It’s been nearly two years since Hurricane Helene devastated communities across western North Carolina. A new graphic novel called Islands in the Sky documents the real-life experiences of survivors.
Creator Andrew Aydin is the award-winning co-author of the graphic memoir series March. He founded the Appalachia Comics Project — which is behind the new novel — after facing Helene himself. WFDD’s Rachel Moody spoke with Aydin about amplifying local voices through comics.
Interview Highlights:
On the graphic novel format:
“Comics, when you're making them, allow you to show types of truth that can get missed in other mediums. If you have a documentary, you can never make it a first-person. You've either got the third-person narration, or you've got a re-creation using archival footage, which is inherently third-person, right? Someone’s shooting the footage. And if you do it in prose, you miss out on that component of visualization. Like even if they made it a movie, you are still beholden to the pace that the director chooses.
When you absorb the information through a comic book or through a graphic novel, through sequential narrative, you are able to take it in at your own pace, which allows your brain to process the information at a rate that allows you to absorb it more fully and more deeply and recall it more easily.”
On the partnership between comic creators and survivors:
“I think first we were thinking about people who would be good working with survivors of a traumatic event. Right? I mean, these are people who had to have the sensitivity of character and understanding of what these people have been through, so that they could be good creative partners. Lauren Sankovitch, who is our managing editor — she took point. And we went through all of the people whose stories we felt like we wanted to include in the book and tried to find matches where the art style and also the type of storytelling that they were doing made sense in the pairing. ... You know, you really tried to think through the whole process and make sure that the pairings were done in a way that gave the stories the opportunity to breathe, to explore the nooks and crannies of what was possible. And I think that forethought and particularly Lauren Sankovitch’s extraordinary work really made each of the stories truly exceptional.”
On the range of perspectives on loss:
“We needed to include a range of perspectives on loss because we needed to show the full breadth and depth of the experience. I mean, back in the old days when Congressman Lewis and I were writing the scripts for March, he would say, ‘You know, we can't let anything be swept under the rug. We have to tell the whole truth.’ And I think that was very much in the back of my mind”
On what readers should take away:
“When you've finished reading this whole book, you've been through the ups and downs, which I think all of us have experienced. This shock, this tragedy, this fear, and then this hope and this sense of community and people pulling together and supporting one another.
You know, I just hope that we have succeeded in bringing a sense of urgency to every reader. That when they finish this book, they recognize that climate change has made our world more deadly than it's ever been. What once was a once-in-1,000-year storm is, in fact, something that is going to become and has now become a part of our reality. Pretending like it doesn't exist would be a huge mistake. In some sense, Islands in the Sky is a call to action.”