JAJ: A Haida Manga

by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas

Douglas & McIntyre

JAJ: A Haida Manga

by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas

Douglas & McIntyre

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.

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Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas is a visual artist, storyteller and public speaker. Raised on Haida Gwaii, he melds cultural hybridity and his political experiences as an Indigenous person with contemporary graphic literature to produce a unique genre called Haida Manga. His books include Flight of the Hummingbird (Greystone, 2008), Red (Douglas & McIntyre, 2009 and 2011) and Carpe Fin (Douglas & McIntyre, 2019). JAJ is his third Haida Manga, publishing in 2023 with Douglas & McIntyre. He lives in Canada with his wife and daughter, close to the Two Sisters Mountain on an island in the Salish Sea.

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