Cartoonist draws from his heart to tell a ‘Fire Story’
In the pre-dawn hours of Oct. 9, 2017, just after violently sprawling wildfires raced through Napa and Sonoma counties and yielded rush evacuations of tens of thousands of people, the house that Brian Fies shared with his wife, Karen, burned to the ground.
The couple escaped unharmed — physically, at least.
After corralling their pets and cramming everything else that would fit into their Prius, the Fieses fled their neighborhood, which was nestled along a creek that runs through the Mayacamas Mountains. From there, they stowed away at Karen’s office. As director of Sonoma County Human Services’ emergency response, she spent the next dozen-plus hours coordinating disaster plans for one of eight counties ravaged by fires that would destroy 8,900 structures and kill 44 people by the end of the year.
When the pair found shelter at the home of their grown twin daughters, Robin and Laura, they bought some essentials they hadn’t been able to pack. Brian picked up some bargain art supplies, and then the award-winning cartoonist and writer got to work on recording the week’s harrowing events as best he knew how: in comics. “On Monday, my house disappeared,” begins the 18-page comic drawn and hand-lettered by Fies over four days that October. He hastily chronicled the couple’s losing their home to wildfires in spare, somewhat smudgy but deftly composed panels. Swathes of orange highlighter sporadically breached border framing lines and flooded the backgrounds, harking back to the raging firestorm that rendered the sky oven-element orange and swallowed up the street they lived on.
Despite Fies’ disclaimer that the comic wasn’t up to his “usual standards” when he posted JPGs of the new strip on his blog, his work went viral, just as his Eisner Award-winning graphic memoir webcomic, “Mom’s Cancer,” had in 2004. Navigating attention from local TV teams and huge media organizations wasn’t easy for the artist, specifically after having just lost nearly everything he’d ever owned.
“Although this Fire Story is a graphic memoir, it isn’t just my story,” writes Fies. “It’s the story of thousands of people who lost everything, and hundreds of thousands who were affected less directly but still traumatically. Compared to the enormity of that universal experience, my particular unique situation was irrelevant.”