Umibe no Machi - Recommendations

• 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; 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
• 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; Ch: 12
• 2002 - 2004

• 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; 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
• 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
• 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; Ch: 16
• 1989 - 1996

A collection of sixteen early works by Nishioka Kyodai, including their three-part debut series. As always the stories range from the whimsical to the surreal, with tales of serial killers, bird women, and a man who one day wakes to find himself with a pouch like a kangaroo.

• Vol: 1; Ch: 7
• 2013 - 2014