Yokoyama Yuichi

Neo-manga artist Yokoyama Yuichi is back with PLAZA! Inspired by Carnaval in Brazil, PLAZA offers a maniacal extravaganza of marching, dancing, leaping, firing, cheering, smashing, and exploding over the course of 225 eye-and-eardrum-confounding pages

As an anecdote on any voyage, three enigmatic protagonists seek for a fourth character in an environment in which even the most everyday action (watching TV, fishing, sleeping, taking a taxi) will turn strange. A place to discover and decipher characters. These are the components of this visual adventure that is called Iceland. A new surrealist tale by the creator of neo manga, the critically-acclaimed Yuichi Yokoyama. His frenetic visual style contrasts with the taciturn pace of the story and dialogue as a group of friends wander the high-latitude areas of the strange icy Far North looking for someone. Readers of Yokoyama's other stories may even recognize some characters.

Guys visit a city. They watch airplanes departing and arriving at an airport. They go on board a ship and across a river. Finally they arrive at a building as their destination. A man guides them to the"world map room." It seems they have an appointment there, although there is no description about the appointment. They see books on the shelves and have some desultory conversation. Then they go to the courtyard and carry on the conversation. They reach a pond with a sunken ship. The guide starts to explain the ship's history. The book ends.

Gekigaka Yuichi Yokoyama (born 1967) draws wordless narratives of scenarios that verge on visual abstraction. Stripped of any detail that might orient them in the past, present or future, they record the self-determined activities of machines and architectural structures in a pre- or post-human universe. With his fourth volume for PictureBox, designed and edited by the artist himself, Yokoyama broaches significant new terrain: color! Color Engineeringreproduces both older and unseen imagery from the 2000s with dozens of color drawings and paintings that were executed in 2010 during a six-week open studio event held in Tokyo, at which the public was able to view Yokoyama at work. A selection of these canvases is reproduced here as gatefold pages, and is integrated among comic-strip sequences executed in a variety of techniques: photography, loose marker drawings, hyper-real portraiture and much more. These sequences continue his investigations into the world of machines, architecture and post-human fashion, and are the first Yokoyama narratives to provide insight into the artist's personal world, in details of his rural habitat.

A crowd of makeshift astronauts embark on a group outing into space, but what at first glance looks like a serious and majestic interstellar odyssey quickly becomes a big mess. Undisciplined, unpredictable, burlesque, playful, some grumpy, some excited, but all very strange, Yûichi Yokoyama's astronauts evoke the unbridled and carefree characters in children's tales.

A group of friends is attempting to enter a garden just beyond a wall. When they succeed, the garden they finally enter is no Eden, but rather a massive landscape of machines, geometric forms and all manner of nonorganic objects.

A man Xeroxes his three-piece suit, cuts and edits the photocopies produced and adjusts them with sticky tape on the body of his friend. A guy makes an ad hoc mask with pieces of a ventilator. A third chisels himself a cap out of a solid piece of stone. Individuals let themselves be sprayed with glue before leaping into a container full of balls, leave, pebbles... A man catches a potted plant by the stem as it was falling down a building, whilst others engage in strange mechanical ballets or perilous acrobatics using torches, tulips and explosions... Here is how one covers one's body and here is what and how one uses it in the robotic, opaque, strange and enigmatic world of Yûchi Yokoyama. Through 12 speedy, geometric, sharp tales, New Bodies (after Public works, Fights, Travel, The Garden) continues the systematic exploration of the universe of the most singular graphic designers.