Graphic Novels

"The primary focus of this annotated bibliography is comics by self-identified Indigenous creators and publishers working in Canada and the United States, although where possible we have included Indigenous comics from outside North America. We have attempted to include as many titles as possible until March 2019, but this will always be an incomplete list and we regret any omissions or oversights. We regard this annotated bibliography as a preliminary work and hope it can serve as the basis for more in-depth work in the expanding field of Indigenous comics and graphic novels."

This article surveys Indigenous graphic novels created between the year 2000 and 2017 and identifies some trends in the corpus. Because information is still scarce on this subject, three Indigenous creators were interviewed for this article: Jason EagleSpeaker, David Alexander Robertson and Sean Muir. After discussing the inadequacy of the term 'Canadian' to qualify the nationality of Indigenous creators, a chronological inventory of Indigenous graphic novels reveals that only two were published before the year 2000 and that the production really started in 2008. Indigenous publishers are also surveyed. Among the most important trends in the corpus, there seems to be an overarching purpose of education in Indigenous graphic novels. There is also a desire to rewrite history with an Indigenous perspective, as well as a strong wish to show that Indigenous culture is alive today and not a remnant of the past. Indigenous creators are also using the medium of the graphic novel to express their Indigenous identity while making their voice heard to a public as wide as possible

"In this paper, I examine select graphic novels that narrativise intersecting histories by artists who possess distinct social positionalities and subjectivities. The first is Luke W Molver's two-part graphic novel about King Shaka, Shaka Rising: A Legend of the Warrior Prince (2017) and King Shaka: Zulu Legend (2019). This epic illustrates King Shaka's rise to power and his unmatched conquering pursuits that helped form the Zulu Kingdom. The second case study is Zinhle (Zhi) Zulu's--hereafter Zhi Zulu--part-historical, part-futuristic graphic novel The Spiritual Adventures of Nandipha: Protector of the Zulu Kingdom (2019), which visually narrates the story of Nandipha, a superhero whose identity is inspired by King Shaka's mother, Nandipha, and the influential women in Zhi Zulu's life. I am specifically interested in how the positionalities of these two comic artists Molver, a white man, on the one hand and on the other, Zhi Zulu, a black woman--influence their artistic approach, narrative arc, content selection, stylistics and overall treatment of indigenous Zulu histories. Using the notion of pluri- or multi-histories, I argue that these distinct but convergent comic book explorations of the interlinked lives of King Shaka and Nandipha are poignant artistic exemplars of how indigenous histories should always be retold in the plural."

When Indigenous artists and writers entered the graphic novel genre, they opened up the world of ancient tribal tales, traditions, and customs to a new generation of readers, thus allowing the past to relay important cultural knowledge to our youth while Indigenizing a Western-dominated art form. In this paper, I seek to contribute to the dialogue about Indigenous concepts of space, time, and the oral tradition, to include present and future iterations of our knowledge systems in Indigenous sci-fi and speculative storytelling graphic novels. I contend that Indigenous artists are reimagining an older pictorial tradition that relayed cultural ways of knowing the stars and the universe to our youth, and charting new ways forward by connecting the past to present in the process. These specific genres 'retell' and 're-understand' traditional narratives with culturally grounded speculation about Indigenous futures and space, revealing a persistent cultural continuity that is deeply connected to our traditional terrains in fluid and exciting forms of artistic expression. I argue that Indigenous science fiction can, and does, critique and resist the continuation of settler-colonial endeavors by exploring and re-indigenizing a space that we have always been connected to, but is also customarily part of the settler frontier narrative in this genre.