New Engineering

The idea of hanging comic pages on the walls of museums is one I’ve always found most unappealing. Comics are meant to be flipped through and enjoyed, they should be designed to be reproduced, not hung in reverence in the expensive gathering places of the snooty cultural elites, or in the trendy boutiques of the pseudo-hipsters. But what we have here, in this new English version of Yuichi Yokoyama’s New Engineering is sort of the opposite case. This is the first book I can think of that has taken work that seems best suited to be hanging on the walls of a museum and presented it instead as a comic book. As comics, I found the book far less than satisfying. It’s like if you took the cut-up comic book paintings of Roy Lichtenstein out of the museums and re-assembled the work as a comic book - suddenly it wouldn’t work - it would feel wrong - and loose its power.

I do find Yokoyama’s dynamic energetic drawing quite appealing (although I think there may be something slightly off in the reproductions in this book - as the line work and tones seem a little lighter than in other places I’ve seen his work?). Trying to read look at his artwork as comic book stories leads to a dissatisfied feeling. The mostly wordless stories are crazy, but don’t draw you in. Many of the drawings are incoherent and filled with sound effect. Reading the sound effect translations at the bottom of the page is sometimes the best way to figure out what the drawing is supposed to be about. Actually those sound effect translations have a weird poetry of their own that can be appealing - but at the same time leading to an excessively disjointed experience. Also thinking, in the Japanese original, where the sound effects weren’t explained, the reader had a different (even less coherent experience). Example, “GACHA Sound of mechanical parts clicking / PAKA Sound of a lid flipping open / BARA BARA BARA Sound of multiple object falling together.”

The 232 page book is filled with these crazy, usually not decipherable stories focusing on machines, technology and people fighting. Transformation also seems to be a central theme. Because the pages have so little dialog, its very difficult to look at the artwork slow enough to figure out its meaning. In that sense, I do feel like the work would be more appealingly seen on a museum wall, where you could just enjoy the individual dynamic images, and be less concerned with the storytelling aspect of panel to panel transitions one associates with the comic book form. I was also thinking this stuff could work better as experimental short animated films - there it could be dreamlike in a way that pulled the viewer in. As a comic I found New Engineering dreamlike in a way that left me feeling bored, and as if I’d perhaps wasted my $19.95. “WAAAAAA WAAAAAA Sound of people screaming.”