ABSTRACT
Drawing on the historically ‘thick’ contexts of Haida suppression and comics racism, this chapter explores multiple sites of cultural and ecological violence in Red: A Haida Manga. Originally composed as a composite mural of what creator Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas terms ‘Haida Manga,’ and subsequently repackaged as a graphic novel, this intriguing text combines storytelling techniques associated with the Pacific Northwest to create a resonant and timely allegory about how violence can proliferate violence. On the surface, it is a tale of the tragic and eponymous, coming of age protagonist, Red. Yet it is clear that Yahgulanaas’s painstakingly detailed text has amalgamated several intertextual and transcultural myths. In playing between different levels of satire and humour, between time and space, and between visual and verbal elements, the text highlights familiar ways of reading and seeing while it ‘defamiliarizes’ readers at the same time. These are all strategies as part of the text’s general aim to show interconnected social and ecological agencies while indicting anthropocentric—often invisibly naturalised—structures of domination and war.
