Review by Woodrow Phoenix

Color Engineering is the follow-up to New Engineering, the radically experimental first book of comics by Yuichi Yokoyama. The storytelling was the most unusual aspect of New Engineering, with the black and white drawings and panel layouts following relatively conventional compositions. This book goes beyond that, taking the ambition a stage further. It’s the same size, a 222mm x 159mm softcover volume of 228 pages but it contains watercolour and acrylic paintings, photographs, marker and ink for comics pages that are fluidly designed to incorporate many different kinds of image style, sometimes on the same spread. To add to the variety of techniques there are also fold-out spreads to accommodate large images for a sequence of activity, or one extended image such as a massive waterfall.

The narrative is Yokoyama’s now-familiar mix of exploration and observation as we watch teams of people move through landscapes of mountains and rivers, driving all-terrain vehicles or flying in planes over massive human-made constructions. The action begins with an explosion before switching to a river, where an aeroplane drops into a river, the wings detach, and the fuselage becomes a boat that sails onwards. The dialogue between the masked protagonists and all the sound effects are in Japanese, but the translations are in small type below the panels, which works well as a solution for letting you read the comics in their right to left orientation without the left to right movement of English text pulling your eyes in the other direction.

Color Engineering adds an extra layer of exhilaration to the language of Yokoyama’s comics, the textures and surfaces of the colour applied in so many interesting ways to the lines and shapes of his panels, and making them a much richer visual experience. At the back of the book is the author’s commentary where he breaks down the action for each page, explaining the actions of his protagonists and the equipment they use in these explorations. Published in an edition of 1000, this book is now out of print.