Drawing from Real Life

Misfit Mountain was left unrecognizable after Hurricane Helene. Fortunately, the nonprofit animal rescue in Clyde had moved the cats and dogs from the premises before the storm. But the pigpen, home to nine pigs, was destroyed. Debris scattered across their field. Their creek looked like a river. 

But owners Amy and Tera McIntosh, who live 10 minutes away, had a more pressing emergency. A friend in Gerton called to say a neighbor had been airlifted from their mountain home and left behind two pigs. The damage was so extensive, they weren’t sure if the pigs were dead or alive. 

“Their house was completely destroyed,” Amy recalled. “There was nothing there besides the fence that kept the pigs inside the enclosure.” 

Tera stayed behind at Misfit Mountain, which is all volunteer-run and had 13 senior and disabled animals living there at the time. They also distribute food and supplies, and quickly opened up a pantry; people and their pets soon began arriving. 

Amy gathered some friends to check on the pigs. It took two ATVs, a large crate, and a little ingenuity involving a child’s wagon, but Amy was able to rescue pigs Willow and Hamilton. Misfit Mountain took in 27 animals in the week after Helene—including another pig, cats, rabbits, snakes, ferrets, dogs, and eight chickens. Ten of them came from the home of Tony Garrison, a volunteer firefighter who died in the storm.

The heartwrenching story appears as a comic, “A Community of Misfits,” illustrated by Thien Pham and Briana Loewinsohn, in the new anthology Islands in the Sky. The book is a compendium of 11 comics that Andrew Aydin of Edneyville brought together to feature the stories of Helene survivors. 

Aydin began his career in politics, first in Connecticut and eventually as a digital director and policy adviser for the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia. But today, Aydin is legendary in the graphic novel field as the co-author of the March trilogy with Lewis and illustrator Nate Powell. The series’ third installation was the first graphic novel to win a National Book Award, and the books have now been published in seven languages and are required reading in many schools. 

For his latest effort, Aydin wanted to set the record straight about how Appalachians helped each other after Helene. He recalled seeing Facebook and Instagram posts after the storm, claiming government inaction or lauding tough outsiders for charging in to save the day. 

Social media “portrayed what was happening during Helene as these groups of cowboys coming in … the guys who came in with their helicopters,” Aydin said. Others spread “bullshit” rumors about the Federal Emergency Management Agency confiscating property or avoiding houses with Trump signage. “These are lies, and it’s clearly politically orchestrated. It seems like it was organized by outside groups to advance a political narrative going into the election.” 

The reality Aydin saw on the ground was “all hands on deck, and it was neighbors helping neighbors.” 

It struck him that there was an opportunity: “Let’s create a real historical record that lives up to the standards of authenticity.” 

Putting up the ‘Bat Signal’ 

For Islands in the Sky, Aydin paired locals with compelling survival stories with the writers, illustrators, and colorists he knew through the comics and graphic design community. The collaborative aspect was intentional. Aydin cites the work of Elon Justice as an inspiration; her paper, Hillbilly Talkback: Co-Creation and Counternarrative in Appalachia, describes co-creation as a way to produce “compelling counter-representations of Appalachia” and other groups “who have been systematically misrepresented.” 

Appalachians, like many others, are sensitive to the media parachuting in after a disaster and leaving before shattered lives have been put back together. 

“Having the opportunity to tell your own story is power,” Aydin said. “It’s validation. In some ways, it’s healing and catharsis, and in all too often, it’s reserved for the wealthy and the privileged.” 

Aydin was also familiar with helping others tell their stories. March is the product of years of research at the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the Department of Justice archives, and numerous interviews with the congressman. 

Originally from Atlanta, Aydin moved to Edneyville, in Henderson County, after Lewis’ death in 2020. “A lot of people didn’t understand why I moved out here,” he said. “They thought the professional thing you’re supposed to do is to go and work in the administration. You go be a lobbyist or something. And I couldn’t think of anything that sounded more awful to me.” 

Instead, he moved into his late mother’s hobby farm; she passed away in 2017, only six months after he won the National Book Award. Aydin bought a tractor and began to grow his own food. He started to heal from the loss of two of the biggest figures in his life.

“Then Helene happened, and I realized I had this opportunity to … help other people heal,” he said. “Because telling your story, making things, seeing people value your story? That speaks to the core of who we are as human beings.” 

In the weeks after Helene, Aydin “put up the bat signal” to his compatriots and formed the nonprofit Appalachia Comics Project. The contributors are a who’s who of the comics community. The McIntoshes wrote the text of their 33-panel comic with the help of Gene Luen Yang, author of the acclaimed graphic novel American Born Chinese and the recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant” for his work. 

“I realized that my head is full of stereotypes about that particular part of the country,” wrote Yang via email. “And what better way to counteract stereotypes than to get to know the real stories of real human beings?”

