Regé is probably best known for his extended, unnerving graphic novel Skibber-Bee-Bye
, but his long-running Yeast Hoist series—mini-comics, pieces in anthologies and now this book—is a venue for his more experimental work. This work is a set of short, not-very-narrative comics pieces and illustrations, mainly inspired by a trip Regé took to Europe last year with a rock band. (One particularly lovely piece illustrates another band member's sleeping diary: where he slept each night of the tour, on what furniture, with how many other people in the room.) Regé calls his style "cute brut," and it owes more to, say, Keith Haring than to the cartoon tradition. He draws everything in the same thin, deceptively flat line, and the images' priorities are design first, then geometrical shapes and finally detail. (Every character's head has lines erupting in a halo around it, like a drawing of a saint.) It's amazing to see how Regé filters everything around him into his style. He lovingly renders Italian architecture with flattened, distorted angles. He uses a bump on the head as an excuse to fill a page with fantastically stylized diamond shapes and lines. And he minutely observes facial features and expressions, translating them into round heads and bulbous noses. Regé's most tender observations, though, are of psychological states—the best parts of this volume delineate moments of emotional intensity. (Aug.)
