The Indians' poverty-related problems are real, but Aaron hasn't distinguished between these and his portrayals of Indians as criminals, thugs, and lowlifes. He's implied everything in his stories is based on research. Naive readers who know nothing about today's Indians will have no way to tell what's real and what isn't. They'll swallow it all.

Oh, and it's another fiction that every tribe is opening a casino and that casinos inevitably lead to corruption and crime. In reality, South Dakota's tribes don't have mega-casinos because they're too far from population centers to make money. But on Aaron's prototypical reservation, large-scale Indian gaming is a given.

More to the point, the Prairie Rose casino is all about enriching the few at the expense of the many. This is one of the most pernicious Native stereotypes in existence and Aaron is exploiting it to the hilt. If you think the typical SCALPED reader understands Indian gaming and knows Aaron is falsifying it, you may be as naïve as the readers I mentioned.

In short, I've stepped back and thought about Native stereotypes a lot more than you have, friend. You're kidding yourself if you think the media's portrayal of Indians as crooks, losers, and victims doesn't harm them. Check out "The Harm of Native Stereotyping: Facts and Evidence" (http://www.bluecorncomics.com/stharm.htm) and educate yourself on the issue.

I think if you step back, you'd find that bits such as the diabetes, and abundance of drug and alcohol problems are the 'authentic' look at Native Americans, whilst the crime bits aren't meant to be.

So yeah, sure, if you want to get outraged, go for it - but as with most good fiction that causes people to get their knickers in a knot, if you step back and THINK, you'll see there's no point.

I mean, you don't see too many Brits complaining that Hellblazer provides a negative stereotype of working class England, and yet it story after story of people doing horrible stuff to each other.

Some Natives also root for the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians because they like to see "their" names in the win column. Some Natives don't think much about how stereotyping affects their people.

Re "If it was saying 'this is a story about Native Americans and all Native Americans are like this' then there’d be justified outrage": The outrage is justified because Aaron has said he's researched Indians and wants people to learn from SCALPED. In other words, he's positioned his work at an authentic look at Indian life today. If Aaron had said his stories bear little relationship to reality, he'd be right, but he hasn't said that.

See http://www.bluecorncomics.com/scalped.htm for more on the Native stereotypes in SCALPED.

Why would a Lakota in South Dakota care whether someone from Oklahoma was 1/16 or 15/16 Kickapoo? Either way, the Kickapoo is an outsider from another part of the country. I doubt Diesel would fit into a "foreign" tribe any better than Jason Aaron or I would.

And while these instances aren’t as egregious as “20 seconds from now”, they could still be the reason other people at DC are playing with time.

Yeah, all true - I just don't think anyone could see it as intrusive, Scalped has had a lot more thought put into it than the issue Greg was complaining about.

Scalped really isn’t as good as I hoped. I check out the new issues when they come out and even gave the first trade a chance but it just isn’t as good as the hype

It's a cumulative thing - I think if you'd stuck with it sequentially, you'd be a lot more impressed. The first trade is good, but it takes a big leap forwards after that.

A few cool moments aside, I find it unnecessarily gratuitous and I’m surprised I haven’t heard some sort of outrage about the portrayal of Native Americans.

It's not really about Native Americans though - it's using that as a setting for a story about living life on the bottom of the bottom.
If it was saying 'this is a story about Native Americans and all Native Americans are like this' then there'd be justified outrage, but it's just using a reserve as a setting for a story about sad and desperate people doing bad things to survive.

That said, I like the character of Diesel (issue 26 was awesome) and maybe more of these cool moments will turn me around.

This issue jumps into Diesel's past frequently, and it also tells a non-sequential plot in the main story.

It will spend a lot of time on one particular day, and then the next issue covers weeks, but apart from the storyline where it told the same night from different characters points of views, when has it played with time?

(Apart from the probable mistake of the main characters age changing, and a seemingly - for the moment - contradictory version of how Bad Horse became an FBI undercover, it hasn't really played with time at all).

Vertigo’s only GOOD title…

YEAH!

Oh, except for DMZ, The Unwritten, Northlanders, Fables, Hellblazer, and Young Liars (for one more month).

The singles are great.

Hrm...