A.D.: NEW ORLEANS AFTER THE DELUGE - SerioComics 74 - Q&A with Author Josh Neufeld
I plan to be at Small Press Expo 09/12/25-09/14/25
I Plan To Be At Small Press Expo
God Willing
Which will be in Baltimore, Maryland.
September 12th-14th.
And I hope to meet other comics makers there like Josh Neufeld in person :)
How I Met Josh Neufeld!
I met Josh Neufeld on the Internet?
When I noticed that he bought a paperback copy of SHOULD WE BUY A GUN?
From the website.
It was order #42.
There have only been 46 orders via shouldwebuyagun.com
Not sure how many others via Amazon or other bookstores :)
But I was grateful to Josh.
And I noticed he had also just connected on LinkedIn.
So we talked about what he’s working on.
Which might include a work on a similar subject.
And at some point he mentioned that
It so happened that it is the literal 20 year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
Which is the subject of his seminal work A.D.: New Orleans After The Deluge
And so we decided to do this Q&A.
I went through a bit of a hurricane in my life recently too.
But came out on the other side stronger and well.
With an interview with Tessa Hulls, only the second Pulitzer Prize winner in graphic literature.
But without further adieu.
Here is…
Josh Neufeld
Josh Neufeld is a Brooklyn-based cartoonist and journalist best known for his groundbreaking work in nonfiction comics. He is the writer and artist of the Eisner and Harvey Award–nominated A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, and the Xeric Award–winning travelogue A Few Perfect Hours. His illustrations have reached a wide audience through the New York Times bestseller The Influencing Machine.
A longtime contributor to Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, Neufeld has also collaborated with David Greenberger (Duplex Planet Illustrated) and R. Walker (Titans of Finance), while his art has been featured in exhibitions across the U.S. and Europe.
His comics and illustrations appear in newspapers, magazines, anthologies, and online platforms, covering subjects from global travel to media critique, financial satire, disaster response, and public health.
Neufeld’s passion for real-life stories has made him a leading voice in comics journalism.
Influenced by the pioneering work of Joe Sacco, he uses the comics medium to capture the texture of lived experience—whether documenting Hurricane Katrina survivors, exploring the complexities of media, or contributing to the field of graphic medicine.
His recent works include stories such as “Supply Chain Superhero,” “A Tale of Two Pandemics,” and the award-winning “Vaccinated at the Ball,” which earned him the 2023 GMIC Graphic Medicine Award.
In addition to his published work, Neufeld is co-founder (with his wife, writer Sari Wilson) of Dojo Graphics, a studio producing educational motion comics for clients like ABC, Lifetime, and Scholastic.
He has also served as a Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan, an Atlantic Center for the Arts Master Artist, and a cultural envoy through the U.S. State Department, sharing his work with audiences worldwide.
He lives in Brooklyn with Sari and their daughter.
A.D.: NEW ORLEANS AFTER THE DELUGE
A masterful portrait of a city under siege that depicts seven extraordinary true stories of survival in the days leading up to and following Hurricane Katrina.
Here we meet Denise, a counselor and social worker, and a sixth-generation New Orleanian; “The Doctor,” a proud fixture of the French Quarter; Abbas and Darnell, two friends who face the storm from Abbas’ s family-run market; Kwame, a pastor’s son just entering his senior year of high school; and the young couple Leo and Michelle, who both grew up in the city. Each is forced to confront the same wrenching decision—whether to stay or to flee.
As beautiful as it is poignant, A.D. presents a city in chaos and shines a bright, profoundly human light on the tragedies and triumphs that took place within it.
Social Work and Societal Art
One thing I love about Josh’s touchstone in comics journalism.
Is that it’s not just a piece about society.
He also lived the social work experience as a member of the Red Cross.
It’s that kind of combination of art and life.
That not only creates a more meaningful, textured reading experience.
But also serves as an example to the value of contributing in tangible ways.
Something I know I’ve sometimes forgotten.
But have recently also been rediscovering.
Cinematic but also Personal Scale
Another quality I really enjoy about Neufeld’s A.D.
Is that he has these sweeping cinematic scale visuals of the Hurricane.
And its devastation on New Orleans.
Yet the scale of the stories is beautifully small and realistically slice of life.
It has the lived-in qualities of a Harvey Pekar story.
