Trickster: Native American Tales
Edited by Matt Dembicki
(Fulcrum Books, 2010)
496 pp., $27.95
By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives
By Spoon Jackson
and Judith Tannenbaum
(New Village Press, 2010)
200 pp., $24.95
Trickster grew out of a wonderful and slightly wild idea Matt Dembicki, a graphic novelist and comic book artist, came up with after discovering the range, breadth, and ingenuity of Native American tales. In particular, he fell in love with trickster tales and thought it would be wonderful to pair Native American traditional storytellers with graphic novelists and comic book artists. The result is a delightful, beautiful, rich book that contains 21 tales, each told by a different storyteller and illustrated by a different graphic artist. Amongst the tricksters are raven, rabbit, coyote, raccoon, and alligator; among the tribes represented are the Yup’ik, Cherokee, Choctaw, Penobscot, Creek, and Dine nations. Each tale is rendered in a different style, created through the collaboration between each specific artist and storyteller. I found the results amazing. Each tale comes alive as a complex linguistic-visual experience in which the words and the pictures simply cannot be separated.
For example, “Wolf and the Mink” is told by Elaine Grinnell, a S’klallam elder, and illustrated by graphic novelist Michelle Silva. The first page has a drawing of a mink thinking about how hungry he is. Below the title is a free-floating bubble in which the narrator says: “Well, hello there to everyone. What a story it is! Do you see yourself in this story? It’s about the wolf and the mink.” We are swept into the story, which ends with the narrator expressing the moral: “As the Kallams say, ‘I’tt I’kwan, I’tt I’kwan.’ That means, ‘If you snooze, you lose.’”