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Creating a Haida Manga: The Formline of Social Responsibility in <em>Red</em>

2014; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5250/studamerindilite.26.3.0041

1548-9590

Miriam Brown Spiers,

Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies

Creating a Haida MangaThe Formline of Social Responsibility in Red Miriam Brown Spiers (bio) Red is an example of a new genre that its author, Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, labels Haida manga. Initially, the form appears to be a loose blurring of the style and color scheme of traditional Haida art and the exaggerated illustrations typical of manga, or Japanese comics. The book also resembles a Western comic in that it is a story told through a combination of words and pictures, arranged at least loosely into a series of images that can be read left to right across the page to create a narrative arc. While the inspiration of both Haida art and manga is evident in Red, this new genre does not, at first glance, seem to be a distinct entity. When the formal rules of Haida art are applied to the text, however, Yahgulanaas's traditional philosophy and aesthetic emerge. Red is not simply a mash-up of popular genres; rather, it is the work of a traditionally trained Haida artist who is respectful of the culture and artistic traditions out of which he has emerged. Even though Yahgulanaas's adaptation of Haida art is vastly different from the work that has come before it, the Haida manga actually maintains and reinforces both the rules of the traditional art and the beliefs of the Haida people. Yahgulanaas says that the story in Red originates in "[o]ral narrative from my family's history" (Yahgulanaas, "Re: quick"). Thus, while the text may initially disorient readers who are unfamiliar with the conventions of Haida art, even the narrative aspect has been influenced by Yahgulanaas's family and community. Through its content as well as its form, Red insists upon the importance of balance in both art and life, a belief that is central to Haida culture. A closer examination reveals both Yahgulanaas's respect toward and innovation of traditional Haida art forms. According to Bill Holm, one of the distinguishing characteristics of Haida art is that its primary colors are black, red, and either green, blue, or blue-green (26). The most [End Page 41] important of these colors is black, which is used to create the formline, the "characteristic swelling and diminishing linelike figure delineating design units" in traditional Haida art (29). In the creation of the artwork, the formline is "outlined and then filled in," allowing the artist to vary the width of the line and also giving the artist "considerable control" over those lines (35). In Red, Yahgulanaas follows this traditional definition of the formline while expanding upon it in significant ways: it also separates the individual panels that make up the comic. As a result, the swelling and diminishing of the formline dictates the size and shape of the images that make up the work. True to its nature as one of "the fundamental elements of the art," the formline in Red controls the shape of the story and also forms the outline that connects each of the 108 pages into a single mural, as illustrated inside the jacket of the book (33). This outline is one of the most innovative formal aspects of Haida Manga. Like traditional Haida art, Red is a single, static image of three interlocking figures.1 As is evident from photos of Yahgulanaas working on Red in his studio, the book began as a large mural, the structure of which is dictated by the three figures depicted in the formline.2 But within that static image, literally inside the formline, Yahgulanaas has also created a sequence of images that work to tell a story. He tells this story chronologically, relying on the formline that shapes the original mural to separate images into a sequence within the narrative. That formline, already responsible for guiding the traditional mural, serves a double function by becoming the frames of the narrative, the black line working to both separate and juxtapose the sequential images that allow us to identify Red as a comic. In many comics, the artist can build the frame as a way of containing the narrative, but in the case of Red, Yahgulanaas had to find a way to tell the story...