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Yuichi Yokoyama




Title Creator Publisher Series Price
Color Engineering Yuichi Yokoyama PictureBox $29.75
($35.00 list)
Colorebig
Read more and comment... 		This one is a challenging excursion into the mental landscape, so you'll need some quality alone time, perhaps with some choice trance instrumentals blasting in your headphones blocking out any extraneous distractions, to take the trip that is Color Engineering.  We strongly recommend that you make your first run through solely focused on the visuals:  ignore the text and the translations – just take in the images as they build, one on the next; feel the rhythm.  Only after you have completed this journey, and have absorbed it, should you pay any attention to the text and notes.  Our quick formulaic take away is: ∫ f (Yuichi Yokoyama's Color Engineering) dx = F (Jennifer Bartlett's Rhapsody) - F (Jack Kirby's The Eternals).  In other words:  prepare yourself.  When you have finished the journey, you will doubtless come back with your own ideas.
Garden Yuichi Yokoyama PictureBox $22.75
($24.95 list)
Gardenbig
Read more and comment... 		Yokoyama's newest – and longest, weighing in at 319 pages – work to be translated into English is now on our shelves.  Readers of Yokoyama's previous mind altering works, New Engineering and Travel, know what to expect:  monomaniacal manga rife with lucid layouts, novel narratives, power-packed pen & ink, revelatory riffs and spectacular sound effects that taken together add up to a new way of seeing the world presented as only comics can.  Garden presents a group of Yokoyama-oids as they work their way into a "garden" that has been metamorphozised and is more technology than nature.  In doing so, Yokoyama holds up a transformational mirror that forces us to confront our preconceived notions of the natural world.; from PictureBox, of course.
Bete Noire Ludovic Debeurme, Anke Feuchtenberger, Helge Reumann , Suzy Amakane and more ... Fantagraphics $9.95
($9.95 list)
Betenoire
Read more and comment... 		<<• edited by Chris Polkki •>>  Don't let the fact that some of your favorite comics anthologies are concluding their runs get you down:  there's a world of comics out there waiting to be discovered.  Take this swell 100-page anthology from 2005, for example.  We thought it was long gone, but we stumbled on a source and so are eager to let late-comers in on this swell package of comics from around the world, with a special emphasis on the Japanese avant garde.  Bête Noire features what we believe was the first North American publication of Yuichi Yokoyama, as well as works by fellow Japanese manga masters Junko Mizuno, Ichiba Daisuke, Takeshi Nemoto and Suzy Amakane.  Also on hand are Helge Reumann of Switzerland, Anke Feuchtenberger of Germany, Ludovic Debeurme, Lucie Durbiano and Caroline Sury of France, as well as artists from Italy, Spain, Finland, along with Kevin Scalzo, Renée French and cover artist David Heatley from the USA.  Recommended for readers of Kramers Ergot, MOME and Blood Orange (which Mr. Polkki also edited).
Travel Yuichi Yokoyama PictureBox $17.77
($19.99 list)
Travelmed
Read more and comment... 		While perhaps not as hotly awaited as PM2, this year's follow-up to last year's New Engineering  (which was the amazing US debut for Japanese manga magician Yokoyama) is, for our money, the sequel of the year.  Anyone wanting to see truly original, ground-breaking comics work need look no further than this unassuming volume.  It may not seem like much sitting there on the shelf, but once you open it up and let its contents pour out as you pore over its pages you will find yourself taken out of your body and travelling to realms of mind over matter, racing at a pace you didn't know you were capable of.  A very strong rhythmic component was already evident in Yokoyama's work in the short pieces collected in New Engineering.  With Travel, a single piece of almost 200 pages, the rhythm has been intensified and become an indefatiguable beat that gives the impression that it might just be the pulse of the world.   Every motion, no matter how mundane -- from the turning of one's head, to the stubbing out of a cigarette -- is rendered with a dynamism and a sense of urgency that focuses the reader's attention in a startling way and serves to bring alive every instant; "never a dull moment," indeed.  You will go back to this book again and again trying to unlock its mysteries.  This work conveys movement through space in time in sequential images that alchemically reflect the manner in which human consciousness is being reformatted by being enveloped in a landscape composed of ever increasing loads of information that must be processed at ever increasing rates of speed.  This is all the more amazing given that this work is text free and entirely imagematic.  It does, however, come equipped with an introduction by Paul Karasik and an appendix featuring commentary by Yokoyama himself.  Recommended!
New Engineering Yuichi Yokoyama PictureBox $17.77
($19.95 list)
Newengine
Read more and comment... 		Whether you're a manga fan scouting for the best and most challenging new comics from Japan, a straight ahead comics maniac who will take good new comics wherever you find them, or a connoisseur of fine art regardless of the form it takes, New Engineering is for you.  Based in Tokyo, New Engineering creator Yokoyama is an art school graduate whose primary medium for the first five years of his career was oil painting.  He became attracted to manga because he wanted to "make serialized paintings."  As a result, Yokoyama's comics are focused on communicating his ideas from a painterly perspective, with a keen interest in the flow between images and the way in which comics/manga possess a temporal dimension that is lacking in single image painting, rather than relying on narrative.  He is, in other words, more interested in showing than telling.  Visual impact is the aim here and the images provided by this volume are clear, clean and strong; and very much engaged in forging a dialectical bond between an exaggerated western perspective and a highly iconic Japanese composition.  Interested in confronting and experiencing visually exciting work that challenges the conventions of comics, adding to its vocabulary and grammar?  Well then, there are precious few works that do this as completely as New Engineering.
The Ganzfeld 5: Japanada Yuichi Yokoyama, Marc Bell, Julie Doucet, Dan Nadel and more ... PictureBox The Ganzfeld $25.00
($29.95 list)
Ganz5
Read more and comment... 		edited by Dan Nadel w/ Marc Bell & Yuki Minami You'll want to strap yourself in before cracking open the latest issue of The Ganzfeld, as the going gets going and doesn't stop until it's solid gone, and things get so far out you might wonder where it is you've gotten to.  Well, the answer, if you haven't already guessed, is, of course:  Japanada!  The artists featured in this issue all hail from either Japan or Canada -- hence the title -- and the end result could be seen as an imaginary island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, but we'll assert here that it would be more accurately described as representing a heretofore unexplored province of the mind; more a state of mind than a place on a map.  This volume invites you to get away from the restrictive conformity of life in these United States and take a walk on the wild shores of Japanada where anything goes.  Here you'll find artistic risk taking the like of which you aren't likely to find between any other two covers.  You'll discover new and daring works by (from Japan): Saseo Ono, Shigeru Sugiura, Keiichi Tanaami, King Terry, Eye Yamatsuka, Misaki Kawui, Yuichi Yokoyama; (and from Canada) Julie Doucet, Bobo Boutin & Dominique Pétrin, "the All-Star Schnauzer Band", Tommy Lacroix, Amy Lockhart, Owen Plummer &  Andrew Dick, Scott Evans, Mark Connery and Shayne Ehman.  Each artist's work is prefaced by a short - or not so short -- essay to help get the reader up to speed and ready to confront the artistic frenzies of Japanada.