A couple of weeks ago, Kostis Kourelis sent me the first volume of Grass Kings, a comic book by Matt Kindt and Tyler Jenkins. The comic tells the story of a the Grass Kingdom an independent trailer park situated on a lake somewhere in the heartland. The Kingdom is ruled by the troubled character Robert and his brother, Bruce, who also serves as the Kingdom’s sherif. Surrounding these two is a cast of distinctive characters rendered in a frenetic style rich in muted gold, brown, grey, and blue.

The Grass Kingdom itself has all the features of a neglected prairie town: an elevator, a quonset hut hanger for crop dusters, a water tower, some ponds for livestock, lots for mobile homes, and a number of wood-framed houses. It lacks the tidy grid of a settlement on the North Dakota prairie, but the nearby lake might have shaped the town site or the violent history of activity in the area, which the authors flashback to throughout the work, incised the landscape with an unavoidable structure.

It is hard to avoid a comparison to one of the sites we documented in the North Dakota Man Camp Project. The Grass Kingdom certainly echoed the tangled paths between RVs that defied the neat prairie grid of Wheelock, North Dakota. In fact, one of the characters in Wheelock declared himself the mayor, even though there wasn’t an official municipal government or even much of a town to speak of. Demonstrating an ingenuity that seeps through the panels of the Grass Kings, the mayor’s RV park featured his homemade sewage and water systems. Like the Grass King’s Robert, who charges through the mayhem of a police raid to secure the water tower, the mayor of Wheelock understood that water (and sewage) is the stuff of life and community.  

The dominant theme of the first volume of Grass Kings (and I’d argue our experiences in the Bakken) is freedom. But the freedom afforded by the Grass Kingdom comes a the price of violence. Kindt’s and Jenkins’s historic flashbacks remind us that over the millennia the Grass Kingdom was secured through violence, and the violent scenes that seem to define the efforts of the Grass Kings to preserve their freedom seem less like a necessary response to an intrusive and unsympathetic outside world and more like a basic requirement of being free. The corruption of the sherif from the nearby town of Cargill presents an uneasy parallel to Robert’s troubled past and the haunting specter of unsolved murders and disappearances in the Grass Kingdom hints that freedom also involves a tolerance for mysteries and allowing a community to remember or forget its own past.

I won’t spoil the book, but do check it out. The art, the story, and the setting made it an addictive read at the end of my summer.