Mali and Puuj are back for another adventure in new graphic novel

Four years ago, Mi’kmaq author and comic books creator Brandon Mitchell set up the world of young Mali and her Little People companion Pugulatmu’j (Puuj). Now his second graphic novel in the Mali and Puuj adventure series, The Search for Gluscap, is scheduled for release early next month.

“I had a blast writing this,” said Mitchell. “This was a story that was in me for…the longest time…I had already had this one in the chamber, but I (couldn’t) tell this story yet without creating the world. So the first book (Adventures of the Pugulatmu'j: Giju's Gift) was about introducing the readers to a world that I had created. And then this one is opening up the floodgates.”

In The Search for Gluscap, Mitchell brings together a “real amalgamation of everything I kind of grew up with,” he said. “This is almost my childhood in the book.”

After an unsuccessful fishing trip, Mali’s dad tells her about Gluscap, “the protector of all living things” and how he came down from the forest to take on giant beavers that had built a huge dam across the river preventing the salmon from reaching their spawning grounds.

As Gluscap couldn’t be everywhere, Puuj tells Mali that Gluscap made the giant serpent (jipijga'm) the Guardian of the Waters.

Mali and Puuj need to save the great serpent, but they can’t do that without Gluscap’s help and that feat becomes more difficult as no one has seen Gluscap for a long time.

Mali’s grandfather fleshes out Gluscap’s story a little further and tells her about the Great Blue Heron (Tmgwatignej), which he always looks for “when times are hard.” 

Mitchell points out that when Mali’s dad is talking “it's super muscular and super over the top.” He said he wanted that to be a reflection of how he grew up on comic books in the ‘90s, “which were always big muscles and big action.”

But when Mali’s grandpa tells the tale “it’s more traditional.” It’s also a reflection, says Mitchell, of the research he has done over time to learn more about his culture. 

“I want to represent our petroglyphs styles in the form of storytelling,” he said.

At the heart of the story is how “too much outside change…can disrupt the balance of nature,” Mitchell writes.

That’s a lesson Mitchell learned at age six or seven when fishing with his own father and being attacked by mosquitoes. He got mad and said he didn’t need mosquitoes and wished they didn’t exist. His father pointed out that fish need them. There’s a cycle, said his dad.

“The way that he described things is everything's connected and…there's a balance that needs to be respected,” said Mitchell. It was one of those lessons that stuck, he said. “There's a delicate balance or delicate scale with us and nature.”

Along with recording the oral stories in a graphic novel, Mitchell also includes more of the Mi’kmaq language in this second adventure than he did in the first. 

“It's important to see our language, and it's important to see how you can apply our language to media…Our language is endangered…so I'm trying to do my best to preserve a way of life, really, and a way of communicating,” said Mitchell, who is from Listuguj First Nation in Quebec. He now resides in Fredericton, N.B.

Mitchell is hopeful that seeing Mi’kmaq in a graphic novel will encourage young Mi’kmaq readers, ages six to eight, “to take that next step. If they don't understand how it sounds or what that word means, then there's other resources. I want to give them a breadcrumb trail of saying ‘This is where you go next.’”

He also hopes The Search for Gluscap will encourage non-Indigenous kids to have a “sense of wonder” and want to learn more about the Mi’kmaq people and their stories.

The Search for Gluscap is illustrated by Veronika Barinova, who also illustrated Giju's Gift.

 It was easy working together, said Mitchell. “We not just understood each other, we interpret each other's art forms…Whatever I wrote, I knew how she was going to capture it. So it helped me as I was writing the script.” 

Mitchell says he also sent photographs of where he fished as a youngster and of Sugar Loaf Mountain and other significant locations to help the illustration process.

The Search for Gluscap is published by Highwater Press and will be released May 5. It can be ordered through https://www.indigo.ca/en-ca/the-search-for-gluscap/9781774920510.html