Funding Friday, "Moonshot" - Comics & Crowdfunding News

Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection Vol. 1
Edited by Hope Nicholson

Hope is rapidly becoming the most cited person on this blog, which I suppose goes to show just how busy she's been this past year-and-a-bit. Having brought both Brok Windsor and Nelvana of the Northern Lights back to our bookshelves, Hope is building a reputation for being the go-to person for comics Canadiana and it makes perfect sense to me that she was the one Andy Stanleigh approached to edit Moonshot, Alternate History Comics' next cultural comics codex. Just this past year AH released another kickstarted anthology, The Jewish Comics Anthology, edited by Jewish librarian Steven Bergson, and hinting at what may become this publisher's modus operandi: collecting well-curated and respectfully presented collections of cultural stories as a literary window onto worlds which we as modern readers may not entirely understand.

Cover for Moonshot; original painting by Cree artist Stephen Gladue

For me, this respectful approach is one of the shining highlights of the Moonshot project. K.D. Callaghan's interview with Andy for PaperDroids.com directly addresses the issue that immediately struck me as the biggest problem a project such as this faces: cultural appropriation. Andy met the question head-on.

One of the biggest concerns when working with Indigenous stories and culture is that of cultural appropriation. You’ve noted that any traditional stories are being printed with the permission of the elders in their respective communities—a wonderful and respectful way to deal with this issue. Were there any other concerns around appropriation with this project? If so, how did you handle them?

There were definitely concerns about appropriation, and both Hope Nicholson and I are big comic book fans who have seen a lot of the character stereotypes out there. Even with the best of intentions, non-indigenous writers and/or artists can unwittingly cross that line from tradition to stereotype/appropriation. The way we’ve dealt with this is being extremely selective with which writers and artists we bring on board. The collection will be comprised of over 90% indigenous creators, who have all had a say in who they work with on MOONSHOT.  As well, the non-indigenous creators involved are all experts in the field who have a massive history of work in the community behind them, and are welcomed by the indigenous creators involved.

Now, that answer made me pretty damn happy, so when I got around to reading Hope's mission statement for Moonshot (as posted by Sequential), it was the icing on the cake.

1. Accuracy – No mish-mash of cultures or appropriation. (ie. If a traditional story is being relayed from a Metis culture, don’t have characters with Cherokee outfits).
2. Permission – a writer brought up that some stories are not meant to be told outside of the community. When in doubt in regards to the appropriate public telling of traditional stories, I’ve asked the writer to consult with an elder if possible. Google is a great place to start with research, but must be used judiciously.
3. No addiction or self-harm in the stories. Not because these issues aren’t important or relevant, but when you turn on the news and that’s the only representation you see, it becomes a biased view of what everyday culture is. I know there is a greater variety of stories that can be told.
4. Creators – Together, the publisher and I researched and found a great variety of artists and writers that identify as indigenous. Having stories told by members of the community, and to encourage young aspiring artists/writers is very important. It’s also important to me to prove that there is no excuse for a non-indigenous writer/artist to not create a complex indigenous character, and there are a few non-indigenous creators involved in this collection.
5. Romanticizing – Too often a writer will see old-fashioned stereotypes and go so far in the other direction that they end up doing the exact thing they wanted to avoid. Any reference to a brave, dying culture rings to me as an untruth and stories that portray this type of depiction are not included.

I think the second item on the list is crucial. I'm far from being an expert on First Nations culture and one of the least comfortable people when it comes to engaging in the seemingly tenuous relationship between the North American indigenous peoples and all us other folk who came from somewhere else. But the sentiment I am most familiar with, and which coincides with what Hope mentions in her blurb, is that these stories are not ours to tell. I can't even begin to elaborate on what all that issue entails, and I won't try, but I'll say that it seems to me the Moonshot project is going about this matter in all the right ways.

"Water Spirit" - Haiwei Hou

As mentioned in that fourth item on Hope's list, the project sports an impressive team of artists and writers.
Claude St-Aubin (R.E.B.E.L.S., Green Lantern, Captain Canuck)

Jeffery Veregge (G.I. Joe, Judge Dredd)

Stephen Gladue (MOONSHOT cover artist)

Haiwei Hou (Two Brothers)

Nicholas Burns (Arctic Comics, Curse of Chucky, Super Shamou)

Scott B. Henderson (Man to Man, Tales from Big Spirit)

Jon Proudstar (Tribal Force)

George Freeman (Captain Canuck, Aquaman, Batman)

Mark Shainblum (Northguard, Corum: The Bull and The Spear)

Elizabeth LaPensee (Survivance, The Nature of Snakes, Fala)

Buffy Sainte-Marie (Fire & Fleet & Candlelight, Coincidence & Likely Stories)

Richard Van Camp (Path of the Warrior, Kiss Me Deadly)

Ryan Huna Smith (Tribal Force)

David Robertson (The Evolution of Alice, Stone)

Steve Sanderson (Darkness Calls, Journey of the Healer)

Michael Yahgulanaas (RED)

Michael Sheyahshe (Native Americans in Comic Books, Dark Owl)

David Cutler (The Northern Guard)

...and more!

