ÉDITIONS MATIÈRE

The immediate shock is that of seeing Yokoyama comics in color: bright and luminous [+]

Yokoyama’s Rubicon: Humanity/ Color/ Transcendence. […] If Garden’s final moment of humanity feels like a considered accession, however, the short works collected in Yokoyama’s next, sadly untranslated book, Baby Boom, constitute a fully committed, passionate embrace. Save for the basic element of enigma that swims over panels that stand up to scrutiny as both figurative and abstract visual information, everything about Yokoyama’s established drawing style has been upended from page one. The immediate shock is that of seeing Yokoyama comics in color: bright and luminous, Baby Boom’s marker-drawn panels have a highly appealing airiness to them, filled with strokes of hue that float against a white background, uninhibited by the pages’ total lack of black space. The artist’s use of his new tool is impressive from the first, with immediately pleasing combinations of two or three tones creating distinct grounds figure‑object separations in each panel. There’s an ease of access to every page that’s absent in Yokoyama’s black and white work, no matter whether the eye is engaging the drawings as story or abstraction. These are pictures that pull you in with sheer prettiness. Beyond the color, though, the work showcased in Baby Boom turns away from the logical acme that drives Yokoyama’s previous books in favor of something more fleeting, more felt than thought out. Yokoyama has gone back to silent comics here, and except for the lines that lay out the gridded panel borders, there is no evidence of the ruler at play on these pages. The lines that make up Baby Boom embrace the spontaneous imperfections contained in human hands — thinning and thickening, doubling back and looping over themselves, tracing the impressions of geometric shapes more than actually drafting them, condensing into joyous bits of outright scribble in the shadows and the solid blocks. Even the colored space within the thick marker lines themselves defies uniformity. Here and there it fuzzes out into the white surface of the paper, condenses into a spot of purer color to indicate extra pressure from Yokoyama’s fingertips, or pulls up and gives way to a rough grain where the strokes end. Yokoyama’s lines aren’t the flowing brush trails of Paul Pope or the spiderwebbing coils of Guido Crepax, but they’re as effective a primer in the sensual qualities of comic book artwork. Every line put on the page in Baby Boom is quick and decisive, full of an infectious joy. It’s an artistic approach that’s perfectly matched to its subject matter, which presents a series of vignettes — some barely snapshots of moments, others longer meditations on single themes — centering around the warm, definitively human interactions of two characters. Yokoyama’s character designs leave behind the look of humanity almost completely as a result of Baby Boom’s simplified graphic approach (one resembles a man’s body with a head something like a bird’s, the other a dandelion puff or perhaps a baby chick), but it’s impossible not to read the dynamic of father and son into the scenes they share. The bird-headed dad feeds the fluffy kid with a baby bottle; the kid builds a tower out of blocks that the dad helps him finish when it gets too tall; the two clean the house, visit a playground, and go to an open-air market where the dad buys the kid a chewing gum and a soda. The sense of joy in these sequences is predominant, moreso so than any one picture or idea. Some of the stories are formalist explorations — an eight-page scene depicting a game of catch between father and son changes color schemes halfway but sticks to a rigid, dense fifteen-panel grid throughout, providing an authoritative object lesson in the dynamics of back-and-forth motion across a page — while others are almost like drawing journals, consisting of hastily scrawled landscapes whose great virtue is the energy with which they’re drawn, the characters seemingly added in as near-afterthoughts. Occasionally the amount of linework squeezed into a single panel or the alien quality of the ritual being enacted on a page becomes too much, and the eye moves into a different mode of viewing, following lines instead of characters, color relationships instead of panel progression. But it never feels as though we’re missing anything: the spark of life is in these lines regardless of how successfully we’re able to piece them together. Through it all the sense of real caring — even love — between these beings is so strong that the space between their figures ends up functioning as a visual device in and of itself. The eye can’t help but close the distance between them when they share panel space, and when they don’t we end up wondering where the other one has gone. As content it’s hardly the earth-shaking experimental literature of Garden, but it feels like the only valid point of progression from that work. After taking in the world and humanity as a whole, it seems only right that Yokoyama should narrow his gaze to focus on some of the smaller stories that build the one big one, and in doing so be touched enough by the legitimacy of the emotion that they carry to create a new style for drawing them with. Each of Baby Boom’s stories, no matter how trivial or even banal the events depicted in them are, is bound to pull a smile from all but the stoniest of faces. That the overall idea of the stories here isn’t anything particularly new or individual, doesn’t hurt the work at all, and the archetypal quality of the stories ends up a virtue at many points. Baby Boom is a book about how the world is a beautiful place, how living in it can be a very wonderful thing, and how the presence of others is what keeps happiness alive in us. The comic’s standout sequence, however, comes near its end, and it suggests that Yokoyama may cherish what he has found in his exploration of pure humanism, but he is not fully satisfied by it. Six stripped down, backgroundless eight-grid pages of father and son contorting themselves in expressive dance moves beneath the glitter of a disco ball suddenly explode into widescreen, pyrotechnic shots of a huge crowd gyrating beneath strobing spotlights, the color scheme changing violently with every new page, culminating in one of the book’s only two uses of black linework. Two pages later the characters are flying out into the starry embrace of space. It’s about as purely musical as comics have ever gotten, as immediate and propulsive as the bass kicking in under the percussion track on a dance club’s roaring sound system. Yokoyama uses color and a newfound sympathy for characters to bring the human into his comics’ topics of discourse in Baby Boom, but by the time the book finishes it seems like what he really wants to do is cut heads with eye-popping, formalist color comics. Thankfully, in Color Engineering, his most recent release, he does just that — and with a mastery that few before him have. […] 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. [-]