AN AMERICAN APOCALYPSE: THE RECKONING

Written by Bob Hagedorn

Art by Jay Peteranetz

I never thought I'd see a true Apocalyptic setting during my lifetime.  Then, I flew into New Orleans in February of 2006.  As we were landing, I looked out the window to see the worst devastation and destruction I had ever seen on American soil.  It was New Orleans, LA, AND it was six months after Hurricane Katrina had made landfall in the city.  The rebuilding still wasn't happening and the people of New Orleans had moved away, at least the ones that could.  The rest were trying to rebuild the pieces of their lives that were left and were struggling to do so.  That scene inspired me to write about this experience in New Orleans, and being a Colorado State Senator, I felt obliged to see the injustices done by the people in charge avenged.  So I came up with this story.  An American Apocalypse is my payback on behalf of the people of New Orleans who suffered under the watch of a police force that "wasn't going to lose control of the city," a mayor who turned the other cheek, a governor who dropped the ball big time, and the director of disaster relief who was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the destruction.

I was fortunate enough to find the artist of this book, Jay Peteranetz, through the Community College of Aurora.  Being a long-time college instructor, I looked at this as an opportunity to help an aspiring artist to get noticed and help build his or her career.  Jay Peteranetz was a first-year professor who recently received his MFA in Sequential Art, and was using his knowledge to pass along his passion for the medium to others.  His love of the medium, his style of storytelling, and his frustrations with the clean-up efforts of Katrina brought us together to create an intriguing and thought-provoking graphic novel that introduces a new breed of zombie that rights the wrongs of a corrupted government, and introduces us to the mysticism and mystique that is New Orleans, LA.  

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A Brief summary of the story follows:  

In the days following Hurricane Katrina, 25-year old TV reporter Cate Marchand receives a tip that a number of New Orleans police officers have gone missing.  While following up on the information, she witnesses the brutal killings of two cops and her camera-woman by a pair of "grotesque-looking" men dressed in 19th Century clothing.

Cate connects with a Native American professor of religious studies at a local university, Dr. David Velasquez, and learns that events in the aftermath of Katrina eerily parallel tragic events from a 1879 hurricane which hit New Orleans exactly 126 years earlier, on August 29, 1879.  And of a "Hoodoo" curse (think voodoo + Catholicism), suggesting a "day of reckoning" is facing the city.

What the reporter is not yet aware of is that she holds an ancestral secret which unknowingly makes her a part of the news she's covering.  The professor, who's also a tribal "medicine man" in his home state of New Mexico, has a secret as well, known only by an ageless Royal Street antique dealer in the French Quarter of New Orleans.  Together, Cate and David are caught-up in a macabre tale of Old Testament-like vengeance unfolding in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Blending fact, history and mysticism, "An American Apocalypse" is the response by the writer and artist to the widespread misfeasance and malfeasance that compounded the disaster of Hurricane Katrina.  Too often people with the blood of innocent victims on their hands are not held accountable for their actions, if not their sins, and escape the punishment they righteously deserve.  But not this time.

The "Hoodoo" zombies in "An American Apocalypse" are not the diseased, lumbering zombies we are more familiar with in current fiction.  Instead, they are vengeance-seeking creatures "reanimated" from the mortal remains of the victims from the 1879 hurricane, and are hellbent on revenge.  Except by their individual destruction, these zombies are not going to be stopped from fulfilling the 1879 curse.

"An American Apocalypse" is the first of a trilogy of graphic novels involving Cate and David:  Book One is about "the reckoning" soon to befall New Orleans; Book Two is "the awakening" of Cate; and Book Three is "the manifestation" of Cate and David's intertwined, blood-soaked destinies.  Stay updated here as well as at anamericanapocalypse.com