Turok, Son of Stone (Dark Horse)

[Jeff of Earth-J]

I do not purport to be an expert in Native American Indian culture, but according to William Stout, “Turok and Andar were Plains Indians, specifically from the Mandan tribe. Their visual depiction was fairly accurate for a comic book; Turok and Andar wore traditional Plains Indians garb. What wasn’t explained was how two Mandans (whose tribe originated in the East and then settled in the Dakotas) ended up in New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns area!” Jim Shooter has apparently put some thought behind the discrepancies noted by Stout and some research toward explaining them. Mention is made of the great river called Misi-Ziibi by the Ojibwe people, and he threw some Aztecs into the mix as well.

Turok and Andar were drawn back into the past in a much more visual manner (they were sucked into a kind of time vortex) than they were originally, but the original Turok, Son of Stone (from 1954) is reprinted for the sake of comparison. Shooter places the time as “three score and four years before men of the old world first stand upon the shores of a Bahaman isle, which by my reckoning is 1428, but the editor cites as 1482. He cops to not being a physicist, just a comic book editor, and to his credit he did assign the art to Brazil’s Eduardo Francisco, whose work I’ve never seen before, but I must admit is very well-suited to Turok and the world of four million B.C.

Although I read them all, I never became a very big fan of Valiant’s Turok, but this revamp has me intrigued.

[Captain Comics]

I interviewed Shooter for CBG, and he said he's reworked Turok's back story so that he was not simply a Plains Indian, but one possessed of a wanderlust who visited many tribes in the Western hemisphere. That explains a number of things, such as his metal knife, which he obtained in the Northeast, trading with Vikings. So any time you see Turok saying or doing something not of the Plains Indians experience, you can chalk it up to some tribe he visited.