News Briefs featuring Adrian Tomine ( back ) Adrian Tomine talks shop on Reverse Direction Updated May 1, 2013 "Adrian Tomine: Some Extra Bits" John Seven Reverse Direction, 19 April 2013 My article on cartoonist Adrian Tomine runs in today’s Transcript – he will be in town next week to speak at the Williams College Museum of Art. Not included in that article is a section of our conversation that talked about various issues specific to the changing field of comics, and I thought I’d put those up here for those interested. Adrian spoke about his alienation in art school and then we chatted how that dynamic had changed. Now there are art schools with cartooning students and shows like MoCCCA Fest are filled with art students producing and selling elegant minis at their tables. He agreed: “I guess like any sort of marginalized or underground art form that starts to get a wider acceptance, there’s a whole new range of artists who are coming into the field now and there are people who would never have done comics if they were born 10 years earlier, just because of … I don’t know, maybe because it wasn’t as accepted culturally, or there is now more of a sense that you could possibly make a living doing it. So it’s interesting and as the field diversifies, there’s good and bad.” I asked Adrian whether what makes cartooning different from other illustration forms was the requirement of writing ability as well, and he talked about how narrative and the writing component may not turn out to be very important at all: “I feel like the jury is still out on how important writing and content and story are, because there are a lot of really talented artists now who are mind blowing in their visual abilities, and completely absent in terms of writing and storytelling and content in general. A lot of them are doing very well and enjoying great success. It might be that this field is mutating into a form — that’s not a criticism. You don’t walk into a fine art gallery in Soho and criticize any painting that doesn’t have content to it and not full of narrative details. Some things are just beautiful on a visual level and that might be a direction that cartooning is heading in. Literally, there is a whole group of artists who would say that is their expressed goal, to separate from the old fashioned ways of storytelling and dialogue.” Finally, I asked him how he saw himself in regard to this movement, and he had this to say: “I’m pretty old fashioned. I think that if I had started doing comics more recently then I would probably have a broader set of influences and a different kind of agenda, even though, I’m 38 now and still coming from a tradition that I see my influences as being people like the Hernandez Brothers and Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, all these guys who are incredibly talented visual artists and I think have inspired everyone my age and younger in some ways, but I’ve also been very inspired by their amazing storytelling abilities and their interest in creating characters and crafting great dialogue, things like that. I don’t see myself at some point abandoning that completely and doing an abstract, visual comic. And that might be to my detriment, we’ll see.”   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product New York Drawings   The Age praises New York Drawings Updated April 4, 2013 Ross Southernwood The Age, 3 March 2013 The New Yorker is one of the world's most famous magazines, for its writing and illustrations. This beautifully produced and reasonably priced hardback volume by New Yorker artist Adrian Tomine offers a fine cross-section of his work and, importantly, what inspired his drawings in particular cases. Tomine, who has written and drawn the American comic book series Optic Nerve since 1991, moved from California to New York in 2004. To familiarise himself with the city, he spent much of his time drawing the people and places he came across. His artwork first appeared on The New Yorker's cover in 2004, beginning a partnership between artist and magazine resulting in a varied and renowned body of work, which has been described as "offering a singular vision" of the city. Advertisement New York Drawings contains, as the subtitle implies, a comprehensive look at Tomine's illustrations, covers and comics for The New Yorker; other illustrations inspired by the city, including album covers and book jackets; rare and, until now, unseen sketchbook drawings; a three-page comic-book introduction; and notes and commentaries by the artist about the work reproduced in the book, this being most helpful in giving context and background. Most of the illustrations are colour, with only a few in black and white. Tomine mainly uses a pastel background, with black or darker colours - often reds or browns - featuring on sketches of the characters, thus giving contrast and impact to the drawing. Each illustration or comic drawing has a title and publishing history. Unfortunately, the notes and commentaries are at the back of the book. It would have been far more reader friendly for them to accompany the titles and histories. The volume begins with a black-and-white comic set about 2004, the year Tomine came to New York, depicting a youthful, unknown out-of-town illustrator at his first New Yorker holiday party, being rather overwhelmed by it all and largely ignored. It's a rather charming self-introduction to the book. The book's cover has a drawing entitled Missed Connection, Tomine's first cover for The New Yorker, done for a book-themed issue. A pretty girl reading a book is seated in a stationary subway train adjacent to another, in which a young man is holding a copy of the same book. Their eyes meet. Words are unnecessary, while the film Sliding Doors comes to mind. This interesting journey through New York and observations of its denizens, insightful and at times humorous, is well worth taking. