Jason Aaron’s “Scalped,” among the last decade’s most immersive long-form works of comic fiction, is also one of the most troubling for me. I also think it’s one of the most important. What begins as a pulpy noir set in South Dakota Indian country becomes a multi-dimensional and layered epic of interlocking lives. As (I humbly submit) American comics enters its “Spectrum Age,” where diversity moves from the margins to center stage, the issues raised by Aaron’s absorbing and masterfully-told tale, issues of race and place, of representation and narrative, warrant serious consideration.

Vertigo just began reprinting Deluxe Editions of “Scalped”, Aaron’s early opus, in keeping with its publication pattern for titles like “Fables” and “Y the Last Man”: monthlies, trades, and now handsome, hefty hard-bounds. The endorsements on the first volume’s cover, echoing many critical plaudits, compare the work to landmark HBO shows like The Wire and Deadwood. I think the comparison is apt, not just because I mainlined the ten trade paperbacks of Scalped with the same amphetamine ferocity as I did those TV shows. Like David Milch’s Deadwood, David Chase’s Sopranos, and David Simon’s The Wire, Aaron and primary artist RM Guera produced the kind of sprawling saga in serialized form that manages both a vast breadth of canvas and a humanizing level of character detail. And like those shows’ familiar genre tropes — Western, gangster, crime-procedural, and in the case of “Scalped,” Western/gangster/crime-procedural/noir — are leveraged in the service of layered narratives of complex individuals within distinctive social systems. Plus, fodder for over-thinkers aside, they’re totally engrossing stories; affecting, gripping and compulsive.

I find the Wire comparison most apropos. Simon’s TV masterpiece blessed us with a city populated by searingly memorable characters (for Wire-watchers, witness the flash floods of fondness as I name them: Bunk, McNulty, Kima, Stringer, Bubbles, Omar, Snoop…), but each acting against the backdrop of an organic and interacting network of social strata, from the cops to the projects, the docks to downtown. One can argue that The Wire’s main character is Baltimore, living and breathing and irrepressibly fraught. And while “Scalped” follows a central protagonist, Dashielle Bad Horse, the book’s sixty issue run queues up so many deliberate diversions with its supporting cast that Dash sometimes recedes into merely a yeoman for plot progression. Instead, along its sixty issues, “the Rez” becomes Aaron’s subject. Like Avon Barksdale, Red Crow is a crime lord radiating the polarities of magnetic power and repulsive brutality. In “Scalped,” Carol is initially a flattened genre fixture, a femme fatale, but she acquires stirring dimensionality in the course of the story, as with Wire characters like Bodie and Pryzbylewski. Even antagonists, like tumors-in-the-power-structure Nitz (“Scalped”) or Rawls (The Wire), get some human backstories.

But I think that beyond complex characterization, Aaron achieves something more. Something else that makes The Wire a fair parallel, but also earns “Scalped” the “troubling” label I pinned on it earlier. Aaron’s and Simon’s stories are both sagas of very specific settings, geographies and demographies one could drive to (or past), locate on a map, where you or someone you know might come from. Simon’s Baltimore and Aaron’s fictive Prairie Rose Reservation of South Dakota are representations of living places, real-life (or semi-real) locations with accrued histories reflected in the characters’ conflicts and circumstances. More to the point, they are largely depictions of American communities of color, not in an isolated microscopic gaze, but embedded in the larger context of US and Tribal institutions and politics. Other comics of this size and scope, like the aforementioned “Y the Last Man” and “Fables,” or “Astro City” and “Saga,” often rely on the distancing (though not necessarily less potent) effect of superhero/sci-fi/fantasy metaphor or dystopian speculation. In contrast, “Scalped” keeps it real: it seethes with the pavement, brick, and dust of harsh economic realities, legacies of oppression and resistance, specters of addiction, casino capital, property struggles, and the hardscrabble survivance of many Native American tribes.

Comics needs stories like this. Stories combining the boots-on-the-ground exploration of places you find in comics journalism (the Joe Saccos and Guy Delisles), the crackling and vivid stagecraft of long-running character stories (the Terry Moores and the Bros Hernandezes), and the non-didactic layer of social relevance that lurks behind crafty remixes of genre (the Kelly Sue DeConnicks and the Alan Moores). And to accomplish all of that, I hasten to add, we need the length of story that “Scalped” achieves, ten arcs long, a protraction that is increasingly rare in the market. Without it, “the Rez” would be simply another encampment of caricatures. But given time and space, it is peopled with representations that put the lie to any simplistic generalities about this group or that race. Here in Indian country lives corruption; here also lives compassion, regret, ambition, radicalism, loyalty, honor, and spirituality.

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And yet…here’s the troubling part. Such specificity comes packaged with serious questions of representation, especially when we are dealing with depictions of indigenous Americans. “Playing Indian” in American popular culture is a practice with a gut-wrenching history, one intimately tied with rationalizing and even romanticizing material dispossession and symbolic removal of peoples. Numerous scholars have pointed out the complicity of non-Native cultural constructions of American Indians in a profoundly troubling history of settler colonization, exploitation and ghettoization, and, it has been argued, genocide. Some will bristle at this kind of “race talk” in a piece about a comic book. Others bristled the moment the word “scalped” showed up in a title.

