Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Red: A Haida Manga
You people with your graphic novels, you wouldn't know art if it … well, did something that only art can do. Who knows what that'd be, given the diversity and freedom of artistic production, but I bet that Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas would have some ideas about that.
Graphic novels are a legitimate art form, to be sure, but that's not quite what Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas has produced in Red: A Haida Manga. But it's also not manga as such, either, though Yahgulanaas has described it as such, nor folk tale nor history nor classical tragedy. I don't have much interest in questions of form generally, and less so for texts that clearly live in the borderlands, but it's worth setting Red deliberately apart. This book is like nothing you've seen before, and unless you've spent some time with stories of First Nations on the Pacific coast of North America, the story itself might not make sense to you.
Just don't let any of this get in the way of your picking up Red, because it's a very, very special book.
Does it mean anything to summarize the plot? To say that orphaned young Red comes to lead his people, that many years later he seeks revenge for the abduction of his sister, and that in stories, revenge is inseparable from tragedy?
Does it achieve anything to describe the visuals? To comment on the sense of movement between panels, the continuous overflowing of panel boundaries, the connections between pages into a single giant image, the overwhelming colours, the intersections between represented places and worlds?
Not every reader gets this book, and that's as it should be. It's a simple story with a significant moral component, rendered elliptically through remarkable imagery, and there are lots of prickly details here that'll turn off some readers. None of this means that it isn't remarkable.
Or you could just listen to Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas talk about Red. That's what I'm going to do.
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| Linked from West Coast Reader |
Just don't let any of this get in the way of your picking up Red, because it's a very, very special book.
Does it mean anything to summarize the plot? To say that orphaned young Red comes to lead his people, that many years later he seeks revenge for the abduction of his sister, and that in stories, revenge is inseparable from tragedy?
Does it achieve anything to describe the visuals? To comment on the sense of movement between panels, the continuous overflowing of panel boundaries, the connections between pages into a single giant image, the overwhelming colours, the intersections between represented places and worlds?
Not every reader gets this book, and that's as it should be. It's a simple story with a significant moral component, rendered elliptically through remarkable imagery, and there are lots of prickly details here that'll turn off some readers. None of this means that it isn't remarkable.
Or you could just listen to Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas talk about Red. That's what I'm going to do.
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