Bless you - Recommendations

• Vol: 1; Ch: 24
• 2004

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.

• Vol: 1
• 2016

A new surrealist tale by the creator of neo manga, the critically-acclaimed Yuichi Yokoyama. His frenetic visual style contrasts with the taciturn pace of the story and dialogue as a group of friends wander the high-latitude areas of the strange icy Far North looking for someone. Readers of Yokoyama's other stories may even recognize some characters.

• Vol: 1; Ch: 13
• 1974 - 1979

A man and woman sit together one evening and talk. Let's take a night train and go for a trip, across the somber landscape we watch through the window; let's see the tomb of the whale...

• Vol: 1
• 2006

A wordless journey into the contemporary Japanese psyche. It takes the not unfamiliar plot backdrop of a train ride and turns it into a psychological meditation on the vehicle's architecture and passengers (rather than focusing on the usual narrative-driven concerns such as destination, distance or landscape).

• Vol: 1
• 2007

A group of men arrives at a huge walled garden, only to find it temporarily closed. Their disappointment at not getting to enter does not last long, though, as they stumble across a large gap in the wall nearby. Now inside, they are free to explore the vast garden however they wish. However, the enclosure is not filled with plants and other organic matter, but with bizarre structures like perfectly square lakes, libraries housing impossibly sized books, and glass mountains as far as the eye can see.

• Vol: 2; Ch: 34
• 1967 - 1971

A experimental manga series about a boy named Jun and his surreal voyages. The character is a alter-ego of Ishinomori himself.

• Vol: 1; Ch: 12
• 2017 - 2018

• Vol: 1; Ch: 12
• 2003

Every morning a man wakes up, gets dressed, and heads to work, returning home in the evening to go to sleep. Feeling suffocated by the mundanity and repetitiveness of life, the man takes a detour on his way to work one day. But after being swept up in a tide of piracy, cannibalism, and bizarre religious sects the man starts to wonder: was his boring old life so bad after all?

• Vol: 1
• 2013

The events within the narrative are spare and enigmatic: Yokoyama is as much fascinated by shapes and visual effects as he is by character and plot. First, the protagonists visit a city; then, our heroes watch airplanes departing and arriving at an airport; next, they go on board a ship and cross a river. Eventually, they arrive at a building where a man welcomes and guides them to the “world map room,” where they inspect a library. Eventually they leave, and reach a pond with a sunken ship. Their guide starts to explain the ship’s history, and slowly, with casual suddenness, the novel comes to a close.

• Vol: 1
• 2011

Color Engineering reproduces both older and unseen imagery from the 2000s with dozens of color drawings and paintings that were executed in 2010 during a six-week open studio event held in Tokyo, at which the public was able to view Yokoyama at work. A selection of these canvases is reproduced here as gatefold pages, and is integrated among comic-strip sequences executed in a variety of techniques: photography, loose marker drawings, hyper-real portraiture and much more. These sequences continue his investigations into the world of machines, architecture and post-human fashion, and are the first Yokoyama narratives to provide insight into the artist's personal world, in details of his rural habitat.