Visionary Cartoonist Yokoyama Yuichi is Back with PLAZA, a Maniacal Manga Extravaganza!

Bigger, bolder, and louder than ever before, neo-manga artist Yokoyama Yuichi is back with PLAZA! Inspired by Carnaval in Brazil, PLAZA offers a maniacal extravaganza of marching, dancing, leaping, firing, cheering, smashing, and exploding over the course of 225 eye-and-eardrum-confounding pages. Originally published in Japan in 2019, this oversize English edition of PLAZA brings to full, hyper-animated life the spectacular graphic art of this genre-defying work of avant-garde comics.

Yokoyama Yuichi is Japan’s leading creator of avant-garde comics. Born in 1967, he studied painting in art school, then turned to manga in the late 1990s. Characterized by modernist abstraction, sparse dialogue, oversize sound effects, obsessive movement and speed, and a wry sense of humor, Yokoyama’s “neo-manga” cross the boundary between art and comics. Among his many books are New Engineering (2004), Travel (2006), Garden (2007), Outdoors (2009), Baby Boom (2009), World Map Room (2013), Iceland (2016), and Plaza (2019). His works have been extensively translated, and have featured in museum exhibitions in Japan and around the world. He has been nominated for an Eisner award, and is a two-time LA Times Book Prize finalist.

This English-language edition of PLAZA, translated by noted manga scholar Ryan Holmberg, also includes the most extended and informative interview with the artist to date.

PLAZA will be available internationally through Diamond Comics, Diamond UK, and Diamond Book Distribution.

Art and literature historians of the future will be flabbergasted that Yokoyama Yuichi existed in our time. He is a visionary on the level of William Blake. PLAZA is a parade of invention, set to the beat of turning pages.

— Dash Shaw (Cryptozoo, Discipline)

 

PLAZA is the purest expression yet of Yokoyama’s unmatched style. A circus for the eyes, this book is a magic trick disguised as a graphic novel, one that reminds us of the medium’s limitless power.

— Matt Seneca, cartoonist/comics critic

 

A dazzling sensory barrage of speeding lines and swoops! Witness the torrent of joyous spectacle, the inner workings of a cosmic parade machine!

— Lale Westvind, (Grand Electric Thought Power Mother, Grip)