The Adventures of Tomy and Jon

In the early 2000s, while working through my Native American studies, I began oral storytelling, my kids, an account of two boys, and their adventures in a WildWest faerie land. As my family grew, the tales also expanded to include their family. (Read more below)

This story wasn’t meant to romanticize the WildWest; it allowed me to tell brutal truths about the history of both sides of our family heritage. On the one side, our white colonialist family stole and killed; on the other, our indigenous family lost life and home. The vehicle for the story was a “white” family who moved out West. This family was free of the unchecked bias of those who wanted to push the native out. My goal was to share stories that would grow a love for the “other,” and help my sons and daughter to learn from history and see how it could have been.

I wanted to tell a story that could have been. I used the idea of Faerie land because, much like nature and native, the notion of Faerie has shrunk and nearly eradicated in our world. The native tales of shapeshifters and giants were nearly destroyed (and, in many areas, it was entirely wiped out). So, I began a story to repair without “whitewashing” the truth to the best of my ability.

In 2011, I turned the stories into ebooks. Then the critical nature of my art skills took hold, and I paused my attempt at writing them as novellas. 2014 I sketched out the first draft of making it a weekly comic. Then, in early 2015, I started posting the story as a weekly comic. Fifty strips later, what I originally intended as a brief hiatus, became an indefinite pause.

I hope to return to this story in the future.