At the time, as even Truman would admit, he saw it as a cautionary tale as well as one of protest. Now, the creator feels is relevance hasn't slipped at all. We spoke with Truman about the original work, the collection, and what it still means to him.

Newsarama: Fist off Tim, this seems like a long time coming, given that many, many properties from the '80s like Scout have seen collections, reprints, and even revivals. How did the Dynamite reprints come about?

Tim Truman: Dynamite contacted me a year or so back ago about it and we began negotiations. Over the years a lot of publishers have inquired about reprint rights and I always resisted it.

NRAMA: Why?

TT: My reasons were due mainly to my own peculiar and maddening artistic insecurities: Quite simply, I hate to look at the drawings that I did when I was first starting out, particularly Scout and Grimjack. I was sometimes drawing four to six pages a day at that point in my career and looking at the work now drives me crazy. So I was never too anxious to have the work out there again.

Another reason I always resisted other publishers was due to the fact that they always gave me the impression they saw reprint material as a cheap way to make a buck, by acquiring reprint rights for old stuff at a cut-rate price and saving production costs by printing from old plates. Dynamite's approach, however, was quite different. They treat the material with great respect and produce the books with great care, and they market them as archival material. That really appealed to me.

NRAMA: Going back to the beginning, what inspired you to develop a series with an Apache leading character?

TT: It's funny, I was just reminded of the genesis of Scout a few weeks ago. Some folks have been asking me about a possible Scout movie or television deals and asked me for some reference materials. I got into my book collection and pulled out the book that served as the main touchstone for the research that I did for Scout - a book called Apaches: A Culture and History Portrait by James Haley. It's a really amazing book -- a very thick, well-researched hardcover written the year that I began work on Scout. I opened the book and there's this little note from my wife, Beth, that reminded me how I'd acquired it.

Beth and I had been in a bookstore and she'd seem me checking out the book. I'd really gotten involved in it -- I think I stood there and read about three chapters. I've always been into Native American history and Apache culture had fascinated me most of all for some reason. This was the most in-depth, well-written study of the Apache I'd ever seen. Anyway, I finally put the book back on the shelves at the store and we'd continued shopping.

A few weeks later, at my birthday party, I opened my present from Beth and, what do you know, there's the book. She'd sneaked back into the store and picked it up for me. What a gal! A new hardcover was quite an expense at the time. It was like getting a diamond ring or something. We'd just had out first child, Ben, and the publisher whom I was working for was getting late with checks.

Over the next few weeks I read the book about three times, over and over again. I just found it fascinating.

Not long after, I took a trip to Madison, Wisconsin to visit my friend Mike Baron. Mike and I were sitting around a swimming pool at the apartment where he lived and he asked me "Tim, if you could do any character, any subject, what would it be?" Without missing a beat I immediately said "I'd do a science fiction story about an Apache riding a motorcycle." I don't know where the thought came from, but there it was.

Mike actually wrote a treatment about an Apache character for me to consider, very unlike Scout, and though I love Mike's writing for some reason the concept he came up with didn't grab me. However, the thought stayed with me and by the time Eclipse Comics asked me to do something for them I had Scout pretty much mapped out.

It was the end of the Reagan era and the beginning of the Bush I regime and there were a lot of things happening that really bothered me. I'm a notorious left-leaner -- not a pacifist liberal, really, but a sort of 1920's pro-labor populist throwback. So I used Scout as an adventure-oriented springboard to address a lot of the social and governmental concerns that I had. It's been weird watching things unfold during subsequent years. Though the Soviet Union isn't around any more, several of the things that I wrote about in Scout and Scout: War Shaman have sort of come to pass in one way or another.

NRAMA: You received accolades from Native Americans and educators alike for Scout's portrayal of Native Americans. Did the portrayal come naturally to you, or did you have to take on an immense amount of research to achieve it?

TT: Well, a little of both, I guess. Mainly from research, though. My main approach was not to take a patronizing view of Native American culture or history. My great grandmother, Belle Truman, was a full-blooded Cherokee, but except for some things that I remember my grandfather doing with my sisters, cousins, and me when we were kids we had no real upbringing in Cherokee culture. As strange as it might sound, I think the approach that I took with Scout stems from - 1.) I'm a hillbilly kid from the Appalachians; and 2.) my family were southern Baptists.

Growing up, I got real sensitive to the way that movies and television would portray both Appalachian people and their culture and religions. It was never right. It was always some New Yorker or Californian's view uninformed, generalized, stereotyped view of my culture. So when I decided to write about Apache culture I remembered how offended I'd been by most portrayals of the culture that I'd come from and took the task quite seriously.

NRAMA: Jerry Garcia and Carlos Santana were big fans of your work. How did you come to find this out, originally?

TT: That's a kick for me because I'm such a fan of San Francisco music. I found out from Dennis Kitchen about Garcia. I'd read that Kitchen was going to be doing Grateful Dead Comix in association with LucasFilm and I called Dennis up, asking him if I could do a few stories for the anthology. I guess I was one of the first artists to respond. Dennis said "Sure! I'll call and ask where you should send your portfolio."

