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The school year is over in Juneau, but some students are still hard at work. During Celebration last week, the Tlingit Culture, Language and Literacy program unveiled a Lingít comic book that brings popular graphic novel characters to Juneau.
Students, parents and community members line up behind a table filled with stacks of glossy, pastel colored comic books. Next to the table, professional graphic novel artist Dimi Macheras signs the inside cover of books for people in line.
He’s soon joined by student artists including Lauren Nease, a rising fourth grader at Juneau’s Tlingit Culture, Language and Literacy program, or TCLL. She said it’s fun to sign books, even if she gets a little scared.
“Sometimes you don’t know that person, but it’s really fun to do it for someone,” she said.
She’s glad to share the comic with people.
“It feels great, because if everybody gets to read it, it makes me happy.”
“Naakéedáx̱ Haa X̱oonx’í Yán,” the title of the comic, translates to “All of our friends from the North” from Lingít. It’s a comic book created by students, teachers, elders and an alumnus of the school. It features characters from Chickaloonies, a graphic novel series following two Alaska Native friends as they become storytellers.
In the comic, the characters go to Juneau and explore the Mendenhall Glacier, downtown and Harborview Elementary School. Along the way, they meet characters created by Juneau’s TCLL students.
Some of those characters include Jimmy the Raven and Chad the Chickadee. Incoming seventh grader Jolie Elisoff said their names come from a couple of her nicknames.
“For Halloween, I’m Chad every year because it’s like a thing now, and I suggested Chad, and the whole class just kept on saying Chad,” she said. “So and then someone said ‘Jimmy,’ and then we just stuck with Jimmy.”
Jolie said the names were her favorite part of the comic project. It also taught her a lot too.
“I learned that you can make like almost anything with your ideas,” she said.
Macheras is the co-creator of Chickaloonies and worked with students on the project. He said they work with schools across the state to create characters, but they were able to do more this time.
“We were able to take the characters we made with the students and kind of tie them together into a narrative together where the students themselves become characters,” he said. “It’s a very meta ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ kind of book, and I’m really proud of it.”
Macheras said he and fellow Chickaloonies co-creator Casey Silver did about half of the artwork in the comic. TCLL alum Micheel Martin did the other half and brought the student’s characters to life. Macheras, who is Athabascan, said it was a great way to bring his culture to Juneau and show how different cultures can come together through storytelling.
“Kids are just inherently amazing storytellers, and it’s kind of like we’ve found this lane where our job is to kind of bring their ideas to life and just show them and reaffirm to them that their ideas, their creativity is special and that they are truly storytellers and that they should follow a path of sharing their stories.” Macheras said.
Nae Tumuluk is a language teacher at the school and translated the comic into Lingít. She said there were moments where she would lean on elders and her colleagues to help figure out how to translate things in a comic book.
“My kids love comics, and so they’re, they’re well versed in it. I bet maybe they could have translated it a lot faster than I did, but it was just a first for me to even think about how to write a comic,” She said.
Tumuluk said it’s important for students to have these opportunities.
“They work so hard learning our language and our culture, and when they get to laugh and have fun and have a product at the end that reflects them, I think that is a really important thing for our kids to see themselves in the books that they like to read,” She said.
Students at the event got free copies of the comic, and they will be used in the classroom in future school years.
