The sewer district with a famous sense of humor turns to an old-school format for a fresh take on the life-giving resource we all love.

We Clevelanders take a lot of guff, but we’re also tough. We’ve learned that a heaping side order of humor is in order when the chips are down or, in this case, when the unmentionables flush down. Hence when the entity managing our humble underground sewer pipes went from a “local celebrity of sorts” to garnering national attention (courtesy of sites such as Government Technology no less) for being the Twitter/X feed to follow, a pride bloomed among those of us in the 216 who notice such things. For the hardcore infrastructure nerds, we were downright giddy. It even made some of us cry.

For its next act, the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (NEORSD) is turning to a different sort of media—one as deeply rooted in our culture as the Man of Steel: classic comics. It’s a tall order, but this organization is up to it and then some. After all, the District treats about 200 million gallons of water every day for more than one million residents in cities from Olmstead Township to Moreland Hills and as far south as Hudson. And while they’ve got the STEM crowd covered, and the friendly Wally Waterdrop to interface with the grade school contingent, the NEORSD’s outreach department decided it was high time to target middle schoolers with a campaign that speaks their language.

“With the high school students and beyond, we have the specific concepts of chemistry, biology, engineering … lots of programs to touch that age demographic,” says Danny Neelon, Strategic Partnership Lead for NEORSD. “But in the middle, we were kind of missing that piece of engagement to get kids really thinking about what aspects of our work are relatable to them,” he says, adding that the usual informational handouts don’t always cut it with this audience. “It has to be heavy on graphics and high on accessibility.”

Mike Uva, the District’s Communications Production Lead, was tasked with the job of realizing new material for the tween contingent. “I reached out to LAND studio to help with a short list of names that they thought might be good for this kind of thing,” says Uva of his quest for comic creators. “I was looking for an artist to kind of emulate that classic style of a DC/Marvel comic.”

The successful candidates, adds Neelon, had to mind the District’s sensitivity to equity and inclusion as well as Cleveland’s history. “It was important for us to have local artists that could help us tell that story.”

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Enter a homegrown dynamic duo like no other. While they were both born and raised here on the North Coast and have an artistic bent with a keen eye for education, whether or not they wear capes by night is anybody’s guess.

The intrepid Masta8, (muggle alias: Miguel C. Hernandez) was a member of the DC Comics Class of 2022 Milestone Initiative. He’s also an adjunct professor teaching illustration at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

“I did a lot of reading from comic books as a kid,” says Hernandez, adding that he preferred those signature pulpy pages—particularly the Batman universe—over normy school offerings. He jumped at the opportunity to meld the world of comics with his profession. “Anytime you have an educational unit like a comic book to teach children, I think it’s a better way to draw them in. [Comics] really do pull you in with the story and the characters.”

Joe Sieracki, a mild-mannered high school science teacher in one incarnation and an edgy comic book author in another, is crafting the words and stories to accompany Hernandez’s artwork.

“I’ve always believed that comics are completely underutilized when it comes to educational purposes,” says Sieracki. “When you are reading prose or any sort of plain text, you have more of a passive role, whereas when you’re engaging in pictures and words from panel to panel—you’re filling in the story as it goes. Because of that,” adds the father of two, “you are actively engaged in that content.”

Hernandez, a father of five, also knows a thing or two when it comes to teaching. “I used to be a preschool teacher for ten years. With preschoolers, you only get like ten minutes,” he notes of pint-sized attention spans, “so I understand the value of trying to make something cool to make it more understandable,” he says, particularly if it’s something they’d normally find mundane. Comics, he adds, make almost anything more exciting—even sewers. “It’s kind of cool to be able to show the inner workings of them in an interesting way.”

After the requisite paperwork was complete, the two hunkered down and fired up. When the smoke cleared, a league of super heroes like no other was born: The invisible Vis, the shrinking Doctor Tau, and Carl the Cuyahoga Creature wage a never-ending fight to keep our most prized resource, Lake Erie and its systems, clean and free flowing. They team up with Spectra as she commands mystical energies, and Botanica, who filters out nefarious pollutants. Overwatch, the mechanical eagle, and Rover, the robotic pup, round out the crew.

Lastly, the friendly giant Mackenzie (pronouns they/them, thank-you-very-much) leads this fearless pack. The colossal bore-bot came into sentience when a cosmic power surge coursed through a massive tunnel-boring machine. What makes them special? Mackenzie bores relentlessly through earth and rock hundreds of feet below ground. They never stop—unless it’s to save a squirrel so small, it’s barely a dot on their enormous mechanical palm.