The effort also includes Powell, who won the National Book Award alongside Aydin, and Josh Adams and Anthony Del Col, Pulitzer Prize winners (along with Fahmida Azim and Walt Hickey) for their graphic reportage on Chinese oppression of the Uyghurs. Aydin got Matt Fraction—“a legend” who has written Batman, Fantastic Four, Captain America, Hawkeye, and Spider-Man comics—to contribute as writer. And Marvel’s Lauren Sankovitch edited the anthology.

‘Some Good Tears Shed’

The heart of the anthology, however, is the experience of Western North Carolina residents. 

Jessica Stepp Edney wrote her story, “Something Indestructible,” with Fraction. Her tale, illustrated by Aster D’Amico and colored by Nick Filardi, describes spreading her mom’s ashes at a loch in Scotland two days before Helene made landfall. And when the storm hit, Edney, who works at N.C. State University, rushed back to the United States to be in Henderson County, where her family has lived for five generations. “No way in hell I wasn’t coming back,” she wrote.

Aydin had known Edney for years and got in touch after seeing her post online about her experience. She wrote a script, gathered photos, and met Fraction over numerous video calls—which was thrilling, she said, as a huge comic book fan. “I was a bit star-struck,” Edney said with a laugh. “I tried really hard to keep myself composed.”

They communicated back and forth on the narrative via email. “Some good tears shed, which is a very vulnerable thing,” Edney said. “Matt was so kind, making me feel safe.” She thinks she’s been more vulnerable with Fraction about her Helene experience than even with her therapist.

Although Fraction lives in Portland, Oregon, he felt a special connection to the region because his grandparents lived in Lake Lure. “Y’all have been abandoned—I don’t think there’s any other way to put it,” he told me at a fundraiser in downtown Asheville for the project last November. Writing comics “felt better than writing a check,” he said, and he was just as enamoured of Edney as she was of him. “She’s got the soul of a poet,” he said. 

While Edney felt honored to share her family’s story, she was “very cognizant that there were a lot of people with more traumatic stories,” from Helene, she said. 

Contributor Cory Vaillancourt of Maggie Valley felt similarly. “I didn’t lose a thing,” said Vaillancourt, a reporter for the Smoky Mountain News. “I don’t want to take the space for someone who lost something.”

Yet Aydin said he intentionally included stories that involved sadness and struggle without death or destruction; he found it to be a counterpoint to the sensationalism that he saw on social media about Helene. “The storm hit everyone in different ways,” he said. “It wasn’t just the trauma that was the story that needed to be told; it was all of the experiences.” 

Vaillancourt’s story, “The News Still Came,” describes driving through “the silence, the shock and the silt” as the rain came down. Co-written with Steve Orlando, drawn by June Kim, and lettered by Josh Reed, the panels depict the plastic bags trapped in tree branches, trailers floating down streets, and mud coating every surface. 

Vaillancourt wasn’t used to sharing his own experiences—“no one asks you that as a reporter,” he said. He provided Kim with “gigs and gigs of photos,” which she used to draw elements like the flooding around Frog Level Brewing in Waynesville and the collapse of I-40. He liked the idea of telling Helene’s story through comics, which can reach more people than articles or books. 

“It sticks the abstract to the tangible,” said Jarrett Rutland, a Woodfin-based artist who illustrated “The Audacity of Sadness,” written by Matthew K. Manning. “It does something to the brain.”

“This is the best medium to tell the story,” Aydin said. “The fastest growing segment of all publishing is manga, right?” (Manga are comics and graphic novels produced in Japan.)

Comics are uniquely “beloved” in Appalachia, Aydin said, noting Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Demon Copperhead, in which the main character is a poor kid who creates comics about his life. Aydin was first introduced to X-Men through comics his grandmother bought for him at “the old Piggly Wiggly on Hendersonville Highway.” 

A Kickstarter for Islands in the Sky surpassed its $25,000 goal, raising $30,000 to pay the artists, letterers, colorists, and local writers. (Most of the established comics writers donated their time and many illustrators took a reduced rate.) Good Trouble Comics, the publishing company Aydin has operated with Fraction and Fraction’s wife, Kelly Sue DeConnick, since 2019, is financing the first run of 1,000 copies. 

Islands in the Sky is on track for a mid-April arrival for the early backers; he hopes for a national release in August. Aydin is also seeking donations to buy copies for local schools and libraries. “We have requests for a couple hundred that we haven’t funded yet,” he said. (These donations can be made through the nonprofit Appalachian Community Fund in Knoxville, Tennessee, which has partnered with the project.) 

Meanwhile, pigs Willow and Hamilton have found happy endings. Their owner relinquished them to the rescue, and both now live at Misfit Mountain and are available for adoption. The rescue experienced about $70,000 in damage and has been slowly rebuilding. “All the animals survived, so that was the important thing,” said Tera.

Yang feels privileged to have helped tell their story.

“What got me most was how their love for animals brought an entire community together,” he wrote via email. “Looking out for the innocent, the helpless, gave neighbors a reason to gather, to rebuild, and to heal.”