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            The Australian reviews the "keenly observed and beautifully realised" New York Drawings Updated January 16, 2013 Drawn in to an intimate take on New York BY: BILL LEAK From: The Australian December 21, 2012 12:00AM THE editors of The New Yorker magazine have maintained a tradition of commissioning artists to illustrate their covers ever since the first edition hit the newsstands in 1925, with one that featured a highly stylised caricature by Rea Irvin of a top-hatted dandy peering at a butterfly through a monocle. Although Irvin's character was based on an 1834 drawing of the then Count d'Orsay, he became known as Eustace Tilley and has since been reinterpreted in various ways by a large number of artists. He reappears to this day with every anniversary issue, and has gradually taken on the role of the magazine's personal mascot, as instantly recognisable as any logo. Individually, the covers have featured examples of work from artists with a variety of styles. Edward Sorel's exuberant flights of fancy, for example, are about as different in their approach from Jean-Jacques Sempe's whimsical sketches as you could get. Collectively - and over nearly a century of publication - a distinctive New Yorker style has emerged. Back in the early 70s Dr Hook sang about the musician's dream of having his rock star status officially established by the sudden appearance of his face on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. In the more subdued world of the illustrator, seeing one's own artwork appear on the cover of The New Yorker represents a similar confirmation of artistic celebrity. One of the most recent artists to hit the big time is Adrian Tomine whose book, New York Drawings, is a portable exhibition of his deceptively simple but evocative illustrations and comics. To look at works of art you used to head straight to a gallery, while to read about them you'd open a book. Now the situation has been reversed. If you go to a gallery you'll spend most of your time being told what to think by reading the "artist's statements" while casting the occasional cursory glance at the potential investments hanging next to them on the wall. If, like me, you prefer to look at pictures while doing your thinking for yourself, you'll find them on the pages of books like this one. Tomine's keenly observed and beautifully realised pictures have all been born in sketchbooks, derived from direct observation. For him, the simple but profound experience of seeing is always the starting point for his art. The pictures themselves are the artist's statements, no further explanation required. One such picture is the last one in the book and its title is, simply, A.C. A young woman lies naked and asleep on a bed at the bottom, a horizontal element in an otherwise vertical picture. Another horizontal element is an air conditioner on the wall behind her, the "AC" of the title. Above it, an open window reveals a section of a city skyline silhouetted against an evening sky where stars are starting to appear. You know what the weather's like in this picture. It's hot outside but it's cool in the room where the woman is sleeping. You can see she's been spending a lot of time in the sun because her bikini has left its light-coloured shape clearly imprinted on her slightly darker, sun-tanned skin. Tomine's cropping of the figure and the contrast between the soft, flowing lines of her body and the sheets with the hard, almost clinical treatment of her surroundings combine to imbue this scene with a sense of immediate reality and a beguiling intimacy. Suddenly you, the viewer, are there in that room. I'm reminded of feeling slightly embarrassed the first time I found myself standing in front of one of Pierre Bonnard's paintings of his wife in the bath in the Tate Gallery in London. The scene was so intimate I felt like an intruder who'd burst into a stranger's bathroom without even having had the decency to knock on the door first. But I wasn't intruding because Bonnard had opened his world to visitors. He wanted others to see it as it appeared to him. Great art has nothing to hide; it invites you in and makes you feel welcome. Shallow, self-important art keeps you out; it excludes you to preserve and emphasise its exclusivity. People who neither paint nor draw can learn the language of visual art. Once they do they'll find there's a lot to read in paintings such as Picasso's Guernica, the visual equivalent of a vast, powerful novel, just as there is in his pencil drawings, the visual equivalents of poetry. Great artists know that if you're interested enough in art, you'll go to the trouble of learning how to look at it. Fraudulent artists, on the other hand, will assume you're visually illiterate so they'll kindly and