Re-imagining the conquest in comics: adoption of colonial Spanish American narrative and image in contemporary comic books

In this project, I discuss the ways in which comics creators draw from and build off of Colonial Spanish American documents – both narrative and image – in order to retell the story of the conquest of the Americas in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I divide these comics into three main groups: didactic comics, which focus on teaching the story of the conquest from a particular point of view, while ignoring or erasing certain parts of the historical record; political comics, which draw a direct line from the sixteenth-century processes of conquest and colonization to contemporary political consequences; and dystopian comics, which use the conquest as a playground in which to create fantastical, impossible versions of events. Each, however, is indebted to the Colonial-era documents and uses them as the framework through which they retell their tale.