Or a well-researched documentary.
While I enjoyed all of the stories.
Including the one with a comics collector who lost all but one of his comics in the hurricane.
My favorite story was Abbas and Darnell who decide to tough out the storm.
In order to save Abbas’ shop.
It was a kind of heroic but perhaps crazy endeavor.
That I could really relate to recently :)
20 Year Anniversary Yet Still And Perhaps Even More Relevant
In one of the notes in the afterward, Neufeld writes:
“The mainstream media, in the days following the storms, inaccurately reported roving gangs, shootings, rapes, and murders at the New Orleans Convention Center. Denise witnessed what really happened, how the people there were abandoned by the authorities, and how they did their best to help one another—often with the so-called thugs at the forefront—and I knew Denise’s powerful voice had to be front and center in “A.D.”
As we live in a further declining age of authorities perhaps.
It’s important to remember that a lot of what kept New Orleans going.
Both during the Hurricane.
And after.
Which is also recounted in this book.
Is community.
Meaning individuals helping other individuals.
Or in groups.
And not depending only on top-down things.
For better or worse.
We seem to be in an even more community over authority era.
So A.D. with floods in Texas in 2025.
And other natural disasters.
Like the fires in Los Angeles also in 2025.
Show us that we have to watch out for each other.
And contribute time and materials.
This is partly why I have been documenting my films about helping a homeless musician in Los Angeles on SerioComics.
Though I am moving that to purely a Shuffle Synchronicities/Ask The Music and YouTube home now.
OK and now the Q&A!
The Q&A with Josh Neufeld
SerioComics: A.D. is a touchstone in comics journalism. How are the ethics of comics journalism different than other forms of journalism? What would you say your contributions to the medium in comparison to someone like Joe Sacco? Do people look at your work differently in 2025 than they did in the 2000s, when it was more common for people to make work about others than to help people produce their own work who lived through the experience personally?
Josh Neufeld: Comics journalism has many practitioners, each with different approaches and ethics. The main thing for readers to understand about my comics is that the characters are real people, and the events I portray actually happened to them. The rules I follow are simple: any word balloon above someone’s head is an actual quote I obtained through interviews, reporting, or their own writing. I never put words into people’s mouths. Similarly, if I show someone doing something at a particular time or place, that’s based on reporting and fact-checking—I don’t move people forward or backward in time or space. As far as I’m concerned, it's true nonfiction.
Now, the comics form does allow some creative license: I wasn’t literally there when a character survived flooding or witnessed police violence, and even with photographs or video, I still have to invent minor details or background characters to make the scene readable. So there’s a certain amount of reader trust that maybe other nonfiction forms don’t ask for. But in my scripts, I stick to the facts as I’ve gathered them.
Comics journalism also presents unique challenges, because every visual choice—how someone’s expression is drawn or how a space is depicted—shapes the reader’s perception. To me, that makes accuracy and respect especially important.
Joe Sacco — he set the template for the field with his comics about conflict zones, such as Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde. His examples gave me “permission” to undertake a project like A.D. Therefore, I don’t really compare myself to him; he defines the standard, and the rest of us lowly “narrative journalists” can only aspire to reach his level.
As for how people view comics journalism now compared to when A.D. was published in 2009: back then, it was seen almost as a novelty—telling Katrina survivors’ stories in a form normally reserved for superheroes or funny animals! Today, there’s much more acceptance of comics as a legitimate form for nonfiction storytelling, so I don’t have to work quite as hard to convince people that these comics are real journalism.
SerioComics: How are the aesthetics of comics journalism different than other forms of comics? I mentioned above how visually the scenes from New Orleans look cinematic but also there is a lot of factual biography, how do you balance entertainment and information? What did you learn in A.D. that you are now applying to graphic medicine for instance? And why are people so much more able to process comics content than a prose book or documentary of the same material?
Josh Neufeld: Comics journalism occupies an interesting aesthetic space. It borrows from documentary, but the language is comics, so you’re always balancing clarity and accuracy with the need to keep the reader visually engaged. In A.D., I leaned into both ends of that spectrum: the big, cinematic panoramas of the storm’s devastation and catastrophic flooding, and the small, intimate, almost mundane details of how people lived through it.
