ÉDITIONS MATIÈRE

For a reader who has read and looked at too many comics and drawings in his lifetime, this book might just restore his faith in the medium [+]

Yuichi Yokoyama’s Baby boom, out since November 2013 from French publisher Éditions Matière, could be described as a work of sequential drawing in its purest form. For the inexperienced reader it might prove a challenge to read, since its language is, apart from the omnipresent onomatopoeia, purely visual. It is a collection of forty-five short comics chronicling the “adventures” of a bird-man and a baby chick that looks like a dandelion puff — or an explosion, for that matter, if the title “Baby boom” is any indication. Much like in Yokoyama’s other comics, the characters are almost completely devoid of personality or psychology. The subject of the stories, then, seem to be the actions of the protagonists rather than what drives them; the reader never gets to glimpse at what might be the reason or the motivation for their actions. The drawings are a singular study of movement, speed and sound. This might seem familiar for readers of Yokoyama’s other works, which tell depersonalized stories of bodies in movement (such as Voyage) or even movement without bodies at all, as in Travaux publics, where anthropomorphic figures only appear as observers and removed operators of an automated and enigmatic terraforming and landscaping mechanism. Baby boom, however, adds humour to the equation and also marks a departure from Yokoyama’s signature clean black-and-white drawing style. The originals for Baby boom were drawn with pigment-ink markers, provided to Yokoyama by his Tokyoite gallery Arataniurano on the occasion of a public drawing performance. They seem to have been done very quickly and could be mistaken for storyboard sketches, but it is exactly this quality that gives them their incomparable spontaneity. On the production side, publishers Laurent Bruel and Nicolas Frühauf captured the spirit of the original drawings by printing the book not with the usual four colour printing process, but instead by choosing together with Yokoyama six Pantone colours which most closely reproduced the effects of contrast present in the originals. This results in incredibly luminous colours that could never have been achieved with a standard printing process. For a reader who has read and looked at too many comics and drawings in his lifetime, this book might just restore his faith in the medium and remind him of the joy that can be procured from looking at a sequence of interconnected images. It achieves this by going back to the very basics: the story titled “The ball”, for example, explores over eight pages the simple action of throwing back and forth a baseball. We see the thrower leaning back and throwing the ball, the ball flying, the catcher readying himself and catching the ball, throwing it back, and so forth. Gradually, the force that the bird-man and the baby chick put behind their pitches rises: they have to run fast and reach out in order to catch the ball, until the throwing becomes so vigorous that both start to miss the ball, sliding on the ground as the ball zooms past them. The drawings mirror the ever more extreme movements and actions — perspectives become more radical and movement lines stronger. In the end, the baby throws the ball too far and the two protagonists look on it as it floats away in a river. But even if this ending might be interpreted as the “joke” or “point” of the story, it only serves as an alibi of a finale, since it is evident that what this eight-page exercise is about is seeing the protagonists throw, run, reach, jump and slide with an ever-increasing intensity. In all of the stories, the baby chick remains absolutely stoic. It has a distinguishable beak, as well as pair of eyes, but they never seem to express anything. Any kind of emotion has to be inferred by the reader while taking into account the context of the story. It is exactly this absence of expression and the total reliance on context that make the comics incredibly funny. After the baby chick is introduced in the first stories as a “baby-like” character (It gets fed, put in a stroller, bathed, and so on), the reader soon gets to observe it doing utterly un-baby-like activities: Cleaning the house, diving in the sea, dancing wildly in a disco, riding a horse and cooking a full meal with the help of a very sharp knife... while keeping a perfect pokerface. We even see it in the role of a gangster boss in “Bad neighbourhood” (“Quartier louche”) and, multiplied, as a variety of subaquatic species in “Great blue” (“Grand bleu”). At the end of the book, the reader discovers a final enigma: a section named “Description of the pages by the author”, which contains a sort of voice-over text for some (but not all) of the stories. The peculiar thing about these descriptions is that one would suppose that the author might reveal something elucidating about the story or his intentions behind it, but this is not the case. Instead, the reader discovers that the commentary describing the pages in fact raises more questions than it answers. As an example, the first page of the first story in the book. One is under the impression that Yokoyama is writing this description not from the perspective of an omniscient author, but rather from the perspective of a reader who sees the comic for the first time. He even starts to speculate about the meaning of the drawings, where one might suppose that he would use the commentary to “explain” what is not evident from looking at the image. Thus, the reader experiences a doubling of the strangeness of the narrative. Instead of piercing the enigma that surrounds the images, Yokoyama merely adds a layer of textual enigma. Or, as the other side of the same coin, he provides information that is not at all hinted at in the images, such as in “Great blue” (“Grand bleu”). Here it seems that Yokoyama allows us to have a glimpse of his own associations when looking at his images, associations that are drifting off either to anecdotal facts (70%...) or constant repetitions: Yet another unknown species! Combined with the ever-present face of the baby chick on all the strange underwater creatures, we are confronted with an utterly confusing, but at the same time incredibly funny and cheerful multitude of significations which leaves us with our mouths agape in amazement. An amazement, by the way, that seems to be one of the main recurring sentiments that Yokoyama’s stories seek to communicate: more often than not the stories in Baby boom, but also the stories in his other collections, end with a grand magnificent panorama of something marvellous. A very rare posture for an author considered to be part of some sort of independent scene (And whose members usually practice either humility or irony). Yokoyama, on the other hand, almost seems to be a Futurist born a century late with all his fascination for speed, movement, and technology. And yet, a look at his commentary shows that these endings are often open and seldom definitive: the last story in the book ends with a great number of babies exiting a spacecraft and flying off into space, and Yokoyama asks: “Where could they be going?” His answer, to himself: “They are going to the other planet to see if there are clouds and oceans like on Earth.” Just as he is asking, this time without answer, at the end of the first story in the book: “All the children, united in a great crowd and illuminated by the sun, are commencing to traverse a huge park. Where are they going?” Yokoyama marvels at his own stories. And we marvel with him. [-]