We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Nathan Shafer. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Nathan below.

Nathan, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

I have been making a comic book called Wintermoot for a few years now. It isn’t my only project, but one that takes up a lot of my time. It’s a worldbuilding project connected to most of my other work. Basically, I just wanted to create a cyberpunk/superhero universe as a conceptual art project. Anyways, the content of Wintermoot is super meaningful to me, but that isn’t why I’m talking about it right now.

In the Fall of 2023, we opened a show at the Anchorage Museum called “Lines of Site: Comic Art and Storytelling in Alaska”. It was me and two of my homies, David Brame and Dimi Macheras, from Łuk’ae Tse’ Taas (Ahtna for ‘Fish Head Soup’, it’s the name of our comic book group). The three of us each had our own gallery highlighting the comic books we make, and then one big gallery with some interactive stuff. To be real, it was just the way we make Alaskan comics that was the basis for this show, and the three of us flexing our inimitable squatch energy. We are all big, hairy, super mysterious dudes who only talk when it is important to do so.

But the thing that made Wintermoot meaningful for me was the opening night. For the last 15 years or so I have been both a practicing new media artist and a special education teacher. I teach autistic kids in Anchorage. It’s not for everyone, but it keeps me busy and centered. Probably isn’t a sustainable practice, but it is what I am doing right now. The thing about that though, is that I wanted to make a legitimately dope autistic superhero. Not some silly ‘autism is my superpower’ bullshit. I’m talking an autistic superhero whose autism makes them present their powers differently. She gets overstimulated and info-dumps. I just wanted her to be this badass autistic character who was way more complicated in their personality and presentation. I liked that and thought the comic was good, and for an indie Alaskan comic book it still got put on an international “best of” list for comics that year.

The opening night of that show at the Anchorage Museum – I’m tabling, sitting in my gallery selling comic books. It was a great night selling, there was a long line, then I start noticing this pattern. Every 3rd or 4th person who was buying books and wanting autographs, or whatever, they were families with an autistic kid who loved this illustrated bedtime story I wrote based on the storming Area 51 memes called Goodnight Naruto Runners. Sometimes they also liked Wintermoot, I guess, but it was usually the Goodnight Naruto Runners though, because I originally wrote an edited version of that for my students, and would read it to them at the end of the day, so they would Naruto Run to their buses. It was literally just a poem I would read to my students at the end of the day. But, it was this group of autistic adults I sometimes work with who talked me into illustrating and publishing that poem as a book. Up front, I was not intending most of my books to be for anyone other than young adults in Alaska, just in general. And it’s not like Wintermoot is simple to read, it is a very complicated read for most people. I mean, Wintermoot has like 20 Indigenous languages in it on top of the English and the only guns I draw are basically super soakers with bio-lasers. The issue of Wintermoot I am working on right now is about death metal, information theory (specifically the notion of Shannon Entropy), which is also a name of one of the superheroes in the stories; and it is also set in this liminal space I found while listening to Nina Simone’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s song ‘Suzanne’ on repeat in my car while driving to the studio. It also incorporates how my buddy Brendan sings his own version of a Misfits song called ‘Last Caress’ to be about making a sandwich, when he uses it to put his kid to sleep. Seriously, ‘Last Caress’ is anything but a song to sing to a kid you are trying to put to sleep. Wintermoot is hypertrophic and includes everything that I find interesting in the world. But that is my taste. I like overly complicated indie vibes in the media I consume. Just figured I could do a cool autistic character in Wintermoot because I have the background and life-experience to do that well. But all these shy autistic kids were wanting to meet me and talk about the books and the stories at that opening night book signing. It was a shock for me that the community had connected with my books that much and that they came out for the opening. Seriously, Wintermoot is in textbooks and has won awards and shit like that, but it is a regional book I am self-publishing with Fish Head Soup. The sales are good but not making me rich good. And it is not like I am some genius marketer that is putting it in front of every comic book reader in the world. I’m making a comic book I want to make in Alaska because that is what I want to do.
That opening night changed me though, not in a little way. It was a quite profound one. I wasn’t going to go back to Arête, the autistic superhero in the story, because I am only doing 12 books in the whole Wintermoot series. Really, I just wanted to create a comic book universe, so I am doing all these sort-of ‘one shot’ stories, then I was going to go on to another project. But after that night, I rewrote some of the upcoming Wintermoot stuff to include Arête one more time before the series closes out. That will be Wintermoot Nine, which is coming out in a month or so. Then three more books, then Wintermoot is done. But now there are probably going to be some other books years down the road. I found a thing that is working for me.