Well, about 10 minutes later Dennis called me back and said, "Forget about sending your portfolio. Jerry Garcia knows your work." That led to a long association with Grateful Dead and their touring and merchandising wings. I was the only artist whose work appeared in every issue of Grateful Dead Comix. I've done dozens of T-shirt designs and CD covers for the Grateful Dead and bands they've worked with, like Hot Tuna and I did a full color, painted comic page in the Grateful Dead Almanac for several years. They were always one of my favorite clients. Great folks.

With Carlos, I got a call from Rock-it Comics, who were doing a line of really nicely done rock music comic books. They had asked Carlos if they could do a book with him and Carlos said "Sure, if you get Timothy Truman to draw it." So that led to an association and friendship with Carlos and his brother, Jorge.

Carlos was and is a big-time Scout fan. He'd learned about the book from some friends of his in AIM -- the American Indian Movement -- and had really gotten into the story. That was a special kick for me, because Carlos always was one of my top five influences on guitar. Since I'm a hopeless music geek, I did a tribute to several of my guitar heroes in Scout. The three main characters in the book were named after some of my favorite guitar players: Sgt. Raymond Vaughn was named after an up and coming guy I'd turned on to at the time, Stevie Ray Vaughn. Rosa Winter was named after Johnny Winter (a bit of irony there, to be sure) and Emmanuel Santana - Scout -- was named after Carlos.

NRAMA: You went on to work with both Garcia and Santana. What can you tell us about those experiences and your relationship with those two iconic musicians?

TT: I never got to meet Jerry, though I've met several of the other band members and have become good friends with Robert Hunter.

My favorite Garcia-related story is one that Robert passed on to me. Jerry was looking at the first adaptation I did, for the song "Dire Wolf", in Grateful Dead Comix and he said "Wow, this guy draws what I see in my head when I sing this song." That was quite a compliment. A line like that you could almost have tattooed across your chest.

I was able to get much closer to Carlos. I got to interview him several times, hang around with him and the band on the East Coast during a couple of their tours, call him up from time to time. One of the high points of my life was getting to sit on stage behind Raul Rekow's congas during a sound check at Wolf Trap, Carlos wailing away on his guitar not three feet in front of me, and leading the band through a Muddy Waters blues tune that he and I had been talking about the previous night.

He's a very nice guy -- so full of this weird, wonderful kinetic energy. He's a really spiritual guy and some weird things have happened between us. The day I got the call from Rock-it, I was on a Santana binge and was listening to a Santana album while I was ironing some clothes. I looked down at the label of a shirt I was ironing and it was a "Santana" brand shirt. I got a little chuckle out of that -- no biggie, just a coincidence. Once second later, I got a call from Rock-it:" Carlos Santana wants you to do a comic book for us." That's when it all seemed a little weird.

Over the years, other things like that happened, though not so much lately. I'd find myself thinking about Carlos something would happen out of the blue -- he'd send me some T-shirts or music videos, or he or Jorge would call me up and ask if I wanted tickets to a show in the area. Funny little things like that. Anyone else, I wouldn't think much of it but Carlos is such an intensely spiritual guy.

If we ever get a Scout movie made, it's a dream of mine to have Carlos and his brother Jorge work on the soundtrack music. That would really bring things full circle.

NRAMA: Looking back at the story now, is there anything the 2006 Tim Truman would do differently?

TT: Yeah. I'd brush up on my figure anatomy, for sure! There's some storytelling in there that I'm real proud of, though, and I'll always be proud of the writing and the stories themselves. There's some pretty groundbreaking stuff in there, and the book turned out being quite influential. Scout will always have a big hold on my heart and soul because it was the first book that was 100% my own vision.

When I think about it, doing that book was such an amazing task. I was writing, penciling, and inking a monthly series, and I did it for almost three years. Quite a lot of work. Towards the end, there, I was getting pretty strange and cranky and lost a friend or two.

NRAMA: What can fans look forward to in the future from you?

TT: Right now, I've become the new writer for Dark Horse's Conan book, with Cary Nord and occasionally Paul Lee drawing. That's really exciting for me. Robert E. Howard was a huge influence on me, and there's a bit of Conan in every character I've ever done -- Scout, Grimjack, and Jonah Hex especially.

Besides that, I'm illustrating a Conan mini-series that Joe R. Lansdale is writing for me, Conan and the Songs of the Dead. Joe thinks it's the best drawing that I've ever done, and most of my friends and fans who've seen the work have said the same thing. It's been a daunting task -- I've never felt so compelled to do something so absolutely "right."

After I get done doing art for the Conan and the Songs of the Dead mini-series, I'll keep on writing the ongoing Conan book.

Art-wise, post-Songs of the Dead follow up projects might include a new Grimjack mini-series or possibly a pet project that I've wanted to launch into for about three years now, a series of illustrated books called Odin: the Wanderer. Odin would be a retelling of the Norse myths from a rather unique perspective. Folks can see the preliminary work I've done so far in the Gallery section at www.timothytruman.com. There's the first draft for a sample chapter there as well.

Besides that, I continue to do covers for limited edition horror and fantasy hardcover books from Subterranean Press. Great folks. The covers that I painted for Joe R. Lansdale's "Flaming London" and Norm Partridge's "Mr. Fox" are the best two pieces of work that I've ever done in my life. I'm really proud of them.

Discuss this story

Homepage