Yokoyama’s Rubicon: Humanity/ Color/ Transcendence. […] Yokoyama’s second graphic novel, the recently translated Garden, also follows the logic of motion from beginning to end, of journey to destination. But in this book Yokoyama complicates things: Garden also begins with a destination, and for over 300 pages readers are invited to wonder if the journey it depicts is the same utilitarian movement through space depicted in Travel, or an end unto itself. Garden begins with a strong echo of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. A handful of the artist’s humanoid, fashion-forward characters stand assembled before a guard wearing a mask printed with a pattern that encourages the eyes to unfocus, and are denied entrance to the garden that memories of Travel suggest they have come a long way to see. Luckily, there is a breach in the wall that sections off the garden from the outside world — an outside world, crucially, that we are never allowed to see. By the end of page one, the characters we follow for the entirety of the narrative are through the wall and into the garden. […] Like only a few before him, all of whom are enshrined in whatever underwhelming immortality comics is capable of giving them, Yokoyama is making work so far ahead of the curve that it’s hard to know what to do with it. The very idea of Yokoyama rip‑off comics seems laughable: this is and always has been content that couldn’t possibly be divorced from the beautiful lines that create it, and vice versa. It seems unlikely indeed that stories about giant machines and uninformed architectural criticism will become the next catching thing in comics, and while there are plenty of artists working the line between canvas and cartoon or figuration and abstraction, none are doing it with such elevated skill or such intelligence of theory. With his last three books Yokoyama has pulled off a triumph of lit‑comics, a triumph of art‑comix, and an achingly gorgeous thing that sits somewhere in between. As with all great works, the only answer is probably to let their effect on the form work itself out. Truly special work, after all, only elevates its medium. Yokoyama has given us three pieces of art that are very special indeed, and it seems to me that the only reaction worth actively pursuing is to read them. [la version intégrale de l’article est à lire sur le blog]
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The Comics Journal, Matt Seneca, 11 novembre 2011
Yokoyama’s second graphic novel, the recently translated Garden, also follows the logic [+]