The new chapter of A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge has gone live—it’s entitled “If It’s The Last Thing We Ever Do” and takes place on September 1st, 2005 outside the Convention Center.

I’m curious to see what people think about this, and A.D. in general, especially after all the play the “parasite class” comments have gotten lately.

This interview originally appeared in the March 2007 issue of ANTIGRAVITY.

To celebrate After The Deluge getting picked up by Pantheon, I thought I’d post our original talk with artist Josh Neufeld, which coincided with A.D.’s debut over at SMITH. Interested parties may want to know that the current issue of DC/Vertigo’s American Splendor mini-series features some of Josh’s work.

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Josh Neufeld has become adept at telling graphic stories of a personal nature — his comic series The Vagabonds chronicles his and wife Sari’s travels around the world, his artwork frequently tells Harvey Pekar’s unique slice-of-life stories in American Splendor, and his 2004 graphic novel A Few Perfect Hours (and Other Stories From Southeast Asia & Central Europe) won him a prestigious grant from the Xeric Foundation. Neufeld’s latest projects feature both personal and, for the first time, communal stories. In early ’06 Neufeld released Katrina Came Calling, a chapbook-style collection of prose journal entries written in late ’05 during a three-week tour of duty with the Red Cross in Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi. In January ’07 the prologue of Neufeld’s new sequential art project, New Orleans: After The Deluge, premiered on SMITH, an upstart website that celebrates personal storytelling and, in 2006, published Shooting War, a highly acclaimed webcomic about the war in Iraq. After The Deluge features several real-life people affected by Katrina (including AG editor Leo McGovern), and Neufeld intends to weave those people’s stories together in an attempt to show readers that New Orleans isn’t a city full of statistics; that the populace of the Gulf Coast isn’t simply full of people either with or without the means and/or desire to leave, return and rebuild; that our region, even a year and a half after Katrina, is brimming with grey area.

ANTIGRAVITY spoke with Neufeld about the reasons he created A.D., what he hopes readers take away from these stories, and how this project is different from anything he’s done before. (more…)

We just received word that New Orleans: After The Deluge, the webcomic that features the real-life Katrina stories of six New Orleanians, including mine, has secured a publishing deal with the graphic novel division of Pantheon, which itself is a division of Random House.

A.D. author Josh Neufeld joins a very distinguished catalog of authors that includes some of my personal favorites: Jessica Abel’s La Perdida, Charles Burns’ Black Hole, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Craig Thompson’s Goodbye Chunky Rice and Art Spiegelman’s Maus.

Neufeld has planned for the web version of A.D. to run 12 chapters, and the GN version will be expanded to further delve into all the characters’ stories. A.D.’s set for a Summer 2009 release and will appear in both hard and softcover editions.

It’s kind of mind-blowing to be a character in a webcomic, much less a graphic novel published by a company like Pantheon. How awesome is this?

Not a hoax, not a dream, not an imaginary story!

AG editor and Expo founder Leo McGovern is featured on the cover of this week’s GAMBIT WEEKLY and is part of an excellent story on the history of the Expo, the event’s special guest and A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge artist Josh Neufeld and a few fellow exhibitors: Erik Kiesewetter of Constance, photographer Zack Smith, Backporch Revolution’s Alec Vance and Notes From New Orleans author Deborah Cotton.

Read it online!

See you this weekend at the Expo!