Just read Yuichi Yokoyama’s Travel for the third time – this time along with his creepily flat annotations, and, appropriately, while I was riding on a train. The plainness of his comments speak to the basic and essential nature of the movement and the tension and the social relationships that are expressed in his speechless comic. The dramatic movements of the objects and people that carry us through Travel, while often suggesting type, never become melodramatic; they are satisfied with the import of their own momentum or inertia. Yokoyama does this with a razor sharp line, at times exhaustively accurate in the proportions it creates, other times grossly fantastic, skewed in a way I’ve never exactly seen before, in Japan, America or elsewhere. The images and pages are slow to register as the graphic paradigm is not a familiar one (despite Paul Karasik’s not inaccurate comparison of Yokoyama to Jack Kirby in his introduction to the book). Travel creates a fresh kind of confusion and requires a type of attention unlike other comics. This not Chris Ware’s slow and dense style. This is simple and iconic and dares you to rush, but leaves you repeatedly asking yourself: “What’d I just see?” Travel is an unprecedented comic, but I suspect that we’ll be referring to its own precedent often as we try to read many of the works that have yet to be drawn.

New episode of Apostrophe Cast is up. In this one, Nate Pritts goes back to the grassy knoll where he wrote his forthcoming book The Wonderfull Yeare and reads from it.

Also be sure to check out the Apostrophe Cast blog for Ben Brookshire’s interview with Nate. Look at the last question; Nate’s ideal writing environment is a pretty sublime scene. I could get into the idea of Surfer Rosa repeating on the edge of hearing.