part of The Nation Guide to the Nation team. Roane Carey, now managing editor but copy chief when Josh was at The Nation, attended A.D.'s book launch in August. His praise-filled recollection of Josh back in the early '90s — "really gregarious, fun, easy to get on with and the engine and inspiration of our otherwise pathetic softball team" — is matched by that for the graphic novel seventeen years on: "a great book, a moving portrait and a very interesting mix of fact and fiction which manages to stay faithful to its characters' circumstances."
Meanwhile, the cozy Brooklyn nest continues to teem with exciting new projects: Josh is currently collaborating on a comic book with NPR's On the Media host Brooke Gladstone. Sari is writing her first novel and finishing up a teachers' guide for A.D.; and together the two are building up their motion comics studio, Dojo Graphics, through which they co-wrote for ABC News' global warming documentary, Earth 2100. For more on Josh Neufeld or to order A.D., visit joshcomix.com.