condescendingly provide a list of instructions (or "artist's statements") that will enable you to gaze in wonder at their works and see that they are good. This is essentially an illustrational, as distinct from artistic, approach because when the meaning of a work of art can be expressed in words it ceases to have any pictorial meaning at all. So here we have another role reversal: the so-called artists are doing the illustrations while the illustrators are creating the art. Stranger still, the cognoscenti are unable to spot the difference. Tomine was two years old when his Japanese mother, after divorcing his American father, took him with her to live in Belgium. The Franco-Belgian, Japanese and American traditions of modern comic book art are the richest and most vibrant in the world, and he grew up steeped in all three of them. In his best work he plays with the visual language of comic book art, creating images that are as pictorially elegant as they are wryly amusing. It's only when he decides to produce actual comic book art that the work disappoints. Comics and cartoons are the perfect vehicles for funny or satirical ideas but, in my view at least, expressions of maudlin introspection might almost be tolerable when mumbled over a few beers in a bar but they're quite insufferable when foisted upon a reader in three pages of fussy little panels in which the captions occupy more space than the pictures. Mercifully, there are only a few such lapses in what is otherwise a catalogue of minor masterpieces like Missed Connection, which shows a young man and a young woman, both reading copies of the same novel, making fleeting eye contact with each other through the windows of trains heading in different directions. It's an illustrational Tour de Force, a short story within a picture told with an eloquence that would have made Norman Rockwell proud. In E. 9 St. a young waitress eats a snack outside a Japanese sake bar in the East Village and again you, the viewer, find yourself transported to that exact spot, in that same street and you haven't even had to pay for the airfare. Arnold Schoenberg once said, "There is still plenty of good music to be written in C major", and drawings like these are a reminder that there are still plenty of good pictures to be painted by artists working with simple tools and limited palettes. While Tomine cites influences such as Chris Ware and Jaime Hernandez, it's the echoes of Toulouse-Lautrec and Vuillard in his work that indicate it is artists like him who are maintaining the rich tradition of Western pictorial art. And it's a tradition whose history didn't start on the day Andy Warhol bought a Polaroid camera and started taking snapshots of celebrities. New York Drawings, by Adrian Tomine, is published by Faber ($35)   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product New York Drawings   The Economist calls New York Drawings, "enlightening" Updated January 16, 2013 A twilight art Dec 20th 2012, 10:16 by E.H. ADRIAN TOMINE and Peter Campbell are not household names. But there is a good chance, if you have been in a newsagent’s over the past ten or 20 years, that you have seen their artwork or bought something they have done. Both illustrators, Mr Tomine creates covers for the New Yorker and Campbell (who died in 2011) drew the covers for the London Review of Books (LRB). Their trade is, in a sense, a twilight art: their work is seen by many thousands of subscribers and ordinary punters, but it is also ephemeral, appearing on magazines that can be thrown away. Now, two books collect their work in a more permanent format—Mr Tomine’s in “New York Drawings” and Campbell’s in “Artwork”—and showcase them alongside their rough sketches and early drafts. The results are enlightening. “New York Drawings” gathers together everything Mr Tomine has created for the New Yorker over the past decade. It includes his early illustrations for books reviews and film reviews (“Mulholland Drive”, “8 Mile” and “Underworld”) inside the magazine, and all his covers, starting with his first which pictures two people reading the same book in different subway carriages. Mr Tomine, who originally comes from California, is adept at drawing snapshots of city life in his adopted and adored New York. His style combines bold pen outlines with clean computer-generated colours filling them in. In his illustrations, Edward Hopper-like situations—of dogs under disused railway bridges, or people on a street corner—take on a wry edge. One illustration, of someone who lives next to an independent bookshop signing for a delivery from a large online book-retailer, entitled “Read-handed”, captures perfectly the mixture of guilt and defiance on the resident’s face. In Mr Tomine’s notes at the back of the publication, he repeats a rumour that one such online retailer bought several framed prints of this cover to hang in its boardrooms. “Artwork” is more elegiac in mood; published after Campbell’s death, it includes lengthy introductions by Bill Manhire, a poet who knew Mr Campbell from their native New Zealand and Jeremy Harding, a writer and fellow LRB contributor. Describing Campbell’s 30-year career as art director, contributor (writing more than 300 articles) and, from 1993, cover artist of the LRB, they combine personal reminiscences with intricate details, such as about the particular