“This Haida manga intriguingly blends graphic storytelling with a fine art sensibility… Yahgulanaas communicates via an arresting series of images evoking the traditional visual arts of the Haida people.” —Publisher’s Weekly

The brilliant follow-up to RED: A Haida Manga — another stunningly inventive retelling of an ancient Haida tale.

The latest offering from acclaimed graphic artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, War of the Blink is a stunning full-colour graphic novel about war and peace.

It is the story of a fisherman who suspects a party of raiders is descending upon his island home. When his warnings are not heeded, the man sets out to guard the village on his own, only to find himself caught up in a high-stakes game of kidnap and bluff.

All this leads to a final showdown, in which one of the sides must blink first—and the villagers find a surprising way to save face and their home, and avoid bloodshed.

Combining traditional Northwest coast and Japanese comic art in Yahgulanaas’ own, dizzingly original mish-mash, War of the Blink is a timeless fable about the bravery it takes to choose peace over war.

An earlier version of the artwork was displayed at the Vancouver Art Gallery a part of the groundbreaking exhibition “Raven Travelling.”

Review Quotes and Endorsements

“Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas has invented a new form of graphic storytelling seen in full colour in his beautiful new book …The intricate watercolour changes the whole experience of the book, from linear and fixed to all over and fluid. — Calgary Herald
“Yahgulanaas blends … two distinct styles together into something wholly original.” — National Post
“Fusing the bold primary colours and geometric forms characteristic of classical Haida visual art with the emotionally expressive cartooning style of Japanese manga ... the traditional Haida story, freighted with all the sombre inevitability of Sophocles, is told in 108 pages of spectacularly beautiful, hand-painted images.”
—Vancouver Review
“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.” — FastForward Weekly

Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas is the creator of Haida Manga, a distinctive fusion of pop graphics, Haida art and Japanese comic styles. His books include A Tale of Two Shamans; Flight of the Hummingbird, with an afterword by the Dalai Lama;Hachidori, a bestseller in Japan; and Red: A Haida Manga nominated for a BC Book Award, a Doug Wright Award for Best Book, and a 2010 Joe Shuster Award for Outstanding Canadian Cartoonist. RED was an Amazon.ca Top 100 book of 2009. Yahgulanaas is also a sculptor and graphic artist whose work is in the collections of the British Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver International Airport, City of Vancouver, City of Kamloops and University of British Columbia. He pulls from his 20 years of political experience in the Council of the Haida Nation and travels the world speaking to businesses, institutions and communities about social justice, community building, communication and change management. For more, see mny.ca. Yahgulanaas lives on an island in the Salish Sea, with his wife and daughter.

Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas' profile page