For me, the “cinematic” moments harken back to my high school and college years, when I aspired to be a superhero comics artist. When portraying the “mundane” human moments, I drew on my adult work with comics writers like Harvey Pekar, David Greenberger, and my own autobiographical travel stories, aiming to spark empathy and the reader’s desire to connect with the characters.
I learned a lot while making A.D., and the most successful stories I’ve done since follow similar precepts. At its best, comics journalism immerses the reader in the story in a way other media can’t. It has immediacy—it feels like it’s happening right now, rather than retrospectively. Conversely, stories that require heavy exposition or jump quickly from scene to scene don’t work as well in comics. Comics journalism is most effective when told “in-scene,” with people talking—through dialogue—rather than relying heavily on explanatory captions. When I do more explanatory comics, like some of my graphic medicine pieces, they can still work well if they incorporate quotes from real people (say, caregivers and/or patients) who can connect with the reader.
With graphic medicine projects, the “entertainment vs. information” balance is less about flashiness and more about accessibility—using pacing, visual metaphors, or humor where appropriate, so the information lands without overwhelming the reader. You want them to absorb complex health concepts while seeing the human stakes—how science/medicine intersects with lived experience. The form also works well for breaking down complex ideas into component parts or bringing life to dry charts and statistics.
As for why people process comics differently: the reader is decoding both text and image, panel by panel, which encourages active participation. And because the work is hand-drawn, there’s an inherent intimacy—you feel closer to the people being represented, even if—or perhaps because—the drawing is stylized. That quality can make serious material more approachable and, at times, more memorable than other forms.
SerioComics: As a writer, not an illustrator, I have been fascinated by Harvey Pekar. Is there a story you’ve never told about your working relationship? Perhaps something to do with the intensity or format of your partnership and collaboration that you two fostered together during the 15 years you contributed to American Splendor? Did you have to redraw things a lot ever? Not because he didn’t like your drawing but because he changed things? Or what is something you feel comfortable enlightening us with about him and you? Personally, he was one of my favorite re-introductions to comics in my 20s, and continues to be a model for extreme self-expression through others’ sensitive artwork, which is a rare form.
Josh Neufeld: Working with Harvey was a unique experience—part mentorship, part cranky Jewish uncle. He had a way of making the ordinary feel extraordinary, surfacing the drama, humor, or poignancy in everyday life. I’m so grateful he gave me one of my first breaks as a comics professional—and then kept coming back to me for the next fifteen years.
Collaborating with him—and his wife Joyce—taught me to listen carefully, not just to the words, but to the subtext behind them. I thought about his way of seeing the world a lot when writing and drawing my own autobiographical stories. It’s a lesson I carry into all my nonfiction work: pay attention to what’s beneath the surface, and give it room to breathe visually.
Harvey was actually super easy to work with—even when I got a little “creative” with layouts he originally proposed. In all the years we collaborated, he never asked me to redraw anything, except for one comic where I added a visual detail of his cat messing with his pill bottles. Harvey thought I was being “unfair to the cat,” so he had me redo that small section. I was happy to do it, and when he told me how relieved he was that I was willing to revise, I thought it was hilarious. I even made him promise to write another story just about that moment—which he did!
SerioComics: You are also a professor, a blogger, a self-publisher, a producer of filmic content, a father, a husband, and recently a maker of graphic medicine, and probably many more things I don’t know. I personally am greatly inspired by your blog (which has recent entries on Joyce Brabner, Ed Piskor), and your self-publishing and shop, which includes a new zine called Seeing Things, and your openness to new people such as buying this random guy’s book ;0 How do you balance so many parts of you? Including giving to others whether that’s students, social work, or random newbies. And how does this renaissance and altruistic mentality help your contributions to the medium of graphic literature and your own life?
Josh Neufeld: Balancing all these roles is definitely a challenge, but for me, they’re all interconnected. Teaching, making comics, podcasting, and simply being a person in the world—they all feed each other. Engaging with my daughter as she grows, or with my students as they learn the craft of comics, keeps me curious and reminds me why I do this work in the first place.
Being a husband, a dog owner, a son to my aging parents, and a friend to my pals keeps me grounded and attuned to the human scale, which is the foundation of my nonfiction comics. (Of course, I’m not always successful in any of the above roles! But failing, and learning about my own foibles and blind spots, is part of the challenge of getting older that I really try to embrace.) Comics are built on connection: between creator and subject, and creator and reader. Curiosity and openness aren’t just ethically satisfying traits—they improve my comics by fostering empathy, trust, and honesty in the work.
