Hard-boiled hurricane

“Write what you know,” the old adage goes. The thing is, that’s not much of a restriction for Mat Johnson. With a biography as interesting as his, any writer worth his salt could pick from a wide range of topics. One of Johnson’s quirkier areas of expertise: hurricanes.

He also knows a lot about race. (He was born to an African-American mom and an Irish-American dad.) And New Orleans. (He’s never lived there, but the roots of his maternal lineage stretch back to his great-great-grandfather, a former slave who became a free man in the city.) And comic books. (A lifelong fan of the art form, Johnson admits to spending $50 a week on comics.)

Which brings us, quite naturally, to Dark Rain (Vertigo, $24.99), a new graphic novel penned by Johnson—smart timing, given that this week marks the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Under the guise of a heist story in which two ex-cons plan to loot an abandoned bank during post-Katrina flood-induced chaos, Johnson spins a yarn that’s really about the multiple human failures that helped wreak such destruction upon the city in the wake of the crumbling levees.

The writer lives in Houston, which absorbed a vast number of Katrina refugees, and he has his own experience with evacuation, having fled at three in the morning with his wife and three kids when Hurricane Ike threatened Houston two years ago this month. “I ended up spending almost all of our savings at the time holed up in Austin,” for almost two weeks, he says. The only silver lining? He gained more experience that helped him develop Dark Rain.

A faculty member of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, Johnson has published works from nonfiction prose to comics. Among his earlier works are the novel Hunting in Harlem (where Johnson spent some formative years, after growing up in Philly and spending some undergrad time in the U.K.) and the graphic novel Incognegro, about a light-skinned black man who goes undercover as white to try to prevent a lynching in the Deep South of the early 20th century. As the issues exposed by Katrina kept roiling his creative juices, he knew how to write about them in order to put his ideas in front of a wider audience.

“I wanted to keep the spotlight on the larger situation in the Gulf—the economic situation,” he says. “If I write an essay, you know, 30 people will read it. You know, if even 100 people read it, they’re usually the people who already know all those things. If I write it as a novel, same thing: In black lit, it’s expected that you’re going to deal with those issues. But I was thinking, if I did a genre-based graphic novel, I could reach [new] people.”

Along with co-creator Simon Gane, a British artist who traveled to New Orleans to prepare for his work in Dark Rain, Johnson weaves a seemingly straightforward plot that grows more thematically complicated as the protagonists get in way over their heads, literally and figuratively. As the pair ford their way into a flooded city that everyone else is trying to escape, the comic slyly illuminates both well-known real-life horrors (the conditions at the convention center, where several people died) as well as less-publicized travesties, like an attempt by citizens to cross a bridge into the town of Gretna. They were met by white police officers who reportedly fired rifles and forced everyone back into New Orleans.

It’s a primary goal of his, to write great prose “that mixes in genre elements,” says Johnson. “In the 20th century, there ended up being this divide between what was a good read and what’s a good book,” he laments. “My goal as both a writer and a reader is to find books that really suck you in but also have substance.”

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