font Campbell, a book designer as well as an illustrator, most liked to use. As with “New York Drawings”, “Artwork” is best at tracing the transition between early drawings and their finished result on the magazine’s cover. Campbell’s watercolour drawings—of “papers, fruit, typewriters, flowers in a porcelain jug”, as Mr Harding puts it—might seem, on first glance, rather too delicate to be on the cover of a magazine. But, under the LRB masthead and surrounded by contributor’s names, his confident strokes and whimsical glimpses of London life hold their own. Like Mr Tomine, Campbell’s figures often wait at railway stations or read in bed, both illustrators creating bookish worlds designed to appeal to the publications’ ideal readers. It is a joy to see such covers collected together for the first time. However, in both publications not enough is said by the artists themselves: “Artwork” includes an excerpt at the back from one of Campbell’s pieces for the LRB about his love of magnifying glasses, while Mr Tomine begins “New York Drawings” with a witty comic-strip about acting awkwardly at a New Yorker party. But neither publication gives much space for Mr Tomine or Campbell to talk about their art or their process of production. This is a shame. As Mr Tomine has shown elsewhere, he writes eloquently about how he goes about creating a cover. The excerpt from Campbell called out for more from him (his excellent essays are instead collected in a volume entitled “At…”). But perhaps this is what the artists wanted—in contrast to the publications they normally work for, both these books let their work stand out on its own, with few words attached. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product New York Drawings North Adams Transcript on New York Drawings- "quiet portraits of a jarring existence" Updated January 15, 2013 The Kiosk: Snoopy, New York City and the human condition By John Seven, North Adams Transcript Posted: 12/06/2012 04:16:00 PM EST "New York Drawings" by Adrian Tomine (Drawn and Quarterly) Gathering up cartoonist Adrian Tomine's illustration work for the New Yorker - there are a few comics, but this is mostly an examination of covers and spots for accompanying articles - the handsome art book "New Yorker Drawings" often get to the root of Tomine's world view as applicable to New York City and the urban experience together. So much of his work acknowledges that people are all in it together, and yet each individual is his or her own universe within the multiverse we call a city. Tomine's illustration depicts a world where our personal perceptions are both separate from and integral to our shared ones. His work often incorporates two people, many of whom are either not acknowledging the central shared point between them, or clandestinely offering attentions to another person even as that other person is absorbed in his or her own moment. These are quiet portraits of a jarring existence, and the components gather to present New York City as an organism as complex as any human. In the most mesmerizing section of the book, Tomine's sketches of the city are presented with his handwritten observations of the person he draw. He makes note of the physical indications of mood and interest, and then speculates on the internal. One sweaty guy is either deep in thought or staring at his expensive shoes. Tomine suspects one girl of knowing that he was drawing her by the way she abruptly leaves the subway train. Much like so many of the people depicted in his drawings, these are interactions without interacting, and that is so much of urban life.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product New York Drawings   New Hampshire Sentinel Source recommends Chris Ware and Adrian Tomine for Christmas gifts Updated January 15, 2013 Gift books for Christmas Posted: Sunday, December 2, 2012 8:00 am | Updated: 8:48 am, Sun Dec 2, 2012. By Tom Beer Newsday Yes, we live in digital times, but there’s still nothing that can top a beautifully produced and illustrated book. Here are some that would make great presents this holiday season. No, it’s not a board game. Open the rectangular box of Chris Ware’s “Building Stories” (Pantheon, $50), and you’ll find an assemblage of 14 gorgeously illustrated booklets, in different shapes and sizes, all chronicling the lives of the residents of a fictional Chicago apartment building. Ware is the innovative cartoonist behind “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth,” and there’s no correct order in which to read the various contents here. But they do add up to a magnificent, moving whole, and piecing them together is half the fun. Adrian Tomine’s cover of the post-Sandy New Yorker — a man wielding a flashlight and wading through floodwaters to his polling place — is surely one of the iconic images to come out of the superstorm. That illustration wasn’t completed in time to get into “New York Drawings” (Drawn and Quarterly, $29.95), a collection of the artist’s work for the magazine. But what’s here — covers, comics, sketches — is in the same quietly poignant vein. click here to read more Featured artists Adrian Tomine Chris Ware            Featured product New York Drawings Washington City Paper's "gifts for nerds" lists Ware, Tomine, Clowes, and Tamaki Updated January 15, 2013 International Ink: Gift Ideas for Comics Nerds (Part 1 of 2) Posted by Mike Rhode on Nov. 26, 2012 at 12:30 pm In which we take a look at a great big pile of review copies of comic books, cartoons, and graphic novels. Somehow with the turn of the millennium, a weird cartoon switcheroo occurred, and alternative cartoonists became more mainstream than mainstream cartoonists. Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, and Adrian Tomine are regulars in the New Yorker. Ivan Brunetti edits textbooks on cartooning for Yale. Illustrations by Tom Gauld, Lille Carre, and Jillian Tamaki routinely appear in the New York Times. Tomine and Clowes' recent, lovely art books can be found at reasonable prices: New York Drawings (Drawn & Quarterly, $30) reprints the illustrations that Tomine has done for the New Yorker, along with additional illustrations of the city. The book is almost textless, but the art is all beautiful full color. The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist, edited by Alvin Buenaventura (Abrams ComicArts, $40), is a catalog to accompany an exhibit of his work that is scheduled to arrive at the Corcoran in 2013. This book covers Clowes' entire career, even delving into unfinished sketches, layouts, and color guides alongside finished art. The text, meanwhile, explores movies based on Clowes' works, and includes essays by Chris Ware and book designer Chip Kidd. Ware's Building Stories has been getting loads of attention this fall, but consider the academic collection, The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking, edited by David M. Ball and Martha B. Kuhlman (University Press of Mississippi, $55 hardcover, $28 paperback). Overall, its 15 essays are a little dense—but that's OK for this relatively difficult artist. Howard University professor Marc Singer even plunks down a 16-page essay on him.   click here to read more Featured artists Adrian Tomine Chris Ware Daniel Clowes            Featured product New York Drawings   Star Tribune lists Adrian Tomine, Chris Ware and Charles Burns in their holiday book roundup Updated January 15, 2013 Holiday books roundup: Graphic novels Article by: TOM HORGEN , Star Tribune staff writer Updated: November 24, 2012 - 3:33 PM Chris Ware's "Building Stories" tops our list of graphic novel suggestions. BUILDING STORIES by Chris Ware (Pantheon, $50) Apparently, no one ever told Chris Ware that print is dead. Or maybe they did and this is his fantastic rebuttal. Ware, the master behind "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth," has created a batch of sad, highly detailed comics with "Building Stories." The catch is the presentation. Inside this oversized box are 14 different stories -- some are traditional books of various sizes, others are magazines, newspapers and small pamphlets. This isn't a graphic novel. It's a library ready to be explored. THE HIVE by Charles Burns (Pantheon, $21.95) If David Lynch made graphic novels, they'd look something like the weird, twisted work of Charles Burns. The latest from this visionary artist is the second volume of a planned trilogy (which began with "X'ed Out" in 2010). Burns' bold pen strokes tell the story of Doug, a confused young man caught between a dream world of grotesqueries and real life -- which proves even more nightmarish. NEW YORK DRAWINGS by Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly, $29.95) Adrian Tomine is one of the comic book world's great chroniclers of everyday insecurities, best illustrated in the graphic novels "Shortcomings" and "Summer Blonde." His warm, observational style made him a perfect cover artist for the New Yorker, a post he's held for the past decade. Collected in this beautiful 176-page hardcover are all of Tomine's covers, plus his interior illustrations and other New York-centric pieces (from a TV on the Radio poster to a random unpublished portrait of Batman). click here to read more Featured artists Adrian Tomine Chris Ware Charles Burns            Featured product New York Drawings New Hampshire News with an Adrian Tomine podcast Updated January 15, 2013 Adrian Tomine: A Decade of Drawings MON NOVEMBER 19, 2012 The cover of the November 12th issue of The New Yorker effectively summed up the two big stories coming out of New York City this past month: Hurricane Sandy and Election 2012. In the picture, a backpacked shaggy-haired man, chest-high in water, searches for his polling place among the pitch-black flooded streets of the Big Apple. It’s a drawing that someone makes a city of over eight million people seem like a very lonely place to be. The illustrator is Adrian Tomine. His new collection is called New York Drawings: A Decade of Covers, Comics, Illustrations, and Sketches from the Pages of the New Yorker and Beyond. Click the link for the podcast.