I see this as a mixture of Alaska’s oral tradition and neurodivergent info-dumping. They can be the same thing, or work in collusion. The autistic kid info-dumping about Minecraft around the campfire is telling a story just like Ya Ne Dah Ah or Sukdu are. Those are Alaskan legendary stories from Ahtna and Dena’ina oral storytelling traditions. In fact, I would argue, that the info-dumping kids do when they are just learning to navigate the world around them is part of why we tell them stories like Chulyin Sukdu (Raven Story) or C’eyiige’ Hwnax (Magic House). We are coaching them through the void of existence, teaching them lessons, and most importantly cracking the world open to raw excitement and wonder.

Now when kids recognize me, often that is the story they talk to me about. They are like, “You know that character who is obsessed with ice worms? I love worms too! What’s your favorite worm?” And now I tell them, “My favorite worm is the bone eating snot flower. Arête is going to info-dump about them in the new book!” Then we get to talk about bone eating snot flower worms, which are empirically the coolest worm in the world. And their faces when they see an adult info-dump about a preferred topic, which is a love language in the autistic community, that is the shit. That is it, that right there. That is the thing. The comic is cool, obviously, no doubt, I made it. I am regularly confounded by my own talents. Hahaha. Seriously, the comic IS phenomenal, but when these conversations and relationships reach beyond a story into a place where we have the privilege of changing each other forever, that is it. That is meaningful for me.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am a new media artist who has been making work for the last 30 years, world-building in a universe I call the Denaliwood Arcade. This has included books, comics, videogames, AR experiences, audio tracks, stuff like that. Tons of speculative fiction stories set in Alaska.

In 1999, I started doing collaborative work with my wife, Joelle. We formed this art group called the Meme-Rider Media Team with another friend, Isaac, and we were some of the earliest practitioners of internet memes, but it was so much different back then. In 2009, I was part of the first collective making mobile augmented reality work, Manifest.AR. Jump to 2020, I cofounded Łuk’ae Tse’ Taas (Fish Head Soup Comics) with some other Alaskan artists, and in 2024 I began turning my artistic practice into an XR Library for the Denaliwood Arcade and a videogame company called Mengloth Entertainment.

I feel like I should explain the Denaliwood Arcade. I don’t know when it really started, but it began coming together with this augmented reality project I did called Dirigibles of Denali. I started the research for it 15 years ago or so. It was a museum show at the Pratt, in Homer, where I used AR to build three of the domed cities that were proposed to be built in Alaska in the 60s and 70s. They obviously never got built, but they are still a part of the speculative imagination in Alaska. Like a what could have been kind of thing. The cities were a traditional domed city by Frei Otto called Arctic City, a huge indoor city called Seward’s Success conceived by Tandy Industries, and Denali City, a city under clear Teflon drapes proposed by the late Alaska Senator Mike Gravel. Arctic City and Seward’s Success were easy to construct because the architectural specs were readily available. Denali City was a little harder, I had to go to the Gravel Archive in Fairbanks and chug through all the notes and then I had to interview Mike Gravel who was in his nineties at the time. In all the data for Denali City it was never actually visualized, so I had to take maps and notes and build it totally from scratch. In Gravel’s notes he also thought that dirigibles should be used to travel to Denali City from Anchorage, or wherever, that is where I got the title for that project, Gravel’s note called “Dirigibles for Denali”. We turned that title into a fictional Alaskan reality tv show called Dirigibles of Denali, about different airship crews who flew missions between Alaska’s domed cities.

