JAJ: A Haida Manga

by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas

Overview

With gorgeous imagery, visual artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas brings to life the tumultuous history of first contact between Europeans and Indigenous peoples and the early colonization by the Europeans of the northern West Coast.

Yahgulanaas uses a blend of traditional and modern art, eschewing the traditional boxes of comic books for the flowing shapes of North Pacific iconography. The panels are filled with colourful and expressive watercolour paintings. The panels of each page, if removed and assembled into one whole image, form a large image reminiscent of a woven robe.

The story follows several historical figures, including Johan Adrian Jacobsen (JAJ), who comes to the Haida village of Masset to collect specimens for a German museum, through a time span that includes first contact, the devastation of the smallpox epidemic, and the mass resettlement of disenfranchised peoples, both Indigenous and European.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771623537
Publisher:	Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.
Publication date:	09/26/2023
Pages:	132
Sales rank:	722,515
Product dimensions:	8.00(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas is an internationally renowned artist and award-winning author. His previous Haida Manga include Red (2009) and Carpe Fin (2019). He is from the North Pacific archipelago of Haida Gwaii and now lives on an island in the Salish sea with his family.

Editorial Reviews

09/25/2023

Indigenous artist Yahgulanaas follows up his similarly styled Red with an eclectic comic—adapted from a mural commissioned by Berlin’s Humboldt Forum—that employs calligraphy and other flourishes to detail complex histories of Native Haida peoples encountering Europeans on Canada’s West Coast. The first European settlers arrive in the region of Maktali (present-day Victoria) seeking shelter from a storm out at sea and are depicted as working with the Haida to upkeep the land. But as the British start settling in droves, Indigenous laws protecting resources are no match for colonial greed. When smallpox breaks out in 1862, the British refuse to vaccinate the Indigenous peoples, despite known protocols and available drugs. Yahgulanaas focuses on two key figures: Johan Adrian Jacobsen (or Jaj), a Norwegian explorer sent by a museum in Berlin to collect Indigenous artifacts in the 1880s, and George, a mixed-race Indigenous survivor of the smallpox epidemic who travels to Maktali for work and to possibly meet his European father. Each sequence of the comic is a double spread, blending the dynamism of manga-style brushstrokes with watercolors and Indigenous forms into a hybrid that Yahgulanaas terms “Haida Manga.” The simple text jumps around, which can make piecing the story together a challenge. While the structure isn’t always intuitive, there is meaning embedded in the way readers must slow down and sit with the often painful visuals to understand the narrative. This experimental art object delivers a moving message. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"This book is a necessary tale told by the perfect voice at the right time. It also uses graphic imagery in a way I've not seen before, and it feels ground-breaking." —Douglas Coupland

“Utterly remarkable is the confluence of history, family ancestry, fine art, inventive bookmaking—all available to witness here in Yahgulanaas's unforgettable gift of Haida Manga.” —Shelf Awareness

“This experimental art object delivers a moving message.” —Publishers Weekly

"a masterpiece of cultural mash-up and historic grief…In his magisterial version of the genre, a unique blend of Haida and Japanese Manga imagery is put to work conveying historic truth and profound, nuanced human tragedy in a visually powerful form." —Vancouver Sun

"Yahgulanaas has a way with a story. His work leaps off the page, smacks you in the face, and then explodes linear narratives like an atomic bomb." —The Tyee

"Tradition and innovation combine in Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’s Haida manga." —Quill & Quire

"A tale of history and humanization unfold in colorful 'Haida Manga'" —The Globe and Mail

From the Publisher