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product New York Drawings   Capital calls New York Drawings "acutely felt and finely detailed' Updated January 15, 2013 Adrian Tomine on fame, obscurity, craft and drawing for the 'New Yorker' BY YEVGENIYA TRAPS 11:15 am Nov. 15, 2012 Back in 2004, The New Yorker’s art director Françoise Mouly approached Adrian Tomine, who had been contributing illustrations to the inside of the magazine for a few years, with the possibility of working on a cover for the annual Books Issue in 2004. Her directions were simple: the image should be, she said, “a picture that can be read.” The result was Missed Connection, a self-contained bit of poetry in motion: a man and a woman reading the same book wistfully glance at each as their trains pass on parallel tracks. Acutely felt and finely detailed, that cover led to several more: Tomine has now contributed a total of 10 New Yorker covers, with his latest image, Undeterred, another thousand-word-snapshot, this one about voting post-Sandy, fronting the Nov. 12 issue. And now Missed Connection is on still another cover: that of New York Drawings, the recently released collection of Tomine’s commercial work, much of which first appeared in The New Yorker. “I've always liked books that collect people's work from The New Yorker,” Tomine wrote in a recent email exchange. “And that includes cartoonists, illustrators, photographers, and writers. At some point I realized that I was in a position to put together a book like that, and my publisher [Drawn & Quarterly] graciously accepted my proposal.” That deceptively simple origin story leaves out what it might mean to have your work from The New Yorker collected in a hardcover book of some 170 pages. Aside from those 10 covers, Tomine has been contributing various illustrations, many for book and film reviews, since 1999. New York Drawings solidifies Tomine's identification with The New Yorker by isolating his aesthetic contribution to the magazine: mordantly observant, a little sad, poignantly attuned to life’s small pleasures, indignities, and absurdities, and ever so slightly neurotic. Of course that influence goes both ways: working with the magazine, it's clear from Tomine’s notes on the images collected in New York Drawings, has been a kind of master class in the art of provoking emotional reactions with images. In particular, Tomine repeatedly returns to the influence of Mouly, whose storytelling instincts have shaped his own sensibilities: he still, Tomine said in his email, follows her edict to create “pictures that can be read” when designing New Yorker covers. The new book might also be seen as a kind of ratification of Tomine’s status as an official New Yorker, an inside observer of the peculiar rituals of city life. Tomine grew up in Sacramento, the son of two California State University Scramento professors. He spent much of his career before The New Yorker, beginning with the 1991 release of the first issue of his serial Optic Nerve, a self-pubished three-sheet edition with a print run of just 25 copies, on the other side of the country. He only moved to Brooklyn in 2004, where he now lives with his wife Sarah Brennan and their daughter Nora. (Tomine and Brennan’s wedding preparations were chronicled in Tomine’s Scenes from an Impending Marriage, published by Drawn & Quarterly last year, a “mini-memoir” that began life as a wedding favor.) But Tomine’s long-developing strengths as a comics artist—the ability to capture the emotional resonances of an isolated moment, the tendency to imbue vignettes with autobiographical reverberations, the distinct pride in a sense of apartness—were well suited to drawing the rhythms of New York living. Now 38, Tomine finds himself critically recognized and commercially successful, increasingly asked to offer retrospective assessments on his career and his influences. He can be a bit tentative regarding such requests. When I inquired, for example, if he had a favorite New Yorker illustrator, a contributor who had most significantly influenced his own work, Tomine offered a list of people he admired instead of singling anyone out. “I was a fan of people like Peter Arno and Charles Addams long before I was working for the magazine," he wrote to me in an email. "In terms of artists working now, I'm always knocked out by whatever fellow cartoonists like Dan Clowes, Richard McGuire, and Chris Ware do for The New Yorker. And there's plenty of other artists, like Barry Blitt or Andy Friedman, who probably don't influence my work directly in any discernible way, but whose drawings always impress me.” He also noted the magazine’s long history and suggested that its tradition of including visuals was a crucial shaping factor in his own sensibilities: “I think in general the magazine just has such high standards that most of the stuff they publish, whether it's to my specific tastes or not, is interesting and well-done.” He added, “I may not read every article, but I unfailingly look at every single illustration week after week.” Tomine described his work with The New Yorker in glowing terms, and talked about how working working there felt like a bridge over the otherwise wide gulf between commercial illustration and cartooning: “I generally think of cartooning and illustration as two very separate jobs, but my work for The New Yorker kind of blurs that line.” "It still feels like work that I'm personally invested in. Which is more than I can say about some of the other illustration projects I've gotten involved in!” he said. “There are times, especially when I'm working in advertising, when I have to just resign myself to being the ‘picture-making machine’ for someone, and I just politely shut off my brain and do as I'm told.” So how does a piece like the Hurricane Sandy-Election Day cover get made? “I usually start out by overloading the image with detail, and then work backwards, eliminating unnecessary clutter,” Tomine