06/27/2025
THE FIRST AMERICANS—“Savage encounters”
Writer: Christopher Reda
Illustrator: Tadd Galusha
Critical Entertainment 2024
Terry Hammond
June 9, 2025
NO WORDS. Nature tales as depicted in a new series THE FIRST AMERICANS, easily flow into a wordless dramatic landscape where physical force and splendor absorb attention. Every movement, gesture, threat and response is generated by sinew, bone, breath, and action, each individual determined to live another day—which often means, you don’t. Encounters here begin in Siberia 14,000 years ago, when the Bering land bridge connected the continents of Asia and America, and humans crossed over.
Silent writer Christopher Reda starts with a hunt. Illustrative artwork by Tadd Galusha is sharp and appealing. Throaty colors and dynamic panels narrate the pace. A band of human hunters armed with flint-tipped spears pursue a herd of woolly mammoths. This was a time when huge animals roamed the earth, and no one could command them. The men fail. Some die. They would have to wait until they reached America, and thought about it more, to perfect the strategy to run the beasts over a cliff to best them. After that, men lived, and the biggest animals on the continent disappeared.
Conflict in the little band over the failed hunt, and the failure of some to return, set one man apart brooding. He lies under a full-mooned sky outside the tunnel of the band’s cave, on the ledge of a snowy cliff, where he spots a herd of mammoths in the distance plodding eastward. One kill could mean salvation. He is not a hero, but ashamed and hungry. Grim necessity demands he move. He follows the herd across the mountains.
A rabbit is his only meal that night. A wolfish dog arrives to share, and with only a few growls between them, they become friends. It’s a good partnership. They learn to fight together in spectacular encounters with sabre-toothed and other snarling beasts along the way.
Once morning breaks at the camp home, a woman leader who saw the man depart to follow the vanishing herd during the night, arises to speak to the others, the only words spoken: This small sentence is like a magic token as if arisen from nothing, gifted by the divine, and secreted by women in ceremonial mystery. This is probably much how it was. The brackets show we cannot trust ourselves to imagine what this language looked like.
Re-imagining the distant past becomes easier as we learn more, and shy from fabulous creation myths. We know now with reasonable clarity that language was not invented by early humans, like a germinating plant. Even Adam and Eve knew language well enough already to name the things around them, illustrating symbolically the fact that before humans, language came first. Emergence of language and tools favored those skulls and brains that knew best how to use them. A variety of humanoid species flourished, until about 35,000 years ago, after millions of years struggling, modern humanity surpassed all others.
Despite this evolution of language and human being in general, discrete bands of humans start with a deficit. Every generation is born ignorant, languageless. It takes an institutionalized shamanic leader, like the woman in this drama, and elders who know, to preserve language, and reliably pass knowledge through time to the next generation. Precariously, this is how we remain today, ever ebbing into a barely human ignorance among insular families or countries as generations pass. No doubt, all humanoids chatter like monkeys, but it is a terrace with no words, hardly distinguishable from other creatures struggling ceaselessly against dominant forces of nature: until a leader stands and speaks to curb the entropy.
The wordless drama here is too silent, yet also entirely appropriate. Intelligence must be preserved by at least one among them; and guarded by ritual practices to ensure there is always at least one individual with words, and rules to obey them. Everything passes voice to voice; and in reality, for those ancient first Americans and for us latest Americans, there are few voices, and few competent listeners. Perhaps as so well observed here, the age of silent film and strips deserves a resurgence.
For all early humans, reverence for ancestors, gods, and myths installed ways to think and remember, to fuse words into continuous memories over generations. In the distant era 14,000 years ago, language and tool skills thrived in west Asia as humans turned to sedentary agriculture, planning and managing crops and conditions over a longer course of time in one place. Consciousness expanded.
On the farthest edge of east Asia at this time, the scouting man and his wolf-dog friend, alone in the harshest conditions, discourse the ways of savagery. One feels sure the shaman woman and family band following eastward is the only thing bound to save him: or at least, save his humanity.
In Issue 2, across the way into Canada, the man kneels and stares into the hot-breathed face of a huge bear, who has never seen a human before. His wolf-dog companion is smart enough to run. No words needed to spike the adrenaline. Other encounters with determined predators do not turn out so curiously nonchalant. A meek disposition only works once. Explosive fury, tooth to tooth, is the other end of the spectrum, where every fibre within you screams to overcome and live.
The scene closes on bloody companions, alive and together, resting before their next adventure. No words are needed to express their bond of gratitude, across species. Yet the words are coming. The first Americans follow their trail, to save them.