In light of this history, taking the tack that profound problems of representation can be subsumed under the norms and expectations of genre—like noir — feels insufficient. Yes, there are objectors who might be disturbed that Aaron writes these Oglala Lakota embroiled in violence, criminality, alcoholism, drug addiction, intra-group exploitation, family dissolution, and illicit sexuality. One apologist’s retort is that this critique misses the point that in gritty, urban noir, the dark underbelly of any group of peoples is part of the schema, part of the genre configuration. Crudely, if these were white characters, they would be killing and shooting and criminal empire-ing just the same. So charges of racial insensitivity or invocations of redfacing miss the point, right? I’m not so sure.

I’ll save my argument that we are in a “Spectrum Age” for another day, but for now, let’s just grant that the industry’s Kamalafication, its new Miles Morales Majority, its “Lumberjanes”/”Rat Queens” era, suggests that “diverse” is the presumed demographic and that things like “racial consciousness” are legitimate categories of critical concern for mainstream comics.

Let’s also dispense with vainly or simplistically litmus-testing Jason Aaron, by all accounts a modest, brilliant, and self-conscious Southern writer with substantial gifts. His work in and outside of “Scalped” can be plausibly read as most often subverting stereotypes, even if it’s a bit on-the-nose (“Thor” and “Southern Bastards” fans might know what I mean).

The troubling question for me is not whether “Scalped” favorably represents Native Americans in a genre obsessed with the ubiquity of corruption. Nor is the troubling question about its creators’ intentions or qualifications to write about American Indians.

I think the question is if we, the evolving comics reading community, are resilient enough to critique our darlings and to challenge our own prized traditions if we do find their representations problematic. The troubling question for me is whether we have the maturity to sustain robust interrogation of our tropes, our shorthands, and our genres. Because yes, stories in comics that respect the dignity of particular indigenous peoples—and without resorting to a still-dehumanizing “noble savage” illusion—do exist, written by Native and non-Native creators. But if the mass market only accepts as “authentic” those urban black youth who sling dope (and maybe later, if the show gets picked up for a second season, choose not to), or only walks a mile into Reservation life cloaked in the gritty garb of Donnie Brasco gangsterism and gun-blast chiaroscuro, then our escapist realism might be surfacing some issues. What’s troubling to me is that within the comics community, I feel affirmed when celebrating diversity, but I feel a bit nervous about raising questions of representation.

It’s worth betting that Jason Aaron has a pretty good sense of this conflict. The most unusual issue reprinted in “Scalped: The Deluxe Edition Book One,” perhaps the first big hint of the levels Aaron had going on beneath the surface, is issue #9, ‘A Thunder-Being Nation I Am.’ It centers on Catcher, metaphysical catalyst of the narrative (and the first character we ever meet), looking over the Prairie Rose Reservation from a nearby hill, ruminating on how far from Creation-Myth-goodness human beings have fallen. Catcher is the eccentric, wandering seer. A tempestuous and charismatic, “Oxford Graduate. Rhodes Scholar”…Lover of Wordsworth, Byron and the British Romantics,” we find out. To the faraway, glittering lights of the Rez, he quotes Coleridge: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree.”

Indulge the English Major a minute: Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan” is an (opium-induced) exemplar of the Romantic fascination with the byzantine cartographies of imagination. Mongol ruler Kubla Khan’s great and mysterious palace becomes occasion for the poet to ponder the wonder and savagery of poetic creation. At the same time, Coleridge’s poem is a pungent example of Orientalism, the exoticizing of the magical, mysterious, foreign, savage, and primal Other that became how the imperial West saw the East. Vital to the Western self-imagination as adventurer, as civilized explorer, even as disenchanted wanderer wide-eyed before a wild frontier, was the construction of the Strange and Beautiful Races, the Yellow and Brown and (by the time this imagery transforms into the pulps) Blue and Tentacled Alien Peoples, all their allures, their spices, their danger (flip the compass directions and you have how American Manifest Destiny could romanticize, and butcher, the Westward Native American).

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I can’t be sure Aaron is signaling these resonances, but the book’s hard-boiled cynicism (and other spoilery details) suggest we are not meant to read the reference in total earnest. This is no fantasy of the heights of imagination. Fallen and broken are these illusions of world-building power, like the ruins of casino glitz. Comics are not meant to capture, nor save, nor pay tribute to the Indian. The book resorts to hard-nosed noir as an imaginative resource for unflinchingly pointing to the harsh realities of contemporary tribal life.

Or to put it another way, perhaps it’s wrong to suppose Aaron and company think themselves engaging in the hubristic enterprise of reconstructing a noble, glorious Xanadu with a savage heart of darkness. They instead tell a tale that will frustrate both the attempt to romanticize and the attempt to reduce our textured human fabric to types and tropes. This is what long-form comics can do, and what perhaps all stories of a place should strive for.

For it is in its diversions from the genre, the expansion of noir tropes into real, complex characters, that “Scalped” has something to say. The wrong takeaway from this line of questioning would be to evade the risky politics of representing living peoples in comics, resorting instead to a pretense of “colorblind” bogeymen clothed in silk sitting on interplanetary high councils speaking in accents that sound suspiciously like my immigrant relatives. I hope instead that “Scalped,” now in its reprinting, would remain a provocation: tell diverse stories, but tell them real. And let’s stick around as readers with enough patience and perspicuity to allow the storytellers to take us to real places and show us real human beings.

I spoil nothing in mentioning that the stay-or-run-away dilemma tears at many residents of the Prairie Rose Reservation in “Scalped.” The land, its history, its future, is blood and sacred trust, heavy to bear and haunting to leave. It’s a work that might deserve critique for enfolding so much of what is honorable to uphold of a culture, of a place, of a people, in the unbending shadow of its grimness.

But here’s to the long comics that let us sojourn long enough to uphold, in a world riddled with corruption, the humanizing power of stories.