More Fun Comics: An Animated History

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University of New Orleans 2010 History MA graduate Laurel Dorrance created a cartoon-style history of Oak Street's Comic Book Shop for the 2009 Po-Boy Fest History Center. The following is her overview of the project.

I first conducted interviews with More Fun Comic Shop owner Steve H Thomas and manager DC Harbold. Next, I wrote a narrative, illustrated using photos and artwork. Steve and DC's homes, along with their belongings (including photos), had been destroyed in Hurricane Katrina, so there was little left to work with. It was necessary to stage "recreations." These stagings were guided by the interviews themselves.

The title page, photo frames, and text were designed and illustrated by New Orleans comic book artist Caesar Meadows, who draws Mumbeaux Gumbo for Where Y'at magazine and Qomix for Anti-Gravity magazine. In illustrating the piece, he used a style called "Fumetti," which is characterized by an approach that combines photographic elements with hand-drawn illustrations. Arriving in the United States as part of the web comics movement of the late 1980s and 1990s, this genre has slowly gained in both legitimacy and popularity.

This visual history was created as part of the University of New Orleans' Carrollton History Project. It later was included as part of UNO's poster session at the National Council on Public History 2010 conference in Portland, Oregon. UNO's History Department awarded this project the Public History Award for 2010.

Assembled in neworleanshistorical.org by Brandon Keene and Lacar Musgrove.