The blade and the flower mangamaniacs

The Dragon and the Dazzle: Models, Strategies, and Identities of Japanese Imagination — A European Perspective

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It’s pretty easy to see why: Tsuruta is an enormously skilled cartoonist, capable of integrating extremely gestural, line-driven character art and sturdy environments built from hatches, tones and pooled blacks, with few visible ‘seams’ in the composition. I presume he’s using photo reference, but his pages don’t look like it; rather, they often look like comics

How you get there from here is the question posed to me by this stack of drawings. The first 25 or so pages are devoted to a quiet two-panel-per-page narrative in which a small crew of clowns erect a tiny city; they work, drink, fight, and occasionally ride each other like erotic horses, though pantaloons-clad sourface Regulus has manifested psychic abilities that the rest of the crew indulge as another frivolous distraction from their dialectical labors. Then, suddenly, a miraculous transformation occurs, in which a series of die-cut gaps in the book itself guide us into a series of crowded, denuded, domestic purple drawings, interspersed with and ultimatly supplanted by incomprehensible faux-photo ID images and official-looking documents and dystopian pencil images drawn atop calendar pages redolent with decomposing architecture and tiny faces in tiny circles.

What does it all mean? Nothing; it’s just a bunch of sketchbook pages dropped in at random to plump up a short comic in a faintly suggestive manner so as to tickle the arrogance of flatulent critics-cum-marketers and fool hapless culture consumers into paying twenty dollars for a tiny book and you should never, never trust naughty artists and/or Brooklyn hipsters again!

Among the first of the ‘calendar’ pages is a schematic for Alterations on the Pierrot form, in the Pierrot Quality Amphitheater, where characters line up in discreet sections of a walled stage like dates stuck in boxes, peering at each other. “[P]oetry means very little if taken in its practical sense,” CF muses in a brief text coda. The Pierrot of the newer traditions, the longing Pierrot, seeks an impossible sense of art amidst the building of tradition: Regulus, the Leo, levitating and transforming, his flight from the stagebound story of one half of the book revealing a future of increasingly varied activities, collapsing into categorization and suppression. It is the ember of desire, the Idea, “poesis” encumbered, gradually, by practice and consideration and concretization and more, more, more, until the city of this art is a prison. Art as a process of life vs. the life of art as process. The back cover of the book depicts a woman in modern dress smashing a rock through a window, and clowns then scrambling to build a brick wall. What do you do when even dancers seal you in? Vanish?

But Yokoyama is not the same artist he was in 2004. While his “New Engineering” comics gazed dispassionately upon activities left inscrutable on any level more complex than ascertaining the motion of bodies in combat or the construction of a room — a consequence of the artist creating his stories by drawing forward and backward from key images, avoiding ‘humanism’ so as to escape the impotency of art as personal expression, per him — “Plaza” erects an absolute terror field from the clamor of social joy. Not a single panel of this book is without gigantic sound effects slashing across space with razor edges, COROCOROCOROs and DODODODODOs superimposing themselves atop rolling and marching forms like the reader is gazing through an impossible floating lattice; a prison of noise. And it’s a party on the block!

This is from an introduction by the strip’s writer and letterer, Eddie Campbell, who gives us a sense of the milieu in 1984, when “Rodney” ran in the weekly UK music paper “Sounds”. It reminded me quite a lot of sentiments expressed by the artist Chris Ware in his 2017 art book-cum-memoir “Monograph”, despite one ocean’s and the better part of a decade’s distance:

The suite of strips that included the “Rodney” serial was Campbell’s first paid work in comics, and close to that for Elliott. As Campbell tells it, “Sounds” was interested in

“Goro” is a more grounded piece than Horrocks’ preceding serial, “The Leopard”, in that its various confrontations among unhappy members of an extended, massively rich family play out through dialogues set in b&w, contra the hallucinogenic color styling of the prior work. The only color here is found in one of two lengthy depictions of running, chasing: flight as means of challenging destiny. Horrocks includes a handy list of her influences for the project – television and film melodrama figures heavily – but I’m in the headspace now where her comics give me the same feeling as the video games of Goichi Suda, which are full of allusions to popular culture, and adopt a very declarative tone, yet primarily feel suggestive, even cryptic, like the author has reserved something of the work for themselves. Kyoko Okazaki, whom Horrocks cites, is like this too, as is some work of the filmmaker

Andrzej Żuławski (to me, at least!). So, Horrocks might pause to have a character march around the room of a single splash page, detailing the hypocrisies of a transphobic society, and this will not seem out of place because that is the eluction of her text, but the greater relationship of the seething family is something she depicts in vignettes pressed together, different characters sometimes resembling one another, as if each suffers a neverending psychic hangover from the others being inside them, socially and emotionally and genetically. Best downed in one shot.

These are two of those 100-page DC superhero packages they sell for five bucks exclusively at Walmart (for now; later this year they’re gonna have them in comic book stores too), which marry one new 12-page story per issue with three full-length reprint comic books from elsewhere in the 21st century. I just wanted to know what was inside them. Here is what I found: