Gambit > bestofneworleans.com > noVember 29 > 2011
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Report and The Rachel Maddow Show. In the book, he has few answers, if any, as a seasoned scientific pro faced with a very new problem. (“We don’t know,” he often repeats in the comic.) “It’s one of the most favorite things I’ve done,” he says. “There are large chunks in New Orleans, in southern Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, that have a general understanding of what’s going on (with the oil disaster) but are in many respects disconnected — example: Tulane’s student population. Something like this would provide them, and people like them, an opportunity to see it as it unfolded, to see the different communities involved.” Duin and Wheeler mapped out stories and scripts, between arguments and back and forths about plotting, storytelling and pacing. “I’m basically writing the screenplay, and Shannon’s a single-panel cartoonist,” Duin says. “I’d give him the script and sample drawings, and of course Shannon would say, ‘You’re out of your mind.’” As the book gets deeper south and deeper into the complexities and relationships of oil to the Gulf and its people, the stories get murky and collide, mimicking an ebb-andflow that at first is much like oil and water, then gradually homogenizes. The Portlanders come to grips with their own misconceptions, and the characters that were once miles away from their lives become embedded in their own.
“You think oil is the problem? You ain’t from around here. Oil is the solution.” Oil and Water’s Portland characters first board a plane to solve an environmental crisis nobody else seems to care about, only to have those preconceived notions (and stereotypes) flipped upside-down, or defeated (“There’s so much left to do …”). While the Gulf Coast and its residents’ lives crumble, the “do-gooders from Portland,” as Duin describes them, face their own reality: They
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