Trickster Treat: Ancient Tales in Modern Comix

Last month, the American Library Association honored Seattle artist Dimi Macheras, Sequim storyteller Elaine Grinnell, an elder of the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe, and forty other coauthors of the new graphic novel Trickster: Native American Tales. “It gave me the chance to illustrate traditional Native stories similar to ones my grandmother passed down,” says Macheras, a member of Alaska’s Chikaloon tribe. He illustrates the story “Ishjinki and Buzzard,” which explains how trickery wound up making buzzards bald. Grinnell’s contribution is a story that tells how the wolf tricked the mink into falling asleep in order to seize mink’s dinner. The lesson? “I’tt i’kwan, I’tt i’kwan [You snooze, you lose].”

“She recited the story to me over the phone,” says editor Matt Dembicki, “and I wrote it down. She felt most comfortable doing it orally, so I captured it that way.” The collection of twenty-one stories captured from all over the nation was almost published by National Geographic, until the recession killed its kids’ books division. Other publishers told Dembicki, “We aren’t buying anything.” At last, it was picked up by the ideal publisher, First American-friendly Fulcrum in Colorado. This month’s ALA convention will help determine Trickster’s commercial fate.

Trickster will also preserve the oral tradition in a technological age. Macheras roughed out his strip in pencil, then finished it on a twenty-one-inch Wacom Cintiq touch-screen tablet. Now he’s working with an Alaskan playwright on a similar 2-D project as well as attempting the leap to 3-D technology, hoping to break into the local video game business. By looking to the future, he helps save his people’s past. “Merging the Western storytelling format with such an old lineage of stories could help get kids interested at a young age,” says Macheras. “Because nobody’s going to sit around a campfire nowadays and listen to an elder tell a story.” •