Originally from Tucson, Ariz., Henry Barajas is, in many ways, a rarity in the comic book world. The medium itself is oftentimes protected by a pagan image of elves, ogres and mages, but not so in the work of Barajas. His newest series “Helm Greycastle” is heavily influenced by the ways of the Nahuatls, such as Mayans, Incas and Toltecs. Spread across four issues, “Helm Greycastle” incorporates cultural elements we’ve never seen before, as comic books should.
Before becoming a top 10 selling Amazon creator, Barajas had a humble beginning as a child of an immigrant father and a mother Indigenous to the Sonoran Desert from the Pascua Yaqui Tribe. His rich, yet complex, ancestry would eventually become ground zero for the work he would come to produce.
“I discovered that my mother’s side, the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, was documented to have talked to Spanish priests during the Inquisition,” Barajas said. “I decided to research more about Mesoamerican history, but I was having a hard time finding information by Brown people who are Native.”
So he took matters into his own hands, telling the stories of his own community.
However, tapping into sensitive slices of history today comes with certain consequences, especially for comic book creators. “Maus” was banned earlier this year by a Tennesse school board and another graphic novel, “Gender Queer,” is the most challenged book by schools and libraries of 2021. For Barajas, that makes providing cultural commentary through comics, as the aforementioned examples do, increasingly difficult.
“The assault on graphic novels, specifically, has gotten more rampant,” Barajas said. “Book banning is one of the worst things that could happen in this country because it only cuts access for children to stories that they should be reading.”
Aside from being a creator himself, Barajas takes the banning of books personally because without novels like “Maus,” inspiring him with the way it emphasizes perspectives of history, he may have never made the stories he desperately wanted to see in comics. “Without ‘Maus,’ I probably would have dropped out of school a lot sooner,” he said. “I was never engaged in school more than when ‘Maus’ was introduced to me.”
Barajas’s work, and the other examples, serve to amplify and emphasize the voices of a certain community. “Greycastle” fills a hole in, not just the world of comics but the creative industry in general. In entertainment, the Latinx community has been continuously underrepresented, and in order to escape the circumstances, Barajas believes it’s going to take creators pushing past the adversity to tell their stories to put the narrative back in the community’s hands.
“We need the infrastructure that everyone else is afforded,” said Barajas, referring to the importance of the Latinx community controlling their own narrative with the care it demands as opposed to examples that fall short of providing accurate and honest representation. “Watching ‘Apocalypto’ was offensive. It was my intent to be like these smart and capable people that deserve dignity.”
Aztlan is the name used to represent the Indigenous land of what is now part of America and most of what is now known as Mexico. After the Spanish colonization of 1519, the connection to that land has weakened. Comic books, however, have helped Barajas discover his history and explore it in ways that have pushed his relationship with his own heritage and hopes it inspires others to do the same.
“For me, it’s important to try and celebrate this [history], to pass it on,” he said.