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Garden
Yuichi Yokoyama
PictureboxYuichi Yokoyama's Garden is like looking at plans for an art installation that's too big to ever be made. This 300-page graphic novel takes some large risks with its storytelling, but those risks pay off big time.
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Dan: I'm fairly certain he doesn't. Yokoyama is a pretty analog dude. He doesn't even own a computer, so he emails me from his phone. That said, maybe he played early video games as a kid. Mostly he enjoys the outdoors, though. He lives in the suburbs and frequently sends me photos of the woods.Who is Yuichi Yokoyama?
Well, Yokoyama studied as a painter, and until the early 00s he only painted in a representational style. He used the same kind of figures and landscapes, albeit with a subtle and adept color palette and incredibly skilled paint handling. He moved into comics because, as he said, he wanted to make his images move. Some of this work can be seen on his blog.How old is Yuichi and when did you first see his work?Yuichi is 44 years old, and I first saw his work around 2004, when my friend Mike Buckley showed me a Japanese edition of New Engineering and suggested I track this guy down and publish him.Have you met him? What's he like?
I've spent time with him in Japan and Switzerland. He’s nice, generous, and engaging, but also extremely serious about his work and its philosophical underpinnings (i.e. human/machine interaction and maintaining an almost alien perspective). He claims to have little to no interest in comics in general, but is avidly interested in architecture, engineering, and nature. He wears pretty groovy tracksuits and maintains a poker face at all times. He belongs to no single school of manga and appears to have few, if any, peers.
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I think we're moving back through areas of the book with Yokoyama as our guide. But that's just me. It's pretty open. That's what I like about Yuichi’s books—there are a variety of directions the reader can go. I mean, for a guy of such precision, he is not afraid of ambiguity.The world inside the garden is pretty fantastic, but no more or less so than the characters who explore it. What do you think the world outside the garden is like? It might be missing the point to ask that, but the characters are so odd-looking it's hard not to wonder what their normal environment might be.
I don't think there's a world outside the garden. Much like in Travel, the idea of "outside" is just an idea, not a place, and it serves only to bring characters inside, y'know?
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Lychee Light Club
Usamara Furuya
VerticalLychee Light Club is sick as hell and a lot more than I expected from the cover. A small group of evil 14-year-old boys get together in the guts of an abandoned factory and build a robot to do their evil bidding. They command it to kidnap a beautiful girl, who they keep strapped to a throne and are forbidden to touch. They all seem to be pretty gay. The evil gay teens have some evil gay sex, and the evil gay leader fears his homo minions will overthrow him. As his paranoia begins to destroy him, the beautiful girl and the club's murderous robot fall in love. There are allusions to German expressionism and fascism. I'm unsure if the political story is supposed to be allegorical or if the point of this comic is really about perversion and love, but it's pretty great either way.
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Yeah!
Peter Bagge, Gilbert Hernandez
FantagraphicsPeter Bagge's Hate seems more important all the time. Despite it being "the grunge comic" it's still as relevant as ever. Bagge only made 30 issues of Hate and then went and made a bunch of other comics series. The first of which was Yeah!, drawn by Gilbert Hernandez, about a girl group from New Jersey who are hated on Earth but the most popular band on every other planet in the universe. Unfortunately, their popularity on other planets is unable to positively impact their lives because the existence of aliens is known only to them and their manager. Also, alien money is no good on Earth. Vertigo published nine issues of the comic before cancelling it, but now Fantagraphics has swooped in and published the collected Yeah! series for the first time.
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Pete: I reread it, and much to my surprise I still loved it. I say "surprised" because most of my fans HATED it when it first came out, and I assumed I'd finally see why they hated it. I still don't get why they did. It's a funny, wacky comic book.The main feeling that the comic left me with was a crushing sense of hopelessness. With the exception of the cover art, the girls usually seem unhappy.
Why?!? Well, I gave them troubled backstories, but they sure have a lot of fun at the same time.

Good point! I guess I simply enjoy their misery. I'm a monster!
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Nothing brand new, other than my own band, Can You Imagine? I’ve mostly been listening to old stuff–early 60’s folk, mid-60’s rock and pop, and teeny-bopper crap from the mid-80s and late 90s.What projects do you have coming up?
A mini-series/graphic novel called Reset for Dark Horse, and a four-page feature for REASON.
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Pearls Blows Up
Stephen Pastis
Andrews McMeelWhen looking through Pearls Blows Up the first thing you will notice is that Stephen Pastis is a tacky asshole who thinks smearing photos of himself throughout a collection of his comics is a good idea. Bam! There he is on the front cover of the book, flyin’ out of an explosion with his cartoon characters. Zam! The inside covers show off some production shots from the cover shoot! Then he made unnecessary annotations for about 60 percent of the comics, which feels like watching a DVD where turning off director commentary isn't allowed. But the real icing on the dick is in the final 11 pages. These last pages are filled with photos of the cartoonist over the course of his life. Most of them are not great photos either. There are pictures of him in college, on vacation… even one of that time his basement flooded.

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Mr. Funny Pants
Michael Showalter
Grand Central PublishingI tried to sell my copy to Spoonbill and Sugartown, but they wouldn't take it. They said they were trying to get rid of the copies they already had. I thought Jon Glaser's book was disappointing too, and that guy is one of the best. My editor was disappointed with Patton Oswalt's book, and we both see eye to eye on him being a comedian who gives us severe cases of the chuckles. Sometimes funny guys aren't great at writing funny books, just like good bands don't always make albums that are good. I find many of Steve Martin's New Yorker articles fairly dull. I could go on, but I'm already getting depressed pointing out the failures of people who normally bring me heavy joy.See you next week! That's right, this column is weekly until the strain of having to shit talk funny books makes me die of joy!NICK GAZIN
