You Should Know Better

Giving Comics Back to the Kids

Journey Into Mohawk Country is the story of the development of Manhattan told through the diary of a Dutch trader working his way through New Amsterdam in 1634 to discover why beaver skin trading has slowed.

I know!  Exciting, right?

This is by no means a remarkable comic.  But I want to look at it as an experiment on successful historical exhibition.  Here’s a diary, obscured by the dust of four-centuries, brushed off and set to colorful pictures to give a hard-to-ignore account of what life in early developing countries was really like; to feel the tensions between early Native American land and the colonist’s insatiable hunger for mythological American riches.

Coming from a kid who got a ‘1′ on his history AP in high school, I think I can safely say what makes kids glaze over.  Mind-numbing lists of dates, which King decreed which laws and what parliament had to say about it, tariffs . . . the problem with these details is there’s nothing to latch onto, nothing to make you feel a part of the story.  Why not teach history through pictures?  It worked for the Egyptians and the Native Americans.  We’ve got to shake off this idea that something is dumbed down because it’s graphically presented.  I know plenty of people who reference Hollywood as their historical source, a medium universally known for sensationalism and tweaking of facts to increase blockbuster numbers.  I think comic artists are innate perfectionists (they’re certainly not in it for the money), and in O’Connor’s case particularly I trust him implicitly with factual content.

The landscapes, buildings, and costuming painted through Journey are incredibly well-researched, recreating traditional Indian carvings, log-built castles, and tri-colored palisade graves to cartoonish exactitude.  The most interesting moments to me were to watch some of the Mohawk tribe’s rituals, such as standing over the mortally ill, sliding an arm-length pole down their throats until it completely disappeared, and then pulling it back up to throw up all over the prostrate man.  (This practice is never explained, though I assume it’s a sort of purging and sharing of the spirit, that the ill person might absorb some of the life juice of the healthy.)

O’Conner takes some liberties, adding exclusively graphic subplots where the Dutchman Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert’s two companions are shoving each other in the water or feeding a trapped grizzly bear their hats, elements that probably won’t legitimize comics as a valid form of education any time soon.  But it’s a small price to pay for a subject usually lost in the droop and fog of heavy academia.

-CMH

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under All Comics, Rez Sick. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.