Stamps by Jeffery Veregge

The campaign is offering a slick-looking selection of backer awards, including a set of limited-run Canadian postage stamps, some artsy bookmarks (something which AH did for the Jewish anthology too, and are well worth the money), and an assortment of prints and digital options. No original art offerings have been posted yet, but there are some canvas prints for those so inclined. Great looking rewards. Oh, and you can get the book too. In case you were wondering.


Suffice it to say I'm hardly the only blogger out here chronicling cool comics crowdfunding campaigns (though I may be the only one obsessed with alliteration), and certainly not the only one following this project. There's a whole host of worthwhile interviews, ponderings, and reviews out around the web that you should take a gander at. And while you're out there exploring, read this thing on First Nations creation narratives that Rebecca Solnit just wrote for The New Yorker. It's pretty rad.

Paper Droids
Geek Hard
Sequential
The Beat
Digital Drum
They Stand on Guard
Pastrami Nation

New Websites and Research Plans

It was never my plan to abandon this blog and all you wonderful readers entirely, but unfortunately, that seems to have happened. I just don't have the time to maintain an online presence in five places at once, and this blog has been pushed to a back burner as I've focused on posting daily visual content to Off the Sketchpad. I don't know how many of you are following that blog. I bought a new domain and everything for the site, and now it's starting to feel like my internet home, at least more than it did. You can now visit the site, and keep tabs on my various projects, new pieces, and whatever beer I'm drinking as I read new additions to my bookshelf, at www.ajkomics.ca.

That's not the only new domain announcement I have! Clearly, I've been away far too long... Sacred & Sequential has launched our new website at www.sacredandsequential.org! We're all very excited about this. I had a draft blog post from way back when sitting, unfulfilled, that read,"even if the site doesn't look like much yet, we are developing more content" and now Voila! the site is full of content. A. David Lewis, the mastermind behind Sacred & Sequential, has done a superb job of gathering religion-and-comics-focused articles together into a formidable archive on the site. You can find all our stuff in one place: information on the ISIS death fatwa issued against The 99 creator Dr. Naif Al Mutawa; an interview with Dr. Christine Hoff Kraemer concerning Alan Moore's spiritual philosophy, her interactions with the famed comics writer and Magus, and the "gap in Moore scholarship"; and news on courses in the areas of religion and comics (preferably overlapping), such this one being offered by Dr. Jeffrey Brackett at Ball State University. All this and much, much more. Suffice it to say I have a lot of reading to do to get myself caught up.

In other news, I've pulled out of the 3rd global conference on The Graphic Novel at Oxford. Which is something I never thought I'd hear myself say, that I was letting go of the opportunity to present research at Oxford, yet here I am. It's the downside of being both a student and an independent scholar; when an $1100 conference opportunity comes your way, you either get a grant or you don't go. So that's a shame. BUT...the research planned for that project will continue, and will pick up speed when I return from my year abroad and can settle in again with proper resources and all of my Digital Humanities comrades here in Kelowna. For those of you in the dark, the plans to which I'm referring involve encoding Canadian "Golden Age" comics, the black & white classics known fondly as the "Canadian Whites", using John Walsh's Comic Book Markup Language. Initially, those plans involved only one title, cartoonist Adrian Dingle's Nelvana of the Northern Lights, recently collected and reprinted in a gorgeous hardcover volume by Canadian comics historians Rachel Richey and Hope Nicholson. Hope and Rachel were wonderfully supportive when I pitched them my idea back in March. Now, with Rachel working on a reprint of Johnny Canuck and Hope tackling the classic Brok Windsor, my idea is...evolving. I'm stepping away from it for about a year while I study in England, and you'll see a new and more fully developed iteration of it sometime down the road. So many ideas, so many grant applications to write...

I think that brings us at least somewhat up to date. I'll try not to be AFK for so long this time. I'm sure I can think of something else to write about. There's always something.

Cheers!
Asher

Day of DH 2014 - Notes from the Gutter

Well it's April 8th here on this fine planet of ours, and that means that it's the Day of Digital Humanities (or "DH" for short). I'm going to keep this short: you can follow my research progress on the other blog I'm running today, "Notes from the Gutter", as I use the Comic Book Markup Language, written by Indiana University's John Walsh, to encode a page of Nelvana Comics. I hope you'll take a minute to check out the work I'm doing, it's pretty cool stuff.

Cheers!
Asher

Cover for Adrian Dingle's Nelvana of the Northern Lights