Better late than never, now up at SMITH is A.D. Chapter Five: “Katrina Comes Calling.”
As the hurricane’s pre-winds hit New Orleans, The Doctor hosts friends for a hurricane party. Meanwhile, Hamid and Mansell hunker down at the store. And Denise learns just what a mistake it was to foresake the refuge of the hospital for her apartment.
Comments are welcome at the site.
Hey there, where y’at? I just finished, and SMITH just posted, the latest chapter of my serialized graphic novel, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge. It’s chapter 4, but is pretty much the second part of chapter 3, as our characters do what they can to avoid and/or prepare for the hurricane.
So go now, please, and check it out. And feel free to comment (at the site), if you feel so inclined…
Chapter 3 of A.D., “…Or Should I Go?”, is now live on SMITH.
Hamid sends his family off to Houston, Kevin fills the bathtub with water, and Denise seeks shelter — but finds only chaos. It is Sunday, August 28, the day before Katrina.
Chapter 2 of A.D., “Should I Stay…”, is now live on SMITH. As Katrina bears down on New Orleans, Kevin prepares to leave for Florida, The Doctor invites some folks over to ride out the storm with him in the French Quarter, and Leo & Michelle debate the pros & cons of evacuating. Please check it out.
After a manic month of writing and drawing (and only a couple of days behind schedule), I’ve completed the first chapter of A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge. In chaper 1, we meet our five protagonists — Leo, Kevin, Hamid, Denise, and The Doctor — and follow their pre-Katrina preparations. You can read Chapter 1 (as well as the two-part prologue) for free right now on SMITH Magazine.
Katrina slams into the Gulf Coast in part II of the prologue to A.D.
Fresh from our trip to NOLA, we’ve posted the initial foray into the A.D. experience. It’s part I of the prologue, titled “In The Beginning…”, documenting Hurricane Katrina as it builds from a tropical storm in the Bahamas and moves inexorably toward New Orleans. Check it out over at SMITH.
I hope to post the second part of the prologue in a couple of weeks, with chapter 1 — and the introduction of our five central characters — to follow within a month.
I’m getting excited about my next project, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, which debuts on SMITH Magazine this weekend (which is also Smith’s one-year anniversary). Following (belatedly) in the footsteps of Anthony Lappé and dangoldman‘s critically acclaimed (and justifiably so!) Shooting War, A.D. is about Hurricane Katrina and its effects on the lives of five real New Orleans residents.
I’ll also be dealing with the effect of the storm on other regions, such as Biloxi, in the parts of the project dealing with my personal experiences as a Red Cross volunteer.
This is my most research-heavy project ever, and is going to be a major focus of my time for the next six months (at least). I plan on putting up a new chapter at least once a month, and hopefully more often than that. And it’ll all be free for viewing at SMITH.
As part of the research, I’ll be visiting New Orleans this weekend (along with A.D. editor/SMITH founder Larry Smith), where we’ll meet with the characters from the project, tour around a bit, and take lots of photos. This’ll be the first time I’ll be visting NOLA since shortly after the hurricane, when I came through just for an afternoon.
We’ll have the good fortune to be put up right in the French Quarter, in the guest-house of one of our subjects, a doctor and local NOLA character. And dinner at Galatoire’s is on the agenda!
Should be quite a trip.
In the “wake” of Katrina Came Calling, I was approached to write the foreword to a new book of photographs. Called Signs of Life: Surviving Katrina, the book gives us a look at the multitude of hand-made signs which proliferated throughout the Gulf Coast following the storm. It’s a remarkable — and beautiful — collection, and it goes on sale today, Katrina’s one-year anniversary. [http://www.signsoflifebook.com — also, you can check out a Flickr.com slideshow of images here.]
All the proceeds from Signs of Life go to rebuilding the Gulf Coast, so I encourage you to make the investment. As Rob Walker (Titans of Finance, Letters from New Orleans) writes, “It’s impossible to speak for the people who lived through Katrina. Far better to let them speak for themselves. That’s exactly what these images (sad, hopeful, funny, enraging) capture—and it’s exactly what Signs of Life is about.”
My introduction follows.
As a Hurricane Katrina Red Cross volunteer, I was invited to commemorate Katrina’s one-year anniversary by taking part in tomorrow’s NASDAQ closing bell ceremony. And it will all be viewable on web-cam! So look for me in a gaggle of NY-area Red Crossers as we mark the hurricane by celebrating the unstoppable storm of hyper-capitalism.
Tuesday, Aug. 29, 4 pm
http://www.nasdaq.com/reference/marketsite_about.stm
– Windows Media Player required
– scroll to the bottom of the page under the heading MarketSite Live Web cam and click on Windows Media Player
– any time before 3:50 pm the webcam will show the tower, at 3:50 the router is switched and you can see inside the studio