Red delights me beyond measure. Author and artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas has created a new art form — Haida manga — that honours his heritage as well as the Japanese friends of his ancestors. Haida art is easily recognized throughout the world by its distinctive shapes and forms, while Manga originated in Japan shortly after the Second World War and was an amalgam of traditional Japanese art and the American comic books left in Japan by soldiers. The strips of stories became very popular. In 2006, Manga was a $4-billion-a-year industry and so prevalent that even the prime minister’s office, under Aso Taro, used the style for government documents. Yahgulanaas, a Haida artist and activist for his people, has combined Haida art and manga to tell a traditional tale of a woman stolen from her home and later found by her brother, who was obsessed with retrieving her. That in itself is wildly imaginative and a boldly beautiful creation, but Yahgulanaas goes further and makes the whole set of images a composite. There is an overlay of Haida images that aren’t constrained to one panel. It is most evident when one opens the dust jacket and scans the entire set of images to see what has been painted. One is brought into the artist’s head and gets a glimpse of how he views the world — not linear, not restricted, but connected and interdependent. “In the early 1900s Haida men from Massett hunted seals across the northern Pacific and found there a city where they could walk and live as full human beings,” says Yahgulanaas. “What a relief. Hakodate, Hokaido and Japan were a moment’s rest from the steady assault they experienced [in Canada].” “I see the Pacific Ocean as a connection, a shared experience that joins island peoples together. In many ways the Canadian challenges and its euro-centric histories are oppositional to indigenous peoples. Haida manga started as a minor and, honestly, my personal inconsequential exploration of a time when men from my village enjoyed relief, hospitality and sanctuary in northern Japan,” he says. Another attitude that sets him apart from most artists and authors is he invites readers to fully explore the images he created by destroying the book. "Red" is a book designed to be destroyed,” he writes. “Like the character Red — and I suppose like all things — the actual book, pages and binding will meet its end. A book is as sacred as anything and everything else is, but again we will pass into some other form. So I propose to the reader that they can take an active role in that inevitable change we all experience. In this way they can consider their role as active player, supplanting the role of author/artist as authority/creator. Bold readers might want to take two books apart and reform the disjointed pages into one new manifestation, the mural. Red, the character, arises again as the character of his sister’s son.” Yahgulanaas will be interviewed as part of WordFest. Examine the book and you may have many questions to ask him about his unique art.