Comics Project Seeks To Tell Appalachia’s Story, Beginning With Hurricane Helene

This conversation originally aired in the Aug. 10, 2025 episode of Inside Appalachia.

A newly launched comics project aims to pair residents of Appalachia with writers and artists to tell the region’s story. Its first project looks at what happened after Hurricane Helene struck western North Carolina.

Helene knocked out internet and cell service, leaving folks with an information void that was soon filled by conspiracy theories and other misinformation. A new project aims to correct those falsehoods — through comics. Islands in the Sky is a forthcoming anthology about the storm and its aftermath. The book will feature stories told by survivors in partnership with comics professionals. 

It’s led by the Appalachia Comics Project, which raised more than $28,000 through Kickstarter. Islands in the Sky was conceived by Andrew Aydin, who lives in western North Carolina. 

Inside Appalachia Host Mason Adams spoke with Aydin.

The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity.

Adams: A lot of people will know you from March and its sequel Run — the graphic novel series about John Lewis, the former congressman and civil rights legend. So what led to this memoir and especially telling it in a comics form?

Aydin: I started in John Lewis’s office answering his mail at a challenging time in his career. It was 2007 and we would have these meetings: How do we tell his story? How do we introduce him to young people? And I suggested one, he really needs to embrace the internet. He needs to get online. But there was another element that seemed really very apparent to me, which is that his career, his work, had always been about building for the long-term. And in order to understand everything he was doing in Congress, you had to understand both where he started, how he came to national prominence, and it had to be done in a way that was different.

And so when it was my turn to say what I was doing after the campaign was over, I said, “I’m going to a comic book convention. [I’m] going to Dragon Con in Atlanta.” If you know that, it’s a little bit of a rowdy show, and everybody laughed at me. I mean, this was a room of people in suits that cost more money than I’d ever made in a month. And I remember this deep voice from the back saying, “Don’t laugh. There was a comic book during the movement, and it was deeply influential.” And it was John Lewis standing up for me in that moment, as he stood up for so many people who had embraced things that were outside of the mainstream.

First, you just love him for that, right? Yeah, there’s a comic book during the movement. And then I went home and I read it. It was called Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story. I found it on the internet. It was beautiful: 16 pages, cover to cover, studio house style from the 1950s, an introduction to Rosa Parks and Gandhi and nonviolent civil disobedience, as well as the story of Martin Luther King and the Montgomery story, the Montgomery bus boycott. And I remember sitting there thinking with all of this swirling in my head about, how do we tell John Lewis’s story to a new generation? How do we explain the breadth and depth of it? And I’m reading this comic, and Congressman Lewis is saying words in my head that this was “influential in the movement,” and it just sort of was that lightning bolt moment where I thought, “Why doesn’t Congressman Lewis write a comic book?” And I just got this idea that he should write a graphic novel. 

So we were campaigning out on Wallace Road in southwest Atlanta, just down the street from his house. You gotta understand, there’s two things John Lewis was afraid of, and really only two things. The first was snakes, or, as he pronounced it, “sneks,” and the second was thunderstorms. So we’re campaigning, we’re hammering in yard signs in his neighbor’s yards, and all of a sudden, this flash of lightning streaks across the sky, and before the thunder had, had time to make it to us and roll across, John Lewis had taken off in a full suit, taken off at a full sprint back to the car, leaving us standing there not knowing what to do. We started to follow, and we’re running with him back to the car. We all dive in. I think there were seven of us in a five-seater, just in time for the rain to start coming down on the roof. One of my interns leaned in and said, “You should ask the congressman about the comic idea again. He can’t go anywhere now.” And so I did. I remember he was sitting in the front passenger seat of the car, and I was in the back. He looked, and he got that little grin that you see in his mug shots, where it’s not a full smile, it’s just this corner of his mouth ticks up like he’s up to something. And he said, “Okay, I’ll do it, but only if you write it with me.” And that moment changed my life. It changed everything. That’s really where it started and where the idea came from, and at its core, everything worked because we trusted each other, we liked each other’s company. We enjoyed working together, and we very much felt at ease in the trenches doing the work.

Adams: I love that answer, and that book has become — it’s a trope, but it’s true in this case — a modern classic. I mean, schools are incorporating it in their curricula. So let’s talk about the Appalachian Comics Project, which is kicking off with the project about Hurricane Helene and its effects in western North Carolina specifically. What was your experience with Hurricane Helene?

