Ka-POW! BAM!!! Comic books in the 1950s and ’60s really did a number on young artists-to-be. They inspired important artists in all disciplines—Roy Lichtenstein and Takashi Murakami in visual arts, Steven Spielberg and Guillermo del Toro in film, David Bowie in music, and Art Spiegelman in literary arts to name just the more obvious ones.

Comic books were printed on the cheapest newsprint, making them easy to produce and distribute. They were considered more like junk mail than valued cultural artifacts. By the ’60s they were reaching even the remote archipelago of Haida Gwaii, where a boy named Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas avidly consumed them.

Yahgulanaas came from a distinguished lineage of Haida artists, such as Delores Churchill, Isabella Edenshaw, and Charles Edenshaw. He was introduced to Haida iconography and traditional formline designs by his older cousin, carver Robert Davidson, a central figure in the modern revival of Haida art. In 1969, Davidson’s first totem pole was raised in a public ceremony that reasserted Haida cultural continuity after decades of suppression. Yahgulanaas apprenticed with his cousin before striking off on his own path.

Yahgulanaas first made his mark with activism rather than art. He helped to lead and organize protests against industrial logging operations in the southern part of Haida Gwaii. The famously successful blockade became a model in the larger struggle to protect old-growth forests throughout coastal British Columbia.

That ability to assert Haida sovereignty and stewardship over ancestral lands ties directly to his artistic practices. When he stepped back from political organizing, he turned to the art-form of comics, but comics that were in harmony with the traditional Haida visual vocabulary.

“I’m trying to take a complex, ancient iconic art form — which is totem poles, which is my cultural birthright, I guess — and translate that in a way that becomes accessible to regular people…” 
(Reddit AMA, 2014)

In exploring the fertile ground between contemporary comic book arts and traditional Haida storytelling, Yahgulanaas knew comics could register with a wider public beyond the rarified spaces in which Indigenous art is typically displayed. By this time comics were no longer classed as junk; they had become recognized as a culturally legitimate form. And he knew the Haida nation was resurgent. (In 2010, the Queen Charlotte Islands were officially renamed Haida Gwaii — the result of a long process of Indigenous political advocacy.)

Things clicked into higher gear when his Japanese students referred to his work as Manga, a traditional Japanese form that he had not yet encountered. This was in the ’90s when it was still niche, though that was about to change.

Yahgulanaas studied the roots of the Manga form — learning from the masters yet again. He eventually coined the term “Haida Manga” for the hybrid graphic novels he was forging. The most successful example of Haida Manga is Red: A Haida Manga, which has been widely exhibited, taught, and discussed internationally.

In works like Red, classic Haida formlines define the panels within which Yahgulanaas depicts discrete scenes in his narrative. In comics, the space between panels are known as “gutters,” and they are typically white (the color of the paper). In Haida Manga, the black formline gutters are lifted up, they are positive marks with a meaning, a history, and a presence of their own. In fact the formlines tell a story even as they define the negative spaces or panels in which the “main” narrative unfolds. They flow across each two-page spread and then continue on the following page or spread, another level of design. Even further: the pages can be assembled into one continuous mural, allowing the story to be read either sequentially in time or viewed spatially all at once.

The strategy is a sort of conceptual intervention: Western comics privilege linear reading, while Northwest Coast Indigenous art traditions often emphasize continuous form, non-linear narrative, and the integration of image, story, and space.

All this can seem complicated, and in recent works, Yahgulanaas delights in disorienting the reader/viewer even further. He doesn’t feel that this conflicts with his goal of making the work accessible to readers of all ages and backgrounds.

“What I am trying to do is force the observer to become an active participant. I am trying to undermine my OWN authority and privilege as an artist. I am trying to say ‘You become engaged. Claim your own sovereign authority.’” 
(Reddit AMA, 2014)

Yahgulanaas’s work is on view through February 3 at Stonington Gallery. This provides a golden opportunity to get acquainted with a celebrated figure and a dynamic hybrid artform. The show’s emphasis is on work produced prior to Red, but Red and individual pages and sheets from Red and other works are available in 
different formats.

To see Yahgulanaas’s most recent work, consider a trip to the Vancouver Art Gallery’s group exhibition, “We who have known tides: Indigenous Art from the Collection.” Within this exhibit, the Gallery unveils a major multi-year commission from Yahgulanaas called “Clan Hat,” and it marks the beginning of an expansive story cycle and a new narrative world. 

Tom McDonald
Tom McDonald is a writer and musician living on Bainbridge Island, Washington.

“Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas: Drawing the World Anew” is on view Tuesday through Friday, from January 8 through February 3 at Stonington Gallery, located at 125 South Jackson Street in Seattle, Washington. For more information, visit www.stoningtongallery.com.