VOYAGE, COMBATS, TRAVAUX PUBLICS

Yuichi Yokoyama

Pedro Moura

Up to a certain extent, one would say that Yuichi Yokoyama seems to be a tailor-made author for those who wish to discuss the point of contact between comics and graphic design, or graphic design in comics. I am not referring to packaging strategies or other such gimmicks (tin-foil variant covers and the like), but to an integration of design within the very language of comics. That is to say, something that emerges from the bottom-up, and not a merchant-prone top-down embellishment. It is as if the methods of design were exploitable (and they are) for the structuring of the narrative (option of the) language of comics.

The first time I came across Yokoyama s work was in the first (and only) issue of the unfortunately very short-lived Fantagraphics-published Bête Noire anthology. The most surprising trait of this story was the fact that the onomatopoeias gained such a powerful presence that they gained citizenship both in the visual and the actant fields of the comic. To use a few considerations of an outstanding Portuguese design professor and critic, Mário Moura, we could say that usually, no matter how spectacular they are (and they more often than not are in mainstream comics), onomatopoeias are to be found as sounds without the territory he calls the articulated, civilised language . However, it seems that Yokoyama s onomatopoeias  in that short story as well as in these three books published in France by Matière (and PictureBox is about to publish them all in the U.S.A.) – are allowed to return to civilization, are an integrated part of its own civilization, given the fact that its whole civilization is construed according to a single constructive principle that is co-extant with that of the onomatopoeias themselves: a total presence in the two-dimensional field, an inseparability of the universe in which they re to be found, the rule of the graphic dynamics over the narrational.

A first notion that comes to mind when one reads these three books is the antagonist relationships established between the characters, more subtly in Voyage ( Trip ), more overtly in Combats. These are relationships that are construed through the interconnected gaze of the characters, although these gazes criss-crosses, necessarily so, with our own (readers-spectators). These are strategies that are similarly efficient in a wholly different register such as Masashi Tanaka s Gon (i.e., a tentatively realist register), which reveals, more than the falsehood of the form-content dichotomy, the existence of a functional force (or functive , to use a Deleuzian term that allows us to break free from the idea of an ultimate end, and allows us to approach a perspective that associates the actual to the verifiable) that survives to all these primary pigeonholings. A first step, thus, to deconstruct the empathy  theory.

The actions of Yokoyama s characters, even the most ordinary of gestures, such as opening up a pack of cigarettes, light it up and drop its ashes in an ashtray, are transfigured by the solid presence of motion lines, by a centred focus on that specific action, by the composition of the page, into moments of great tension in Voyage, a tension that will blow up in Combats. In this latter book there are what seem to be two rival groups, endless armies of the ones against the others, although we cannot distinguish them by any means. They fight each other in the most disparate backgrounds and putting to use whatever they find in their path, from kitchen utensils to the most sophisticated of arms. However, none of these actions makes these combatants into merciless and relentless killers, like Marvel s Bullseye or the like. It s rather a why of transforming the action vortex into a wild and quite accelerated parody of these epics so fashionable today that are to be found in comics, cinema, computer games… Second step.

The reflection games, the already mentioned exchanged gazes between the characters that are seated and the ones that cross the train corridors, the ones that wait in the platforms and the ones that go through them, the shines and the distortions created by the many types of water and by the sunshine, and by the also criss-crossing speeds, everything stands for the distinct, diverse elements that comprise a whole and that find their own specific space in that unified and larger unit to which we call the work (work of art, book, and so on).

The Travaux Publics book (which I guess is the New Engineering in the American edition), which was the first to be published in France, has a small introductory text that explains the rules of the game  of Yokoyama s oeuvre, and the Combats one has an interview of the author. It is thanks to these two texts that we can find a few pointers that help us to further interpret the works. The inexistence of dialogs (in Voyage) or the construction of dialogs that only stand for the most obvious of information of to pin down small turning points of the action (as it occurs both in Combats and Travaux Publics) reveal the small interest that the author has in creating truly human characters, or round  characters (to use E. M. Forster s known term), in developing psychology . This erasing of humanity is also felt in the figuration of his characters, men composed by minimal information where their bodes are concerned and with heads that are as stylised as everything else in their worlds, with faces that are quite close to the work of logotyping , in which any given element, structure or absolutely clear trace becomes the symbol that names  such and such a character. It is as if the typical, classical uniformization of a comics character (Tintin almost always uses his gold pants and always sports his famous hairdo; Batman must wear his cape and pointy ears, etc.) was carried to its last consequences and gobbled up the personality (the psychology) of Yokoyama s characters. However, this erasing of humanity is not employed to crank up the possibility of the (supposed) empathy  a thesis which I tend to disregard outright  with the reader; quite the contrary, it is used precisely in order to erase any possible bonds, enhancing exponentially its strangeness, its distance, its detachment. That is to say, the last step towards the deconstruction of the empathy thesis.

The dehumanization reaches its zenith in the Travaux Publics book, in which all nature (the commonplace, natural one) is brutally and quickly substituted by titanic operations that fabricate human constructions, which represent… nature (although the artificial one, thus a phenomenal nature).

This silence and this utter functionalization of the characters remind me also of that other erased role of the verbal and acting sphere in Jacques Tati s films. In the films of this outstanding and wonderful French director, it is precisely the body and the movements that it elicits and that are structured around it that assume the maximal preponderance. In Tati, that happens with and through humour; in Yokoyama s books through a frantic action and even a certain degree of discomfort, also explicit by the words of the author: a manga with no story , without beginning and end , representing the scene-to-scene passage ,… Actually, this last expression should indicate as clearly as possible the fashion after which the books of Yokoyama allow us to rethink the transition scheme that is produced by authors such as Scott McCloud (the aspectual relationships) or Thierry Groensteen (his grammatology), or to use other words, Yokoyama s work makes us rethink them in terms of reading speed. Whether we are facing here a moment-to-moment, action-to-action of aspect-to-aspect transition, or we re facing a coordination of subordination relationship, everything is speeded up in a continuous velocity of moving forward. Take the example of the three pages we reproduce here, side-by-side: these images represent ( represent-as , according to Nelson Goodman) the progressive passage by the metallic structure of what is probably a bridge through which the train goes, under a rain that hits the windows. And at the same time they present us with a geometrical-abstract image  the image properly said  composing to perfection not only a visual unit, but a reading unit (these are three pages, mind you, so it implies the action of flipping the pages; they are shown here in their Western order, not the original Japanese reading direction). It is tempting to establish between these three books an ultimate narrative order: forcing the arrow of time upon a work that Yokoyama himself confesses to be shown as a relentless cycle. And this stylization (of image but also of the actions and the units of narrative) finds its most noble root in Hokusai s work, especially his Manga books, but we can pinpoint other formal  precursors, from Cliff Sterrett to Martin Vaughn-James to the generations of RAW magazine and of the Forth Thunder collective, but not forgetting a whole host of historical, virtuoso designers and geometers. Having erased empathy, one of the possible ends of design returns: to make everything as accessible, as serviceable, as user-friendly as possible. The destruction of the natural landscape (including its human beings) in order to augment its functionality. To put it in a nutshell, a quoting the title of a poem book that never was, we face here the Ergonomics of Landscape .