explained. “There's no concrete formula to this process, but I suppose like all artists, I'm trying to make something look ‘right’ to me.” In his introduction to New York Drawings, Tomine draws himself at his first New Yorker holiday party circa 2004, an image of incredulity at this turn of events. “I thought I’d always be an obscure, ‘alternative’ comic book artist,” cartoon-Tomine thinks. So what, I asked, were the advantages and disadvantages of popular success, now that he’s had a bit more time to process it? “In terms of this particular level of ‘commercial success’ that I've attained, I can't really think of any disadvantages. The main advantage is that I have the unbelievably luxurious ability to make a living doing something I enjoy, from a small room in my home,” Tomine said. But he also wanted to set the record straight: “I should clarify that these are all relative terms. In the scope of things, I'm still fairly obscure.” click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product New York Drawings New Yorker interviews Adrian Tomine about his "intimate" new work Updated January 15, 2013 November 11, 2012 ADRIAN TOMINE’S NEW YORK Posted by Mina Kaneko Adrian Tomine, who created last week’s cover “Undeterred,” just released “New York Drawings,” a compilation of his work from The New Yorker and other places. In this intimate gallery of illustrations, sketches, comics, and covers—a selection of which appears in the slide show below—Tomine explores New York’s culture and its passing moments, asking us to reflect on the city’s quirks and tenderness. We talked to Adrian about his own experience as a native Californian who has nested in Brooklyn. Where do you get your ideas for drawings and where do you find inspiration in the city? Is it in moments you witness, the people, a certain mood? Most of my work—including everything from my own comics to the covers I’ve drawn for The New Yorker—is the result of taking some personal experience or observation and then fictionalizing it to a degree. I’m not one of those artists with an incredible imagination who can just make things up out of nothing, and I’m not the kind of person who would throw himself into some exciting or dangerous situation just to get material. So I tend to go about my normal, boring life, and just try to look at things a little more closely. And even though I’ve lived in New York for eight years now, I still feel like a recent transplant, and I think that’s a big influence on how I see and draw the city. What kind of place does drawing have in your relationship to the city? Even though I’m usually not conscious of it, I think drawing has always served a sort of therapeutic purpose in my life. There’s something about the process of translating the messy chaos of real life into a clean, simple drawing that’s always been comforting to me. My wife is getting her PhD in psychology, so she’d probably have more insight into this than I do! But I think it’s a process that inevitably makes me feel closer to whatever it is I’m drawing, and that’s certainly true of New York. I can’t put that much work into drawing something without feeling some heightened level of connection afterwards. And this is true of anything I draw, including people, buildings, even something as unremarkable as a filthy subway entrance. I’ve drawn celebrities that I wasn’t a fan of, and then afterwards, felt like, “Aw, they’re not so bad!” What is one of your favorite things about New York? I love having access to so many great restaurants. I’m Japanese, but restaurants in my hometown served the most sanitized versions of California rolls. I grew up eating a lot of Japanese food at home that my parents or grandparents made. And then when I came here, I’d go into restaurants and find items on the menu that I thought no one even knew about—that I thought maybe my grandma had invented. Just the idea of a restaurant serving rice balls was totally alien to me. And I’m sure all New Yorkers just think of that as a standard item at a Japanese restaurant. But rice balls were something my mom used to pack for me in my lunch, and that I’d be sort of embarrassed to pull out of my lunchbox because everybody else was eating bologna sandwiches. So then to go into these hip restaurants and be asked, “Oh, do you want salmon or plum in that? And do you want it grilled or do you want it soft?” is amazing! Or similarly, I grew up eating those dried packets of “ochazuke” that you dump over the leftover rice and pour hot water on, and I loved it—and now, I go into a restaurant and have a freshly made version of it with good wasabi and fish broth… it’s still a little mindblowing. And it doesn’t have to be highbrow. I still get a kick out of going to Sunrise Mart and microwaving their bento boxes. Where do you find yourself spending most of your time? I used to justify the expenses of living here by experiencing all the amazing cultural offerings this city has: shows, exhibitions, concerts—but everything changes so much once you have a kid. Now, I sort of do those things in a hypothetical way. I look at the Goings On section of The New Yorker and take some comfort in the fact that, if I wanted to, I could be attending all these events… Since having my daughter (she’s now three), I’ve been walking a lot more. When she was a baby, I’d put her in a stroller and take a long walk, getting