A flood of emotions in a Katrina comics serial

'A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge' puts the city's tragedy in a compassionate frame.

August 27, 2007|Geoff Boucher | Times Staff Writer

Memoirs, meta-nonfiction and journalistic graphic novels are a robust scene right now. The bookshelf is large enough to fit underground rap heroes (MF Grimm has a gritty account of his street life coming Sept. 5 on the Vertigo imprint owned by DC Comics) and the two-fisted tales of an active-duty French antiterrorist cop (the adventures of Pierre Dragon are all the rage in Paris right now).

The push of graphic novels toward real life and away from caped crusaders isn't new, of course.

The compass points for the field include the Holocaust account in "Maus: A Survivor's Tale," which won a special 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Art Spiegelman; Will Eisner's semiautobiographical tales of New York in the 1980s; and Pekar's long career using the pages of "American Splendor" as a cranky and meandering diary.

For Neufeld, the most compelling influence has been Sacco, the Maltese journalist and artist whose bracing 1990s illustrated memoirs were collected in "Palestine," which won an American Book Award in 1996. The Guggenheim Fellow's trip through the twilight of the warfare in Bosnia led to more comics-as-journalism, such as "Safe Area Gora{zcaron}de."

"It was the work of Sacco that was my very specific influence, the one that made it very comfortable and natural for me to approach this as a logical way to tell this story," Neufeld said. "The approach is one that takes less and less explaining to people. Which is good because people just focus on the story you're telling."

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