SOLRAD reviews 20KM/H

Woshibai’s cartooning can best be described as a blank, simplified cartoon-realism, which is to say an unvarying concreteness that, while not relying on photorealism or representationalism in rendering, still makes its laws of physics and dimensionality self-evident. His people, featureless beyond the broadest figures and facial descriptors, are recognizable as people from context, existing as semiotic cipher more than a proper human existence; their environments are depicted only insofar as they need to be, with the cartoonist frequently reserving his right to withhold detail where such is unnecessary. The work sports a utilitarian purity, rendered in a fairly thick uniform line, not varying in weight or quality. This internal dialect of shorthanded solidity is what affords the work the sense of established reality that the author takes great pleasure in subverting.

In part because of the brevity of his chosen format, Woshibai does not attempt to depict stories in the traditional narrative-structure sense. His comics have more to do with the motion and geometry of the world; there is a pure externality to his work, a physicality of engagement that does not preoccupy itself with the interiority of mundane life, instead only broaching ideas with the simplicity of raw image, allowing the idea to linger for but a moment before leaving the reader with whatever they could extol from it. Again I think of Yokoyama Yūichi’s mission statement, drawing people “as if they are being watched by insects or by animals or by the gods or by the room.” But, where Yokoyama deals in an externality of sensory overload, pulsing with sound and motion, 20KM/H takes the opposite approach, toning down sensory embellishment to a minimum.

The complete review is available to read online on SOLRAD.