Broken Frontier

Organized crime is everywhere, even on the Rez. Dashiell Bad Horse has returned to his home and its problems. Is he there to hurt his people or help?

Dashiell Bad Horse is a character you hate to love. In the first few pages of the first issue of his first comic he slings racial slurs at other Native Americans, gets into a bar fight, and joins up with a corrupt, evil man with delusions of grandeur. He even becomes a cop, which is a good sign that he isn’t a good guy. But nonetheless, you can’t help but like him, sympathize with him, empathize with him, and wonder what his true motivations are.

Jason Aaron is taking an old, clichéd story of the return of the prodigal son and turning it upside down. Instead of the noble return, Dash Bad Horse’s is a bit . . . bleak. Aaron’s protagonist’s story is revealed in snippets of conversation spanning from pages one through twenty-one. And quite the colorful story it is. Dash Bad Horse is the son of a political activist, a former runaway, and a well-known loser on the reservation who, upon his return, joins the local slimeball’s Tribal Police Force. Despite all these clear negatives, I like Bad Horse, I relate to the underdog, confused loner disillusioned with his culture, his family, and his society.

But that is just me. I too have cultural, societal, underdog, and loner issues I need to deal with so it eases the mind and soul to see another go through (symbolically at least) what I do. If you can’t relate to Aaron’s somber script and characters, however, Perhaps R. M. Guera’s art could entice you to check Scalped out. His gritty realism is sobering and a fine fit for a dark Vertigo comic. The downtrodden people, the ravaged reservation, and the palpable pain seething through every corner of Prairie Rose, South Dakota is all too clear in Guera’s descriptive, dark work. Engrossing, like a Salvador Dali painting, hard to look at, cold.

As with many tales about Native Americans in this century, Scalped is a sad one, difficult to read because it is so real. A society unaware of its own death is always terrible to look at. Dash Bad Horse is coming to this hard understanding in the pages of Scalped. At the end of issue #1 we are left wondering what he is going to do about it and when the next issue will come out.