For Dirigibles of Denali, I published 5 books that went along with a museum show. I think I wrote 8, but only published the 5. And made one AR videogame for a gallery show at Practice Gallery, in Philly, called Cheechako Wizard Suicide Runners. A suicide run is a term in Anchorage that refers to salmon. When the reds (sockeye salmon) are running in July, a suicide run is when somebody does a full-day of work, drives 4 hours to Kenai, dip nets reds until they limit out, then drives 4 hours home, processes and packs all the fish, and works the next day. It is super fun and crazy to do. That AR videogame was a combat fishing/racing game set on the Seward Highway, where superheroes are fighting you the whole time. It was made on the now defunct Junaio platform, so it doesn’t exist anymore. One of the books I published, I asked ten Alaskan authors to set science fiction set in the three domed cities, that’s where the collaborative stories about the Alaskan reality tv show went. Like Alaska State Troopers, but interesting. We made a ton of stories together. I wrote one of them, a short story called Ravenade, set in Seward’s Success. But we had all this extra unused material that I decided to turn into a comic book series. In Wintermoot, all of Alaska’s domed cities exist and people do shit there, get into adventures or whatever. There are a ton of other storytelling projects set in this universe, but that is why it exists. The domed cities of Alaska. I blended that speculative fiction universe with an Indigenized way of telling stories and boom, Wintermoot.
And there is still a ton of unused stuff from that project, and new unused stuff from Wintermoot. That is where the Wintermoot comics came from though, just the superheroes mentioned in the texts and game. Another cool thing was that the fictional videogames in those stories were all played on this fictional videogame system called Mengloth. When we started turning the unused Wintermoot stories into videogames two years ago, we decided to call our company Mengloth, after that fictional entertainment system from Dirigibles.
But then, also, there are weird things about that, because the work I make doesn’t always stay glued to me. For instance, one night a couple months ago several people started texting me stuff like, “Hey bro, you know this dude from the MoMA is speaking at the museum tonight, and he keeps talking about your domed city projects?” And I have to respond like, “It is a complete mystery to me. Hopefully they make me sound handsome.” It obviously would have been cool to have been there when that dude spoke, but I wasn’t, and was just as content to be doing other things that night at home. And that is not a complaint, it’s just weird being the artist equivalent of the actor who is in a million shows but nobody knows their name really. It’s “oh, you’re THAT guy! Cool stuff, but you seem normal though.” I am hoping my name stays attached to Mengloth since it is being created out of the lore I have been building for the last 30 years, but we will see.

So, at this moment, the Denaliwood Arcade is focusing mostly on Mengloth videogames. Head Touches Place: The Black Pyramid will premiere at the Seattle Art Fair in July. That will coincide with Wintermoot Nine comic book release. The Black Pyramid is an urban legend that has become a bit of a conspiracy theory in Alaska. The notion that Ancient Aliens built a huge black pyramid under a mountain in Alaska, and the US military has been working with them for a while to keep it secret. The black pyramid came into the popular imagination from a top-secret government program called Project Stargate. This is where the CIA had ‘psychic warriors’ astral project around the world to spy on Soviet black sites, and stuff like that. These are the same folks in that movie The Men Who Stare at Goats. Same dudes. It’s nuts. Anyways, some of them astral projected to Alaska and remote viewed that pyramid and described it in quite a bit of detail. I used those specs to build the black pyramid, and for the game, players astral project into the body of a raven who works at the pyramid. There is a dying half-squatch superhero there who asks you to make necropants out of him when he dies, so then you go on a gather quest to collect the materials necessary to do that. Necropants are kind of crazy too, they are also based on something in the real world. In Icelandic magic, people make necropants by skinning the legs off dead friends and then wear the skin as pants. You put a coin in the scrotum to make the magic work, and it both makes you rich and you can walk in-between the worlds of the living and the worlds of the dead. Since kids are playing the game, I obviously am not using the whole scrotum thing. I just made the necropants coin-operated, like an arcade game. This AR game is part of a full-on regular, streaming videogame Mengloth is making called Known Ravenspace, or What the Ravens Were Doing When It All Went Down.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

I wish I started working with a consultant earlier. Nato Thompson and Dreaming in Public have finally put some hyper-focused zhuzh into my practice. For years I wanted shows, or dealers, or publishers, then it was getting grants and fellowships. I have never really made work that is commercially viable in the art or publishing world. It is just too different; nobody wanted to try and sell it but me. And that is okay. It is fine. For lack of a better expression, I’m an artist’s artist. My name doesn’t always stay attached to the projects I make, like I mentioned earlier. The projects are known, just not in an easily monetizable way. Indie media really is my jam, and it helped that when I started working with Nato that I already had paid my dues and received major awards. But working with someone who knows how to run interference, that is the piece I was missing. I don’t know how many more years I have making work, but for the second half of my career, I will be making the work I want in a system that is mine and that hopefully will be able to finish it all with a sustainable practice that I can gift to loved ones when I’m gone. Or maybe just the kids of Alaska in general. Someone is going to have to go through that storage unit with all of my work eventually, maybe I will even have it turned into an archive the way Gravel did all of his stuff. That is a cool thought to me.

But listen, the art world is about relationships. You make a ton of relationships with people when you want to pursue an artistic practice that is more than just making stuff. If you want to show the work, or things like that, you got to find your people, and you got to have relationships with folks who aren’t your people. My practice has taken me through a bunch of variations, and I have mostly been on a system of applying for grants and then only really making projects if I get some funding. It wasn’t like that when I was in school, back then I just made stuff and was basically paying professors to talk with me about it. Professors ultimately do nothing for you, they may help you make better work, but you are their competition next year, and for the most part, they are not going to help your career move out of the pedagogical model. It isn’t financially viable for them. That is the real world.

