ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — When R. Alan Brooks was 5 years old, his father introduced him to comic books to encourage his love of reading.
"[The] first comic I read was 'The Flash,' and I really loved it," Brooks said with a smile. "I was a fan all my life. I was going to comic book conventions as a kid, but comics were not popular."
Brooks's father searched for comic books that contained Black characters but could not find many. His father was always looking to learn more about Black History, and the story of Nat Love had always been one of his favorites.
"When [my father] was a teenager, he discovered the story of Nat Love, and he decided, 'One day, I'm going to write a book about Nat Love,'" Brooks said. "He even came up with the title, but the book never came to fruition."
Nat Love was a legendary Black cowboy in the late 1800s.
Decades later, in 2020, Brooks was commissioned by the Denver Art Museum to create a comic book about Nat Love. For Brooks, it felt like the culmination of several things that his dad taught him to love.
"This was actually one of the first comic book stories that I drew from beginning to end myself," Brooks said about his comic book, "Nat Love: A Cowboy's Life." "I know that my father deliberately gave me a gift of this knowledge of our history, and being able to distill it down and pass it on to other people is really beautiful to me."
Brooks read Nat Love's autobiography and realized he was facing a daunting task: boiling down the cowboy's life into only a few pages.
"History exists. The facts exist. So when I'm approaching it, it's important for me to not just be like, this happened, this happened, this happened. Because that's boring. I have to figure out what the emotional connection is," Brooks said. "He didn't bring this theme out, but I noticed that riding a horse is when he felt the most free. Like, even before slavery ended, he would ride a horse, he'd feel free. Horses represented freedom. And so, I decided to bring that theme out in my telling of this story."
Historians estimate one in every four cowboys in the American West were Black.
"We have our sort of hero archetypes that are presented to us in movies and stuff like that, and that's just different from what the actual history is. And I think the more that we tell various stories, the more we get a sense of what actually exists," Brooks said.
Brooks hopes the comic book passes on the story of Nat Love to the next generation.
"If you have a pencil and paper, you can create. And I think that low barrier to entry makes for really beautiful stories," Brooks said about comic books. "It is approachable because it's accessible, and it's an engaging way to tell a story."
A digitized version of the comic book is on display at the Denver Art Museum as part of a permanent exhibit, according to Brooks.
Copies of "Nat Love: A Cowboy's Life" can be purchased through Brooks's website.
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