Yahgulanaas on a stamp
January 14th, 2026
Canada Post has unveiled a new national stamp celebrating Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, recognizing the profound impact of his graphic novel Red, A Haida Manga (D&M, 2014) on Canadian visual culture. Issued on November 20, 2025, the stamp is part of the Graphic Novelists (2025) series and is featured on an Official First Day Cover cancelled in Prince Rupert, British Columbia—Yahgulanaas’s birthplace.
One of six stamps in the series, the Yahgulanaas issue pays tribute to Red, A Haida Manga, the award-winning 2009 graphic novel that introduced the world to “Haida Manga,” a distinctive visual language blending Haida formline design with Asian brush techniques and manga-style storytelling. The stamp illustration, created exclusively for Canada Post, depicts Red reading his own story, while the cancellation mark features an open graphic novel.
The Official First Day Cover includes a photograph of the book’s cover on the front and an interior page on the back, accompanied by contextual text about the artist and the work. The broader Graphic Novelists series—second in a two-part tribute following a 2024 release—also honours Kate Beaton, Jimmy Beaulieu, Guy Delisle, Julie Doucet and Bryan Lee O’Malley, highlighting the diversity and influence of Canadian graphic storytelling.
The stamp marks a significant milestone in Yahgulanaas’s career, underscoring the national and international resonance of Red, A Haida Manga, a tragic story drawn from Haida oral tradition about two orphaned siblings whose lives are overtaken by cycles of revenge. Uniquely, the book’s pages can be removed and assembled into a 7.5-square-metre continuous watercolour fresco, reinforcing Yahgulanaas’s challenge to conventional narrative and artistic boundaries.
MNY in the studio; production of RED, photo Jeanne Taylor. 2009.
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