Aydin: After Congressman Lewis passed, I left Washington and moved to my mother’s farm in Edneyville, North Carolina, which — for those of you who don’t know — is the town next to Bat Cave and Chimney Rock. I had been working for many years to get my mother’s old farm back to being a farm. When Hurricane Helene hit in September 2024, and the day that the storm first started coming through, we had incredible flooding. And I thought, “Oh, yeah, they’re right. This is bad.” Not really understanding what was about to happen. That night, when the storm came through, it was just me and the dog in the house, and the dog was terrified because outside, you’re hearing all of this noise that isn’t just a usual storm, right? It sounds like there’s a train and it’s dark, so you can’t see it, so it’s like there’s a monster all around your house, and you don’t know what it’s going to do next. It was scary, because once the power went out, once the phones went down, you truly felt alone. Then that sets off what really became almost a month. There’s the first few days after, where we couldn’t get the word out. This storm really came into our view and the damage of it on Friday morning, and it wasn’t until Sunday night that we could even traverse our street to get towards town, and that was really when we started to understand the true scope of the damage.

Adams: You had the comics experience with former Congressman Lewis, and then you just went through this extreme experience with this storm. Walk me through how this idea formed in the wake of that.

Aydin: In those first few days after the storm, we were pitching in together in a way that looking back is — I think some of us actually experience a strange nostalgia for it, because no one asked what party you were a part of. No one asked who you voted for. No one cared if you were rich or poor, where you were from. It was, do you need help? Yes. What do you need? Water? Here’s a bottle. Fuel? Here’s a tank. A ride? Let’s go. It wasn’t what you would expect would happen, or at least what the movies told us happens when society’s fundamental glue comes apart. Without power, without internet, there was no way to use your credit card, so even if you could make it to the store, you couldn’t buy any supplies unless you had cash. For many people who tried to make it into town or into places where they could get food or water, they had run out of fuel, and their cars were abandoned on the side of the road. They were walking in a daze, and people were picking them up and helping them. 

But what I found then is that once I was finally able to get to a place where I could get on the internet, where I could read about what was being said, I found that a lot of what was being put out there was made up. It was people from outside of the region, people who did not live through the storm, who are not part of the recovery efforts and the sort of reestablishment of basic needs of the community we’re talking about, and saying things that just weren’t true. It was starting to become a political football. I got frustrated with that, and rather than be angry or let it fester, I started thinking, what can I do? And so, I started reading things about the history of the depiction of Appalachia in popular media, in the news.

I came across a graduate thesis written by a woman named Elon Justice, and it was published in 2021 called Hillbilly Talkback. And in her thesis, Elon talks about the long history of outsiders controlling the narrative for Appalachia and the depiction of it and how that gave them power over the region and allowed them to exploit the region. And then at the end, she proposes a solution, which is the co-authorship model. It was so eye-opening to me, because in many ways it was the same problem and the same solution that the Black community had faced for so long in their own ability to depict themselves, to tell their own stories. And at the same time, I’m thinking all these things, and I’m remembering that I started reading comics in Appalachia. It was my grandmother taking me to the Piggly Wiggly off Hendersonville Highway and buying me my first comic. Incidentally, that Piggly Wiggly is now closed, and that parking lot became one of the famous staging sites [during Hurricane Helene recovery]. It all started to come together in my mind about how to put this together. 

One, this was a symptom of a larger problem. The misinformation that went around about Helene is just part and parcel of the larger problem around Appalachia’s ability to tell its own story. And two, that comics could be a uniquely successful model for addressing this problem, because not only does the region love them, meaning they’re willing to engage with them in ways that they wouldn’t with other mediums, but also they’re cheaper to produce. I thought, I have been here before with a problem that needs solving, where comics could play a useful and helpful role in facilitating the solving of that problem. I know what it takes to start with an idea that most people don’t understand to bring about national acceptance, and then to use that to change the depiction of events.

March is now one of the most widely taught graphic novels in America. In many cases, these schools are embracing it as the book that they teach the civil rights movement with. Before that, there was something called the “nine-word problem,” where the Southern Poverty Law Center did a survey, and most students were graduating only knowing nine words about the Civil Rights movement. And we fixed that within 10 years with comics. So I took those lessons in my mind and those ideas, and then I was like, “Well, we’ll start a little Appalachia Comics Project.” So we tried to put together a plan for how we could fund the first work, which seemed essential: telling the true story of Hurricane Helene, putting together this co-authorship model where it would be our friends and colleagues in the industry helping the survivors tell their story. And I really believe, even in this first volume, we’re going to see people build writing careers, or at least successful bodies of work. This will go make a dent, make a contribution in helping people of the region and from the region be able to more successfully tell their story and speak for themselves. And that’s really where we started.

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Islands in the Sky is the forthcoming anthology from the Appalachia Comics Project.