New Engineering

Yuichi Yokoyama makes comics in a unique language situated somewhere between the primal drives of William Blake and the elegant geometries of Sol Lewitt—they are works of philosophical complexity and stunning visual power, of which he has said, "I'm not trying to write stories that are set in the future, but rather to write stories which are delivered from references to any given epoch or time. If the history of the world had turned out differently from what we know today, men would live according to different sets of values and different aesthetics It would be a civilization completely alien to ours." This first U.S. book on Yokoyama's work combines two of the artist's central themes: fighting and building. One set of graphic stories, Public Works, details massive structures being erected across a landscape. Plot is pushed aside in favor of sheer formal verve as we watch buildings, about which we know nothing, come into being. The other set of stories, Combats, is one sequence after another of elegantly choreographed battles. Manga comics have never seen a talent that combines this level of formal ambition with such exquisitely drawn depictions of fashion, art and architecture.