The domed cities I have been working with for over a decade now, those only really happened because I got funding for it. There were a ton of other projects I would have preferred to do, stuff connected to climate change and Alaskan history, shit like that. What I would have considered more serious cultural work a few years ago. I wrote grants for the domed cities as a joke at first, like what is the weirdest project I can come up with kind of thing. Then I get funding for it, and it’s like, well damn, now I get to do this work, which ended up being something I really liked playing with. It created a universe I had consistently, unknowingly been building in the background the whole time. Every time I would do a wild out of the box project that would just exist anonymously online or whatever, old meme stuff from the early 2000s, all the storytelling projects, it led me to realize I am, at my center, a neurodivergent Alaskan kid who is telling stories from the Alaskan oral storytelling tradition, it just looks like comic books and videogames. There is obviously a lot more to that story, but the other details are decorations. I tell stories. That is it. Deeper thoughts on it are just philosophical machinations. People can do that in grad school if they want.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I don’t know if this is a habit other artists have, or if it is just a neurodivergent one, but whatever I am working on, for me, is the most important project I have ever done, and my favorite, all until I start a new project. My goal is to keep that energy. The mission is something else. Since Wintermoot I have realized that I am not confused by my audience. Young adults in Alaska. I just make work that is something I would have liked as a kid. Admittedly, I was into to the OuLiPo and fin-de-siécle French literature as a kid. But somebody thinking of Alaska through that kind of anti-traditional lens would have appealed to me. I’m still waiting for some kid to tell me I got them into reading Alfred Jarry or Peter Kalifornsky. But that may never happen. That is a goal though.

The mission came from how I approach works in the Denaliwood Arcade. This was part of it from the beginning, but it didn’t totally make sense until I made the first Wintermoot book. I have to explain this in a story though. So, Wintermoot Book One: Aqpik and Mars Apple. In Dirigibles of Denali, I came up with this videogame character called Cloudberry. Cloudberries are these awesome little orange berries that grow on the tundra in Alaska. The extra stuff I had about Cloudberry turned into the Wintermoot comics. Cloudberry is an Iñupiaq character. She is Alaska Native. I wanted to give her Inuit facial tattoos, so I took one of my Alaskan artist buddies, Holly, to coffee. Holly Nordlum does Inuit tattoos as part of her artistic practice. Anyways, we start talking. Now understand, at that point I had already done a ton of the graphic design for this character. Wintermoot was originally entitled Cloudberry. Like the comic book series was all focused on her and called Cloudberry Comics. The whole thing was going to be about a Cloudberry Woman. So, we are talking. Holly is quiet. Pensive. Then she breaks my heart. She says, “no self-respecting Iñupiaq woman would go by the name Cloudberry. She wouldn’t be like this or that, she would do this”. Holly and I finish coffee, say our goodbyes and I go home and sulk.

Then. THEN I start working on Holly’s edits. You must remember that she is my friend and was not telling me, “No, don’t do this”. Quite the opposite. She had given me one of the greatest gifts an artist can give to another one. Authenticity. She authentically responded and communicated with me. She laughs when I say this to her now. When I started putting Holly’s changes into the character, it made it thousands of times better. Cloudberry was now using her Iñupiat name, Aqpik. She was authentically herself in the story, not Cloudberry. Aqpik. AND she was now a co-creation with one of my favorite artists, Holly Nordlum. To this day, every character in Wintermoot that I can co-create with others is done in that same fashion. Alaskans started noticing this and the real work, or mission, for Wintermoot, and all of my other work is there. Not the drawing or writing. The collaboration. Native Elders would contact me. Kids emailed me. People wanted to make sure their language was put into Wintermoot. People were telling me cultural things, or stuff that should go in there. Wintermoot became a love letter. A love song. It is an act of giving back and forth, thinking of each other, holding space in our hearts. Being. Art is not this eternal act. Nothing is really a classic or universal work of art. It is all contextual, conceptual, part of its time and place. Sometimes they age well, most of the time they don’t, but, for me, it needs to be peer-reviewed, participatory, collaborative, responsible, lovingly considered, even if it is a wild jaunt through a conspiracy theory in necropants.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://denaliwoodarcade.com
• Instagram: @nathan_shaferak
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@denaliwoodarcade

Image Credits

Jacqueline Schoppert, Joelle Howald, Jory Knott, Nathan Shafer