Balancing Creativity and Coping: How Comic Art Reveals Challenges for the Survivor-Folklorist

Comics can be an important and overlooked transmitter of folk culture through documentation of everyday practices and experiences. As comics have often been a way of telling survivor stories, it is possible to look at how informal comic-making not only plays a role in presenting survivor testimony but also makes for a fuller form of ethnographic and autoethnographic documentation. In this comics-form contribution, I will address how my role as a tradition bearer of a family comic art practice was combined with an ethnographic research background in 2020 to create Derecho Days, a series of daily comic panels about life in the wake of the catastrophic derecho in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. This piece strives to demonstrate the challenges that survivor-folklorists may face when determining what, when, and how to document their experiences.