Two hundred years ago, James Fenimore Cooper published The Last of the Mohicans. Its forests, pursuits and divided loyalties helped establish an enduring vocabulary for American adventure. Its Native characters also carried an enormous burden: they became symbols through which generations of readers understood Indigenous people. Courage, danger and the prospect of disappearance were written into a mythology that would travel far beyond Cooper’s pages.
On September 15, 2026, Mad Cave Studios publishes a book with a remarkably direct title: You Are On Native Land: A Charity Comic for Indigenous Rights. The 104-page anthology collects donated stories and artwork exploring resistance, family, kinship, love and grief. Its contributors include Jon Proudstar, Gord Hill, Steph Littlebird, Jackie Fawn, Jim Terry and Arihhonni “Honni” Cannon Clay David.
Placed beside the long history of frontier publishing, that title becomes an invitation to reconsider the reader’s position. The landscape has inhabitants, histories and relationships that continue beyond the last page of an adventure.
The country on the newsstand
By 1860, the frontier was becoming a portable commodity. Ann S. Stephens’s Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter launched Beadle’s dime-novel series, bringing a story of race, marriage and family into an inexpensive publishing format. Even its title is revealing: the Indigenous woman at its center is introduced through her relationship with a white man. Native people were deeply embedded in frontier fiction, although the terms of their appearance were generally established elsewhere.
The illustrated Western inherited the pleasures of this publishing world: danger, movement, exceptional individuals and the promise that another adventure waited beyond the horizon. When Stan Lee and Jack Kirby reinvented the Rawhide Kid in 1960, they gave the gunfighter the concentrated energy of modern comics. Kirby’s staging could turn an entrance, a confrontation or a change of viewing angle into an event. The frontier became a sequence of carefully controlled visual revelations.
There is considerable artistry in that inheritance. There are also assumptions worth examining. As historian Brian Dippie has argued, American popular culture repeatedly placed Indigenous people within a narrow collection of roles, including the admirable figure whose disappearance supposedly accompanied national progress. Sympathy could coexist quite comfortably with the expectation that Native life belonged to the past.
For contemporary Indigenous creators, the possibilities extend in every direction: historical research, intimate autobiography, political argument, fantasy, comedy and superheroes. Their work makes the old categories increasingly inadequate.
The comic that helped another artist begin
One of the anthology’s most meaningful inclusions is a reprint of Tribal Force #1. The property began in 1996 with writer Jon Proudstar and artist Ryan Huna Smith. The U.S. Copyright Office recognizes their original collaboration as America’s first comic featuring a team of Native American superheroes. That historical co-creator credit belongs to both men.
Its significance becomes especially clear through the experience of Diné artist Shaun Beyale.
Beyale has described encountering Tribal Force in a comics magazine and recognizing that Indigenous people were creating their own characters in a setting connected to the region where he grew up. Inspired, he developed a Native superhero team for a local comic-shop art competition. One character eventually became Ayla the Monster Slayer. A published comic had helped another artist imagine a career’s worth of possibilities.
That connection gives You Are On Native Land a history extending well beyond its publication date. A comic reaches a reader; the reader starts drawing; those drawings reach someone else. The medium renews itself through these intimate encounters.
Beyale’s later Diné Wonder Woman draws upon women he knew: a grandmother tending livestock, a mother whose beadwork helped support the household. Familiar superhero imagery acquires the clothing, jewelry and responsibilities of a specific community. Heroism becomes recognizable in the people around him.
Many ways of drawing a world
The new anthology’s variety is central to its appeal. Editor Sarah Brunstad describes a collection containing illustrated prose, poetry, short and longer comics, interviews, and both monochrome and full-color artwork. Its relationship with the Western therefore extends beyond genre. It brings different forms of authorship into a conversation about people and places that frontier entertainment has long claimed the authority to describe.
The contributors’ backgrounds explain something of that range.
Gord Hill developed his political art through solidarity organizing, posters and the anarchist punk scene. His influences include Jack Kirby, Bernie Wrightson and Alex Toth, alongside the documentary and activist comics of Joe Sacco and Seth Tobocman. There is a fascinating continuity here: an artist shaped by political resistance can study the same Kirby whose drawings helped energize the commercial Western. Visual techniques travel, gathering different purposes along the way.
Steph Littlebird brings another kind of training. A member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, she studied painting and printmaking at Pacific Northwest College of Art. Her work encompasses illustration, writing and curating, including This IS Kalapuyan Land, which placed contemporary Indigenous art alongside historical exhibition panels. Her practice raises a question relevant to every illustrated history: who makes the image, and who supplies the explanation beneath it?
Jackie Fawn’s images circulate through community organizing, education and environmental campaigns. A self-taught artist with Washoe, Yurok and Surigaonon heritage, she credits mentorship from artists Cy Wagoner and Martin Aranaydo. Her depictions of people defending land and community belong to a tradition of art intended for public use. A compelling image can be carried, displayed, reproduced and understood by people who may never enter a gallery.
Honni David offers an especially vivid connection between inherited stories and contemporary popular imagination. The Mohawk illustrator from Akwesasne grew up among storytellers while drawing dinosaurs, dragons and Star Wars imagery. He later earned a BFA in illustration from Syracuse University, with a minor in Indigenous Studies. His creative education joins family storytelling, formal study and a fascination with cinematic worlds.
For this anthology, David has described contributions that modernize Flying Head legends, imagining how young people would confront those frightening beings. The premise carries the excitement of adventure while allowing younger generations to inhabit stories passed down through their own communities. Folklore remains capable of surprise.
Jim Terry’s work takes readers into the equally demanding territory of memory. The Ho-Chunk cartoonist’s books include the memoir Come Home, Indio. His later Paper Cuts grew from a residency at Chicago’s Newberry Library, where encounters with archival material became part of the narrative itself. In his account, research involves fascination, distraction and the difficulty of discovering what a collection can reveal. The archive becomes a place where a living artist has questions to ask.
These are distinct artistic lives. Their differences give the anthology its potential richness. Readers can encounter the force of political illustration, the intimacy of personal history and the pleasures of imaginative storytelling within the same publication.
A story with consequences beyond the page
The collection also reaches into the systems through which culture survives. Brunstad’s interview with artist Roy Boney explores his work helping bring Cherokee-language support to iPhones. Another interview introduces Justin Cree and the Akwesasne Cultural Center. These subjects connect storytelling with everyday communication and the institutions that sustain a community’s cultural life.
The charitable purpose makes those connections tangible. Mad Cave states that all profits from the anthology will go to Not Our Native Daughters, a Native-led, survivor-led organization addressing the crisis of missing, murdered and exploited Indigenous women and girls. Its work includes education, advocacy and community empowerment. The distinction matters: the publisher’s commitment concerns profits, rather than the entire retail purchase price.
For an Americana audience, the book offers a rewarding way to approach cultural inheritance. The frontier novel and the Western comic remain part of the country’s imaginative history. Reading them alongside Indigenous-created work makes that history more legible, exposing its habits while opening space for other experiences, pleasures and ambitions.
Perhaps the most consequential word in You Are On Native Land is “are.”
It places the encounter in the present. There are people making art here, drawing on family memories, studying old masters, experimenting with technology and deciding what to create next.
The story continues in their hands.