An Introduction to Native American Comics

Your new binge-reads

 Some comic book shoppers can have store employees pull titles the customer regularly reads and hold them until the shopper comes to the store to pick up their books. I used to do this when I lived closer to a comic book store and could readily stop there to bring home my stack of stories. This service makes shopping easier because customers like me don’t have to hunt around for the latest issues we’re reading and risk the sad discovery the one issue we need is sold out, leaving us with a gap in our story arcs. But if we only go to the store to pick up our holdings and we don’t take the time to browse, we might not discover titles, authors, anthologies, and other texts that are interesting and wonderful. Now, personally, I don’t know anyone who goes straight to counter to pick up their monthly pulls and who doesn’t take the time to browse (do such people even exist?), but even the most diligent shopper might have trouble discovering a great array of graphic narratives written, illustrated, or published by First Nations/Native American authors. In this post, I’d like to introduce you to a few titles and an online store where you could purchase some of these titles if you’re intrigued.

Michael Sheyahshe’s Native Americans in Comic Books is a great academic starting point. In this text, Sheyahshe traces the history of depictions of Native Americans in the comics medium across decades. He does so to show the progression in these portrayals, from the terribly stereotypical to the heroic. It’s helpful, but not necessary, to have this grounding in order to appreciate the many new titles, authors, illustrators and heroes today’s First Nations and Native American creators are generating.

One fun series is Arigon Starr’s Super Indian. This title is full of humor that will appeal to adults and children alike. Character Hubert Logan becomes Super Indian after he eats government commodity cheese tainted with “rezium,” which grants him superpowers. He, his friends, and his dog, Diogi (who also ate the tainted cheese) team up to fight villains such as Blud Kwan’tum and Wampum Baggs. You can enjoy some of Starr’s other artwork on the Pop Culture Classroom website, where she contributes educational comics to its Colorful History collection on Native American issues like the Ludlow Creek Massacre and Chief Ouray’s leadership.

Marvel Comics offers titles that highlight Native American characters and creators with its Indigenous Voices and Heritage collections. These two video trailers provide an overview of the the characters as well as the writers and illustrators in the collections, along with their tribal identity. Although comics and graphic narratives by and about Native Americans is a booming industry lately, it’s still a somewhat small creative world. In the Marvel collections and elsewhere, you will see many names repeatedly: Starr, of course, and Darcie Little Badger, Stephen Graham Jones, Rebecca Roanhorse, Roy Boney, Jr., Weshoyot Alvitre, Jeffrey Veregge and Elizabeth La Pensée, to name a few. Most of these creators have written their own books or contributed to other anthologies besides the Marvel collections, like Alternate History’s Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collections 1-3. Either the Marvel collections or the gorgeously illustrated and printed Moonshots will introduce you to writers and artists you might want to follow up on separately later.

Some of these authors or texts might be hard to locate in traditional bookstores or even in online sources like Amazon. I used to shop these titles (and shamelessly browse) a store called Red Planet Books and Comics when it operated in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It has since moved to North Carolina and rebranded itself as ATCG (“A Tribe Called Geek”) Books and Comics. While its brick-and-mortar storefront is not yet open, its online inventory is still available for sale on its website. Owned by writer, illustrator, and entrepreneur Dr. Lee Francis, ATCG offers a range of comic books you won’t find elsewhere.

I hope you enjoy these new collections and characters. Some of the best storytelling today appears in First Nation/Native American comic books and graphic narratives. Be sure to browse these links to discover your new binge-reads.

For additional reading, see this Library of Congress blog post, entitled “Native American and Indigenous News and Comics.”

See also: Comics Bookcase, “Comics by Indigenous Creators: A Reading List,” at https://www.comicsbookcase.com/reading-lists-archive/comics-by-indigenous-creators

This is a trailer for Kagagi: The Raven, an animated series that ran in Canada.