Having read Yuichi Yokoyama's Travel(see previous post), I was eager to read more. Garden is very much in the same vein as Travel with its lack of narrative and focus on movement and landscape.
A group of explorers with varied physiological make-up (many have strange objects for heads and geometric shapes for hands) traverse bizarre manufactured landscapes, confronting physically and mentally demanding challenges and discovering exciting new landscapes, machines, rooms, and roads. All the while, its growing hoard of explorers discuss the purpose of what they've found and the best route forward.
The feel of the book is somewhere between playing a highly abstract video game and being pulled forward though a strange and vivid dreamscape. Garden's world is one of unlimited discovery, a kind of child's playground for its strange characters to crawl, climb, and glide over. There's a camera that projects your face on a mountain, jets that fly over taking aerial photographs that rain to the ground like puzzle pieces that form a map, and a town where hills, houses, and trees are all on castors and can be moved around at will. There is a staggering amount of architectural/spatial imagination packed into its 319 briskly read pages.
I enjoyed Garden even more than Travel. For me, Yokoyama's work is an exciting new direction in comics that I hope to see much more of.
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