I finally got around to looking at Josh Neufeld’s serial webcomic A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge. I haven’t had time to digest it and it’s not finished anyway, so I’ll just say GO READ THIS.

Josh is not only a solid cartoonist with a good eye for the day-to-day (which he sharpened in his solo travel comics, and as an illustrator for American Splendor), but a socially engaged dude to a degree that’s rare in the current alt-comics generation. After the hurricane, he spent three weeks doing relief work in Biloxi and wrote about it on LiveJournal, but the comic is a different thing: it’s a docudrama based on interviews with a half-dozen people who got through the disaster in various ways. The level of incidental detail, the sense of place and character, and the unobtrusive storytelling craft that pulls you into it—damn. If it were on TV it would have to be a big-budget extravaganza and it wouldn’t be as effective as this is.