New Engineering by Yuichi Yokoyama

New Engineering by Yuichi Yokoyama - 232 pages

Whereas the two books by Yuichi Yokoyama I've previously posted here (Garden and Travel) were each complete graphic novels, New Engineering is a collection of shorter works.  Most of these shorter scenes focus on the creation of some odd and imaginative work of engineering: Workers create a mountain out of rocks, astro-turf, and fake trees and paint rivers down the sides.  A man photo copies another man's clothes and creates his own outfit by taping together the copies.  In the title story, workers create a glass room at the bottom of a a lake, and then celebrate their achievement.

A large minority of shorts in the collection focus on highly kinetic and acrobatic fight scenes and gymnastic feats featuring a similar cast of characters to Garden.  New Engineering adds to the "myth" of  Garden (if you could get away with using a word like "myth" to describe such avant garde compositions) by showing how some of the highly geometric and decorative masks and costumes  from the latter were "engineered."  It's almost as if the "stories" are a fun "how-to" on creating sculptural and architectural forms that have no real purpose other than their beauty and the rewards of the process of creation.

Like with the other books, I am again blown away by the way Yokoyama distills actions and movement into brisk procedural bursts.  One highly mechanic one page short is merely the requisite actions and exchanges of a man buying a drink from a vendor.  "Characters" in his works are merely anonymous role players who are either building something, breaking something, or admiring such works.  Who knows and who cares why they do it.  The process of creation and the beautiful architectural forms are their own reward.  As three of his anonymous characters put it after completing their underwater room, "The planned action has been competed.  The view is beautiful.  The project is a success."

Garden by Yuichi Yokoyama

Garden by Yuichi Yokoyama, 319 pages.

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.