Iceland

nameless series #2

by Yuichi Yokoyama, Ryan Holmberg (Translator)

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.

Yuichi Yokoyama is an Eisner Award-nominated artist who was born in 1967 in Miyazaki Prefecture, Japan. He graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Musashino Art University. Originally, he was making fine art paintings, but after 2000, started to release manga, feeling that through it he could “express time.” These unique works would go on to be called “neo manga” and receive high acclaim in many fields.

Genres: Comics, Manga, Graphic Novels, Art, Japan, Comics Manga, Fiction

98 pages, Paperback

First published May 28, 2016

About the author

Yuichi Yokoyama is a Japanese cartoonist and visual artist.
Yokoyama was born in 1967 in Miyazaki. He graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Musashino Art University in 1990 and initially pursued a career in fine arts.
Towards the end of the 90's Yokoyama turned his focus to manga. His cartooning style, blending modernist abstraction and comics, has been described as "neo-manga". His work has appeared in the alternative magazines Comic Cue, Mizue and Saizô. Among his books are New Engineering (2004), Travel (2006), Garden (2007), Outdoors (2009), Baby Boom (2009), World Map Room (2013), Iceland (2016) and Plaza (2019). Many of his manga have been translated in English and French.
Presently, Yokoyama is also active as a contemporary artist and an illustrator for the press and publishing houses in various countries.

Reviews

[E. G. · Rating 3 out of 5]

--Iceland

Author's Afterword
Yuichi Yokoyama Selected Bibliography

[verbava · Rating 2 out of 5]

троє странних мужиків шукають четвертого посеред крижаного пейзажу, знаходять його і сідають на таксі, щоб звідти забиратися. а, точно, ще вони дорогою заходять у бар, де дуже гучна музика. більше на цих дев'яноста сторінках нічого не відбувається, зате японські ономатопеї виглядають класно.

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Slim volume of beautifully reproduced new work by Yokoyama. I'm glad to have it, but it feels transitional -- filled with close-ups, sound effects, and a surprising amount of dialogue. For fans only. If you're new to his amazing work, start with "Garden" or "Travel."

[Tom Ewing · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably too slight to deserve such a high rating but I feel like I have to reward something which created effects I’d never seen done in a comic before - the sequence in the bar (which takes up most of the ‘story’) with sound effects and interference lines creating the perfect visual representation of being in a club that’s way too loud and trying to talk to people. It’s a genuine relief when you follow the characters back outside. Enigmatic, plotless, visually aggressive and unlike anything else I’ve read: thumbs up.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yokoyama's stories are slight but visually complex: flattened, forced-perspective illustrations at odd angles and extreme close-ups, and a visual field of strange geometric forms (people, buildings) overlaid with Japanese characters make for dense cartoons filled with motion and (implied) noise that force the reader into a slow pace to puzzle together the action: a sophisticated melding of content and technique.

[Derek Royal · Rating 4 out of 5]

In many ways, typical of Yokoyama's style. His manner of storytelling, especially when it comes to the visuals, is a little claustrophobic, in that you feel "up close" to what's going on yet aren't entirely sure you have a wide enough perspective to interpret. What's more, what happens in Iceland reminds me a little of a Samuel Beckett narrative. I like Yokoyama's experimentations with the form, although I am aware this might not be for everybody.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three people are looking for a particular fourth. They find him and they take a taxi and leave. Very short and simple story.

Very much Yokoyama but different. The noisiness, the speed, the surreal/dream-like setting are all there and all fine. The thing I found the most different was the dialogue. Usually Yokoyama uses dialogue sparingly and when used it is to narrate what the characters are doing/seeing since it's usually really weird stuff that's happening. The constant noise and movement sometimes make things difficult to decipher, so the dialogue helps guide the images. This dialogue wasn't doing that. They were actually having longer conversations that just didn't do it for me. It wasn't a detached and alien narration of what was happening but it felt like a real conversation, with some emotion even. It didn't do anything for the story and it felt unlike Yokoyama's usual style. I might also just be nitpicky.

I still really enjoyed it. The ice was very shiny. The shine looked like an chainlink fence over the ice. The close ups in the beginning were cinematic and I liked them. The way movement and sound are illustrated are just great, per usual. Quintessentially Yokoyama's work but it made me want to read old favorites like Garden and World Map Room.

[Gavin · Rating 2 out of 5]

A fireworks display with one squib. Terse robot dialogue goes well with the frenetic horizontal action; most panels have bombs or spikes or something.

[Esther · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first manga I read from yokoyama who works in the 'gekiga' style. Although to me, he seems quite reminiscent of the artists who worked for 'Garo' magazine in the sixties and seventies. very spiky and angular. quite simplistic when it comes to thing like anatomical observation but very sophisticated in terms of pattered arrangement. Sharp angles. Cross hatching. gritty lines. Ways of blending text and imagery that are very experimental and visually impactful.

