Few cartoonists of the moment are weirder or more original than Yuichi Yokoyama — his work obsessively diagrams architecture and design, and just barely clings to shreds of narrative.
Travel is remarkably entertaining, given that it’s a wordless, nearly 200-page account of an uneventful train voyage. Its first quarter concerns three travelers looking for their seats, and the rest is pretty much what they see out the window as their train passes across Japan, zooming by the disturbing geometries of nature and cities. (The human characters are expressionless glyphs, differentiated only by clothing and hairstyles.) Any individual panel from the book is likely to look almost completely abstract, and the joke of Yokoyama’s endnotes is that he’s struggling to interpret his own images, too: “It seems slightly strange that they would sit so close together in an empty train car.”
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