Kokusyoku Sumire: Otona ni Natta Alice - Recommendations

• Ch: 10
• 2019 - 2020

Combining a modern artistic approach with a whimsical vision of creation mythology, the story follows the titular “En-chan” who, becoming involved in a natural disaster at a convenience store, time shifts to herself as a 1 year old child…..

• 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: 2; Ch: 13
• 2019 - 2020

Orphaned at a young age, Alice has lived with her aunt for most of her childhood. But her uncle is abusive and resentful, and at 15 Alice decides to return home to Kyoto and train as a maiko, eventually hoping to become a geisha. But when she arrives back to her birth place, she finds that Kyoto has changed quite a bit in the eight years since she left it. Almost as if it's a completely different world...

• Vol: 2; Ch: 6
• 2010 - 2011

Freshly arrived in the Country of Hearts, Alice bounces from territory to territory in search of a stable home. She finally falls in with the Hatter family, a group of mobsters led by the seductive Blood Dupre. Yet Alice is shocked to discover that Blood looks exactly like her lost love from her home world. Can Alice see past the memory of the man she once loved and recognize the Mad Hatter for what he truly is?

• 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
• 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.

• 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
• 2009

Ballistic buzzing guided camera drones, terrorizing fur and feathers. Drip drop drop top inside your futuristic RV Zen boombox, and then you float away. 

• 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: 1; Ch: 35
• 1967 - 1981