To his credit, Smith is including Ohio’s ancient Native American cultures in the series and the issue devoted to the Adena Mound Builders is a “Free Comic Book Day” edition, which you can download. It can be hard to depict ancient cultures in a comic book without turning the people into Flintstones-like caricatures, but take a look and see what you think. Smith gets a lot of things right, but he makes a few mistakes, too. For example, he correctly shows the Adena people using spears instead of the bow-and-arrow, which came much later in time, but he has the village being led by a chief who passes his role as leader onto his son. Archaeologists don’t think the Adena, or even the later Hopewell had this kind of social organization. See if you can spot other things Smith got right or wrong. From the Ohio Chronicles blog, you can see that Smith is currently working on a comic about the Hopewell culture. I’m impressed by the previews of his renderings of the Marietta Earthworks and look forward to seeing the final product. Brad Lepper
