​Postcolonial and decolonial scholarship has challenged many previously dominant interpretations of the European colonial endeavours and their complex and painful legacies. How can these academic insights be shared with a wider audience in new and powerful ways, to open up conversations on these topics? 

​The starting point of this discussion is a new graphic history on the amateur French ethnographer and filmmaker Bernard de Colmont’s journey into the mountainous state of Chiapas to study the Lacandón people and broadcast their way of life to a curious European public. Considered a “lost tribe,” the Lacandón were thought to be the closest living relatives of the ancient Maya. De Colmont became a celebrity explorer whose adventures generated considerable attention. The Lacandón themselves, however, were silenced in his tale.  

​Nearly a century later, Richard Ivan Jobs and Steven Van Wolputte have taken up this story in all its complexity, creating a graphic history from de Colmont’s narratives and images in the form of a heroic adventure comic – with a decidedly critical, contemporary twist.  

​How can indigenous perspectives and critical takes on metropolitan colonial cultures be brought together? Which possible pitfalls and blind spots are common and how can they be addressed?