“Don’t worry, little guy,” they tell the tiny critter in one draft strip. “I got you!”

The jaw-dropping behemoth that inspired Mackenzie—an actual tunnel-boring machine—is a force to behold, with a cutter head that looks like it spun right off a whirling amusement park ride, but is in fact a meticulously engineered 300,000-pound earth-boring beast. Over the past two years, it’s chewed through 14,000 feet of earth, mining the 23-foot diameter Shoreline Storage Tunnel that will eventually reduce Lake Erie pollution by 350 million gallons a year when finished in late 2025. This is the fifth of seven massive storage tunnel projects that will make the long-term Project Clean Lake a reality.

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So Superman was born here, and a league of heroic sewer champs are about to make the scene, but the NEORSD also helped forge a little-known link in between. The 2014 film Captain America: The Winter Soldierincluded scenes filmed at the District’s Southerly plant and Lakeview Dam. Several of the stars, including Samuel L. Jackson and Chris Evans, left their signatures on underground walls to preserve proof of the legend for years to come.

Will Hernandez and Sieracki find a way to weave that obscure detail into a panel of their forthcoming super hero comic story? Maybe there’s a butler named Alfred who knows for sure, but the rest of us will just have to wait.

Until then, Mackenzie & Co. are laser-focused on keeping Lake Erie and its tributaries clean. And while details are still in development, villains our heroes might encounter include menacing evildoers such as The Wipe, the dreaded Fatberg, the sinister Runoff, or—heaven help us—the Dumper and his illicit discharges.

It all adds up to an imperative message for kids, and one Hernandez and Sieracki are happy to deliver.

“It’s given me a greater appreciation for our Great Lake as a natural resource of clean water, how valuable it is to this community, and how it is our responsibility to be good stewards of that water and to ensure it continues to be there for generations to come,” says Sieracki, who grew up in Mentor.

“At some point as a Clevelander, you either did something by the lake or with the lake; you did something pertaining to the lake,” says Hernandez, recalling watching air shows from East 9th Street as a kid. (His dad was an architect at Osborn Engineering, hence, “I was always in that vicinity.”) These days, he takes in the Blue Angels at Edgewater Park with his own children on Labor Day weekend.

“My kids marvel at the lake,” says Hernandez. “My daughter is four. She thinks it’s the ocean,” he adds, laughing.

“It goes as far as you can see,” says Sieracki, recalling his own young daughter’s first observation of Lake Erie. “As far as she knows, it goes forever.”

In a sense, it truly does and both dads want that water to be clean for their kids, their grandkids, and beyond. And these creators are happy to use their talents to achieve that goal.

“If [this project] helps kids learn to protect the environment, and gets them to think about what they’re doing with something as simple as flushing the toilet, and to think about runoff and chemicals, if it makes this a better place, I’m all for it.”

Sieracki nods in agreement. “Lake Erie itself is a tremendous asset to our community and it’s so important to work to protect that.”

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As for the league’s debut, four initial story lines will launch this fall in a digital format, with a sixteen-to twenty-page hardcopy comic book soon to follow. The characters will also be featured on posters or fun tchotchke-style handouts (such as stickers) at the District’s annual Clean Water Fest, to be held on Saturday, September 21, at the Southerly Treatment Plant, 4747 East 49th Street in Cuyahoga Heights.

However powerful the super heroes are on the page, the dynamic driving their creation echoes how the NEORSD approaches all of its outreach, which means with an authentic human touch. Be that connecting via a deep-dive podcast, a rock star of a post, or, in this case, a comic book, it’s a consistent message that must be tailored again and again in order to reach an incredibly diverse group of people who, despite their differences, all have one thing in common: our infrastructure.

“We want to make sure we’re getting the message across and that it’s grounded in reality,” says Danny Neelon. “All of the comic book characters are really reflections of real employees and real jobs that we have at the sewer district.” The connection goes deeper still. “When we think about being customer focused and customer minded, we’re not just the ‘sewer’ people, we are all residents and many of our employees are also customers.” The revelation sheds light on the impetus of the comic campaign, because while much of the District’s outreach focuses on the science of water and infrastructure stewardship, its customers are all ages and come from all walks of life.

“This is really a concerted effort to make sure our work, our mission, and our values are accessible to all rate payers,” says Neelon, stressing the importance of outreach to those who don’t normally think about the technical aspect of water quality. “We want folks to feel like they see themselves in our work, that we’re thinking about them and that we’re trying to connect with them.”

“We don’t get a lot of opportunity to collaborate with the art community,” adds Mike Uva, “so this one’s kind of special.”