indigenous representation

The weekend is here! Take a look back at what’s happened in the past seven days. New comics, new stories, new podcasts, new art being made — it’s all part of the ComicsAlliance Weekender!

Following the huge success of Moonshot, the indigenous comics anthology, editor Hope Nicholson and publisher AH Comics announced a few weeks ago that they'd be bringing a sequel book to Kickstarter. Featuring stories by and about indigenous comics creators, the anthology collects comics from both new and established writers and artists, spreading their voice and stories around the world. With the campaign for the second Moonshot anthology now running on Kickstarter, Back Pages got in touch with Nicholson and contributors David Robertson, Elizabeth LaPensée and Richard Van Camp to find out what makes Moonshot such an important project, and what kind of stories they bring to the second volume.

With the recent beginning of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze’s Black Panther, and the ongoing success of non-white characters like Kamala Khan, Miles Morales and Sam Wilson at Marvel, the publisher is eager to present itself as a strong supporter of diversity. In fact, Ms. Marvel editor Sana Amanat appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers in January and met with President Barack Obama at a White House event in March in her role as the company's director of content and character development. Ironically, at the same time, I was considering dropping all the publisher’s books from my pull list entirely over the publisher’s current line-wide problems in the representation of indigenous people.

In February, Action Lab Entertainment's Voracious debuted under the tagline, "Top Chef meets Jurassic Park." Needless to say, we were intrigued. The series tells the story of chef Nate Willner revitalizing his career by using time travel technology he inherited from his uncle to cook and serve dinosaur meat in the present day, and it's been a success both for Action Lab and for indigenous representation in comics. ComicsAlliance talked with writer Markisan Naso and artist Jason Muhr about the book's influences, the research involved, and handling another culture's representation with care.

Captive of Friendly Cove by Rebecca Goldfield and Mike Short, published by Fulcrum, is a graphic novel based on the true story of British sailor John Jewitt, who lived as a captive of the Mowachaht people of Vancouver Island for three years at the start of the 19th century. The comic is largely inspired by, and draws upon, Jewitt's own memoirs of his captivity. ComicsAlliance’s James Leask and J. A. Micheline sat down for an in-depth discussion of the book's themes, its intended audience, its treatment of history, and its representation of First Nations people. Their conversation begins with a discussion of context, and the assumptions made by the comic.

This week saw the release of the second issue of Negative Space, the sci-fi horror comic from Dark Horse, which features art by Owen Gieni (Manifest Destiny, Shutter) and story by Ryan K. Lindsay (Headspace, CMYK). The book centers on Guy Harris, a suicidally depressed man who discovers that his own dark emotions are being harvested by a secret corporation. ComicsAlliance spoke with Lindsay about what inspired the book, how he layers on the horror, and why he chose to step outside of his own experiences to write Guy.

In 2014, Toronto publisher Alternate History Comics launched a Kickstarter for an anthology of indigenous comics, with the goal of “showcasing the rich heritage and identity of indigenous storytelling.” The resulting anthology, Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection, Volume 1, is now available, and it presents a unique and much needed look into aboriginal storytelling in multiple aspects. It’s easy, as an indigenous person, to slip into what sounds like hyperbole when discussing a project like this. This is one of the most important comics of the year! But it’s easy for the same reasons that make it hard for any statement to actually be that hyperbolic; the blunt reality of comics as a business and popular medium is that there really aren’t that many aboriginal stories being told, and what few aboriginal characters there are usually employ crude stereotypes. These stereotypes aren’t continued out of any real sense of hatred, but out of the almost complete lack of aboriginal people involved in the telling of these stories.