Finally, buying someone else’s book or helping a new creator is my way of giving back to the comics community, which was so nurturing and supportive when I was coming up in the ‘90s. Plus, you never know when you’ll encounter that next gem that reignites your love of the form all over again.
SerioComics: As someone who has self-published a version of my gun graphic novel, and now is making an edition for Substack, but still hopes to have a traditional publisher do one, I am fascinating by A.D.’s various manifestations in manifold forms and ultimate home at Pantheon. Instead of a recap of what is listed on your website, can you talk generally about what kind of advice you might give to someone like me, looking to turn the paperback into this An Imperfect Union Substack edition, and then find a traditional publisher?
Josh Neufeld: I think the biggest piece of advice is to see each form as a different way of reaching an audience, rather than a linear step toward a traditional publisher. With A.D., it began after I returned from volunteering with the Red Cross. I had self-published a zine called Katrina Came Calling, which collected my blog entries from that period—along with responses from other volunteers and some Katrina survivors. It got a bit of publicity, including from USA Today’s Pop Candy column, which brought me to the attention of the folks at SMITH magazine… and led to A.D.
SMITH gave me the opportunity to serialize A.D., letting me experiment with storytelling and pacing while reaching readers. The web format also allowed for embedded links, audio-visual supplements, and direct reader conversations. Pantheon later gave the work an expanded format, as well as permanence and broader distribution, which only a traditional publisher can provide. Each stage added something different, and none would have replaced the others. (I was especially glad Pantheon allowed SMITH to keep the web version of A.D. up—and free to read—for so many years, though it sadly no longer exists.)
It’s very interesting that you’re transforming Should We Buy a Gun into the An Imperfect Union Substack comic—a kind of reverse journey from A.D. I’d suggest thinking carefully about each platform’s unique affordances. Substack allows direct reader engagement, serialization, and even multimedia enhancements—so lean into that. At the same time, pacing, layout, and clarity remain crucial; the craft still matters, regardless of the form. This could also be a chance for you and the artist to refine or or improve aspects of the book edition.
Finally, when approaching a traditional publisher, the most important thing is having a polished, compelling package and a clear sense of why this story matters and who it’s for. Gun ownership and gun violence remain urgent issues in this country, and showing that you’ve already connected with readers—through Substack or other self-directed projects—can make a real difference.
SerioComics: We mentioned the zine, Seeing Things, can you tell us more about other new work coming, there is a new 24 page zine called BEYOND A.D. with selected updates, related comics and illustrations, and previously unseen-artwork. You've said it's like the DVD Extras of A.D. How else would you describe it? When and where can we buy that? You're also posting daily on Instagram harkening back to what the characters were doing on these exact anniversary dates as they geared up for the hurricane. What can people expect from following your IG and blog? And what else from your back catalogue or other people in your community should we be reading?
Josh Neufeld: BEYOND A.D. is a way to revisit the original book with fresh eyes. With the various updates, etc., it’s like a “companion zine” to A.D. My hope is that it will deepen the experience for readers familiar with the original — but also stand on its own? It’ll be available soon through my website, at the Small Press Expo, and at select comics cons and festivals this fall.
On Instagram, I’ve been posting daily to mark what the A.D. characters were doing on these exact dates leading up to Katrina, the levee failures, and the flood. The idea is to create a lived timeline, letting followers step into the rhythm of those ominous—and then terrifying—days. It’s part reflection, part historical memory.
For other reading, I’d encourage people to check out my solo comics series THE VAGABONDS—five of the six issues are still in print—and to explore my back catalogue, including A Few Perfect Hours, The Influencing Machine, and my graphic medicine work, most of which is available to read for free on my website. I can humbly say my site offers a lot of storytelling across formats and subjects, giving readers a sense of the range of nonfiction comics today.
The New Zine Is A Good Zine
Josh was able to send me a copy of his new zine which will be available soon via
I really enjoyed it.
Especially this fun update from 2016 about how though one of the characters lost his shop, it became a comics shop and another character’s place of employment.
Thanks so much to Josh for his time and participation in the SerioComics project!