Gambit > bestofneworleans.com > noVember 29 > 2011
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essay-based curriculum, and a graphic novel. … Steve thought the idea was nuts. I’m not exactly sure what his turning point was.” “I never thought we could possibly get a graphic novel out of this,” says Duin, who’s also a comics connoisseur and historian. Duin and Wheeler didn’t have a plan when they landed in Louisiana, but Rosen was confident he picked two people who could tell an effective story. “Mike had a vision that was pretty clear. ‘I’m going to get these two guys together: Steve’s gonna write it, Shannon’s gonna draw it.’ He had a real agenda,” Wheeler says. “I’m used to finding people, talking to them and turning it over fairly quickly,” Duin says. “I exercise my voice a lot, because I use it. But it’s such a delight when someone’s voice comes along, like the owner of Daddy’s Money had. You just get out of the way and let them carry the story. I don’t know if we were stupidly lucky in the people we met, or if we stayed another week we would’ve met an equally interesting cast of characters. I’m guessing it’s the latter. Oregonians tend to be nice but bland. There’s no blandness, as far as I can tell, in southern Louisiana.” The character “Catfish” gets his own eponymous chapter. “Seen a lot of shit in the last 20 years,” he says, as panels illustrate Vietnamese shrimpers working the Gulf and cocaine trafficking replacing the shrimping business. “Made good money. Served 39 months.” Deano Bonano, then Jefferson Parish’s emergency management director, meets the group coincidentally in Grand Isle. Bonano wrangles a shark from his fishing line and gently sends it back into the Gulf, resting it against the waves to let water pass over its gills. “Louisianans are resilient,” says Bonano, speaking for both himself and the shark. “We came back from Katrina. And if we came back from that, we can come back from this.” Tulane University ecology professor Michael Blum also made it into Oil and Water’s pages. Blum has been a go-to environmental sciences expert on TV programs like The Colbert PAGE 22