Comics

Graphic Novel Review: JAJ – A HAIDA MANGA by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas

Jaj – A Haida Manga

Cartoonist: Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas
Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
Publication Date: May 2023

In Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’s acknowledgements to Jaj: A Haida Manga he says near the end, “all errors should be taken as my own. And if there are too many, please remember that this is just a comic book.” I hope the author and you, reader, will forgive me for focusing on this small tongue-in-cheek moment a little more than most. This is just a comic book review after all.

I’ve heard the phrase “this is just a comic book” many times from students, friends, comic readers, comic creators, and once while walking past the book section in Target. I’ve heard it with other art as well: it’s just a book, a movie, a play, a painting. In its worst incarnations it’s meant as a judgement, a removal of critical thinking, “This is just a ____. You’re taking it too seriously.” In its best, and what I assume is intended in Jaj, as a “Relax. It’s just a _____.” In the latter, the phrase is meant to suggest that there are bigger things in the world beyond this piece of art. There are more pressing, serious matters that we can turn our attention towards. This can be true, I think. I also think it’s true that art is the strongest way to connect, see, understand other humans.

I’ve used the phrase, myself, both ways. Meant it each time. After reading Jaj, this was not the phrase that came to mind. It feels off to call this “just a comic book” like when my kid puts an ice cube in a perfectly warm cup of cocoa on a cold day. It feels inaccurate because I wasn’t able to pick up my jaw until minutes after the book ends with the provocative question, “and the totem pole?”

Jaj – A Haida Manga is the story of the Haida people of Masset and their first contact with Johan Adrian Jacobsen, a fisherman and aspiring ethnologist who is contracted to collect “cultural items” for the Humboldt Museum in Berlin. But this is a simplification, because the book covers things like the relationship between the Haida (and other native peoples) with the British, specifically the British’s brutal war crimes of intentionally spreading disease in native communities. It also follows characters like George and Wiba who play different roles in the Jacobsen narrative and in the broader history of the region. To give this book a fair summary would take many more words than this review can spare because Yahgulanaas also situates the narratives he’s telling in the history of political movements, Jewish resistance to germ warfare, and critiques of war as a tool for the rich to get richer. Hell of a comic book by any standard.

There is also a stunning mix of art styles at play throughout the book. Yahgulanaas deploys a range of styles from cartooning to abstraction to depict different characters, time periods, and emotional registers. The color palate alone of thick black lines between images (more on this soon) and violent reds of disease are downright astonishing. Each color on each page seems chosen to highlight, and work with, the image he’s created. The blue of the ocean or a slightly different blue of a body being picked at by birds. Each choice gives the reader time to pause and consider the page or panel.

The images also have a depth that needs time to take in. There’s detail inside detail and moments where you’re trying to see what the writing is describing, though there’s always a little more nuance than what the words provide. On a page describing the devastation to the environment that expansions of colonialism caused, the reader is treated to the likenesses of Ohiyesa, Dr. Charles Eastman and Tatanka Iyotake, Sitting Bull with a massive map-like image listing dates of traumatic events in Native North American history. The connections between the words and image aren’t immediately obvious, but given time, the severity of the historical traumas seep deep into the reading experience. This is nothing less than a comic book.

The most compelling part of Jaj though is the way that it is designed. Originally, this work was an eight-square meter mural that was commissioned by the Humbolt Museum in Berlin, Germany. Though I was unable to do this, you can take two copies of this book and reassemble the images to reflect the original mural. The pages, then, are sometimes part of a larger whole with the thick black gutters often a clue for which images connect to others. While this doesn’t affect the reading of the book as it’s laid out, it adds an additional layer of meaning to the pages. Reading it in the order it is gives you a story and a, somewhat, linear narrative while matching some of the pages with others later in the book, especially those that would be just above or below another, provides the reader with an additional layer of intertextuality to discover. This is, honestly, one of the most fascinating parts of the comic for me. The ability for the reader to be an active participant in the meaning making of the comic by having to puzzle together some of the pages into larger pieces, allows Jaj to do more than tell a linear story. Comics, as a medium, is uniquely suited for this type of discovery and play in the form itself while other types of art would be labeled more experimental to do the same.

The level of interaction and incredible achievement of Jaj – A Haida Manga really gives insight into what a comic book can be. While working within formal genre constraints is it’s own challenge, the way that Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas transforms a physical mural into a book length conversation around history, identity, and human existence is nothing short of breath taking. This book begs you to take time with it like a work of visual art in a museum. It also challenges you to make connections between things that, at first, seem unconnected. The book asks you to read a comic, seemingly a simple activity, but presents to you something that’s much larger on the inside. Jaj makes me wonder how many universes these comics and their little boxes can truly hold. How much depth can something as simple as a comic book hold?

Verdict: Buy it and send me pictures of the mural if you’ve seen it in person


Jaj – A Haida Manga is available now

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