So what's the story? A bunch of strange looking characters (like a cross between Wyndham Lewis's cubist 'Tyro's', Jack and Kirby's New God's) turn up at an icy dock, looking for their missing friend. They show his photo around to a group of equally strange looking people in an extremely noisy bar but then immediately find their companion outside in the snow pretending to sleep. The book ends with the group hailing a cab and speeding off

there's an exaggerated minimalism to the storytelling. almost nothing happens at all and there's no clue as to who anyone might really be or why we should care. everyone speaks in a clipped hard-boiled style,

but there is a beauty and artistry to this comic. . in fact, when i'm reading yokoyama, he makes me wish i was a 'mangaka'. in fact, I think he's probably one of the best graphic graphic artists working today.

what makes him great is his use of abstraction. All the amazing chains of different patterns rippling from page to page and the surprisingly varied combination of forms which yokoyama can get from these patterns. From panel to panel, onomatopoeias jostle for space with the characters-several pages can be devoted purely to the sound of a cab approaching (something unique to Yokoyama's style- sometimes sound effects will seemingly shunt the entire grid-panel structure across or disrupt the left-to right-to left sequence with a boustrophedon). motifs also recur between forms, such as the zigzags that represent the shark teeth, the melting icicles and the zigzags on one characters trousers. there are all sorts of strange visual puns. you could almost say the work is constructed around these visual puns just like in Raymond Roussel's' proto-surrealist novel 'Impressions of Africa' Words, letters and forms and shapes shift between this and that-between intelligibility and abstraction. sometimes it takes a few panels or even pages pages to work out what you're even looking at, such as when one character wipes condensation off of a window and looks outside at the snow.

It's almost like seeing the world through some sort of prism-or perhaps yokoyama is on the autistic spectrum-in his interviews at least he seems a little estranged. either way, iceland is really good at taking the small stuff and giving it so much satisfying graphic intensity that it feels realistic- albeit in a highly artificialized and graphic way.

[Rob McMonigal · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 if they let us do half stars here.

The really cool, angular visuals on this one are pretty amazing, as I rarely see someone do this much with interlocking geometrical shapes, mixing heavy black inking with fine background patterns.

The problem is, I couldn't make heads nor tales of the dialogue and plot. And that's enough to push this one into the "not for me" pile. I think I'd have liked it better if it had been wordless or didn't attempt to have any plot at all. I dig abstract comics just fine, but this one kinda split the difference and I think that hung it out to dry. Others might not have that objection, and I understand the creator has a lot of fans.

This is worth looking at for the art, but probably not enough to seek out.

[RND · Rating 2 out of 5]

This story is, honestly, like most of Yokoyama's work, more of an intellectual endeavor. The story is literally: some friends are looking for someone, they find him, they take a cab to leave. But why we read Yokoyama is for his geometric illustrations and layouts, the wild angular designs of his characters and patterns on their clothing, the way he makes the sound effects lay on top of the art. The strange architecture and repeating patterns. The odd world and its effects, the "flatness" of it. In that regard, if the art doesn't do anything for you or you're not already a fan, more of a curiosity than a gripping read.

[Erik Wirfs-Brock · Rating 3 out of 5]

Third Yokoyama, the smaller format than the Picturebox volumes definitely doesn't make his art more comprehensible. Very well established cartoonist by this point, you kind of know what you are gonna get with this-strange figures moving through a landscape, bizarre panel layouts, sound effects overpowering the artwork. Every Yokoyama volume I have read feels like one part of a multimedia project that doesn't actually exist.

[Przemysław Skoczyński · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pierwsza "neo manga" autorstwa Yokoyamy, którą przeczytałem. Strasznie intrygujący jest to koncept, gdzie fabuła jest ledwie zarysowana, akcja zawieszona w bliżej nieokreślonej lodowej krainie, a główny nacisk położono na dźwięki oraz dziwne kanciaste grafiki spłaszczające całość do granic czytelności. Bardzo pozytywne zaskoczenie. Dla tych co lubią niekonwencjonalne pozycje

[Comics Alternative · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://comicsalternative.com/manga-re...

[P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as glorious as Garden, but the overwhelming onomatopoeia and weird character designs combined with a dry and almost pointless story remain mesmerizing to me.

[Hsu Jui-Ting · Rating 3 out of 5]

as assuredly dry as World Map but without any of the underlying aggression. passive encounters

[Daniel Oster · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice Artwork. Hardly any story to speak of, however

[André Habet]

Really appreciate this book's formal risks but whatever narrative was present was indecipherable to me. Better thought of as ant art book than a comic.

[Carol Tilley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really thing but I'm intrigued enough to seek out more of his work.

[Hans · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has more style than you can shake an icicle at. Ice boat loads of style. What exists for story, is both Seinfeldian (i.e. nothing really happens) and Waiting-for-Godot-ian (i.e. perhaps a more literary description than Seinfeldian), in that nothing much happens in the story. It seems to be a connecting chapter to something that happened before and some things that might happen later. This was included with things in a box of zines made by our friend Allan Dorosin, so not sure if I'll find the tissues that are connected with these pages. It's okay if that doesn't happen. The ice will still crack and the humanoids will still search for a friend. They may not reach the destination, but this book is really about the the journey anyway.