By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Arigon Starr remembers as a child going into a local store with her grandfather and he’s give her a dime to buy a comic book.
She loved comics, but she never saw people like her. Any indigenous people depicted were stereotypes. “I wanted to see somebody who was a nerd like me,” said during a talk last Saturday.
Now Starr is addressing that lack of representation as an illustrator, writer, and editor. Starr, an enrolled member of the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma, visited Bowling Green last weekend as a guest of the In the Round series, which features indigenous creators. She spoke the previous evening at the university, and then on Saturday (3-22-25)endeavors spoke at the Wood County District Public Library.
Starr said she is self-taught. She grew up in a Navy family, and lived in the Philippines for a period. Her parents, Starr said, encouraged her artistic endeavors, buying her all the art supplies she needed. She learned by copying other illustrators, and encouraged the aspiring artist to get out the tracing paper. Instead of going to college, she worked behind the scenes in the entertainment industry, until 1996 when she launched her full-time artistic career as a singer songwriter. That was the focus of her BGSU talk.
At the library, aside from a snippet of a plaintive song, she told of her journey as a literary creator.
That started when an agency reached out to her about acting. So she joined the union.
Then she was approached about contributing a script for a 10-minute audio play. Super Indian was born.
“It’s a crazy story about a reservation boy who eats tainted commodity cheese and gets super powers,” Starr said.
That evolved into a weekly web comic that’s still going online. The story moved to print form when she collected the strips and published on her own imprint Wacky/Rezium Studios. The third volume will be released in April.
Starr noted that drawing comics is a complex endeavor involving a number of separate skills. In the industry different craftspeople draw the images, do the shading, the coloring, and lettering the words that go into the bubbles.
She learned how to do those all jobs using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.
Later writer Traci Sorell, who was an In the Round guest last year, approached her after seeing drawings of the Los Angeles Dodgers Starr had produced as part of the Inktober challenge.
Sorell was interested in writing about two native baseball players who played in the 1911 World Series.
Charles Bender, a hard throwing pitcher for the Philadelphia A’s, and John Meyers, a hard-hitting catcher for the New York Giants literally faced each other.
Their story is told in “Contenders: Two Native Baseball Players, One World Series,” published in 2023 by Kokila, a Penguin imprint.
Starr also celebrates other heroes of indigenous lore — the Code Talkers.
These were indigenous soldiers who used native languages to confuse the enemy starting in France in World War I and continuing through the Vietnam War. They are usually associated with the Navajo tribal members in WWII, but other tribes, including the Kiowa, Comanche, and Choctaw as well as natives in Alaska who helped foil a plan to invade Alaska.
Starr edited tthe anthology “Tales of the Mighty Code Talkers,” as well as providing some text and illustrations.
That indigenous people should excel in comics should not come as a surprise. Starr noted that indigenous people have been using pictures in the form of pictographs to tell stories for thousands of years.
Super Indian is just the latest iteration of that tradition.