to know a lot of neighborhoods and their relationship to each other. I’d see that it wasn’t that far to get from Fort Greene to Park Slope, from Park Slope to Carroll Gardens. And I think all of New York is sort of like that. You get this illusion that things are farther apart than they really are because you have to go through the trouble of going downstairs and waiting for the subway, and taking the train, and coming back up when it could’ve been a ten minute walk. There are also all kinds of stuff I wouldn’t have ever experienced if I didn’t have a kid to entertain, such as going to a puppet show or the zoo (we go to the little zoo in Prospect Park all the time). What are some things that surprised you or struck you about the city when you moved here? Where I grew up, there’s a much clearer line of demarcation between the areas for the wealthy people and the areas for the poorer people, as well as other distinct divisions. Of course, they exist in New York too, but there’s just not enough space to have ten miles of barren land between one another; everybody is stepping on each other’s toes all the time. How people manage that can be off-putting or intimidating to me—on the other hand, it can be surprisingly considerate and helpful. It’s odd for me to even say this, but there have been more times where I’ve seen or been involved in scenarios in New York that I could describe as heartwarming, in many ways. This one time, my wife and I were walking home from dinner when we saw a man get suddenly attacked by a group of five or six teenagers, and it turned out to be a pretty bad physical altercation. But within minutes, before I could even start to get out my cell phone, doors of nearby buildings swung open and residents came running out of their houses. One enormous guy (who looked like he should be a bouncer at a club) had one of the kids on the ground with his foot on his chest. In other cities, people might look out from behind their curtains nervously and start calling the cops, but I sense a willingness to get involved here that I don’t see everywhere else… maybe even a positive peer pressure, as though there are so many eyes upon you that you’re almost guilted into behaving properly, which is unusual. Do you remember when you first felt at home in the city? I have one very vivid memory: when I used to visit New York, I would come in for vacation and visit friends, and always spend the entire time in Manhattan. But when I met my wife—I actually came out from California to go on our first date—she was living in Brooklyn, on Bergen St. near Flatbush. We took the subway there, and I just remember it being so dramatic to go from the frenetic, noisy bustle of Manhattan and to come up out of the subway and be in a neighborhood that was extremely quiet and peaceful. I was taken by how beautiful the streets were: the brownstones, all the trees that were up above. I think, in that moment, there was the first glimmer in my mind that Brooklyn could possibly be a place I’d want to live after being on the West Coast my entire life.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product New York Drawings   Nightlife.ca interviews Adrian Tomine Updated January 15, 2013 Illustrator Adrian Tomine talks about his latest book, New York Drawings, and working with Drawn and Quarterly PAR: Amie Watson Publié le 10 Novembre 2012 Adrian Tomine has a dream job – he draws cartoons for a living. The illustrator and regular contributor to the New Yorker will be in Montreal this Sunday to discuss his latest book, New York Drawings, which chronicles more than a decade of his comics and cover illustrations for prestigious magazines as well as an insider’s view of his original sketches and observations. Nightlife.ca spoke with him about his love affair with New York, why readers love his cartoons and illustrations, and his coup de coeur for Montreal publisher, Drawn and Quarterly. NIGHTLIFE.CA: Your cartoons aren’t necessarily funny or make sense at first glance. They’re often observations of day-to-day life in New York that connect to readers in some way. Is it frustrating that readers might not get your cartoon immediately and forget about it? Tomine: As a reader, I’ve always enjoyed that feeling of curiosity. You look at the image first, and if you don’t quite get it, you flip to the contents page and the title will elucidate the image in some way. Your New Yorker cover comics, starting with Missed Connection in 2004 (above image) where a young man and a young woman reading the same book see each other through the windows of subway cars headed in opposite directions, doomed to never meet, have been romantic, cynical and ‘young and hip’. Was that always your style or did you adopt it when you started working with the New Yorker in 1999 after moving from Berkeley, California? That’s probably not my style anymore since I’m neither of those things personally – young or hip, I mean. I’m probably still cynical and romantic. I can’t help but let some element of my own personality seep into my work. So I think some of those affectations that might have shown up in my work when I was younger were just a reflection of who I either was or was trying to be at that point. Like in my early twenties when I was single and going out to bars and concerts, and just being more concerned with that kind of nightlife and youth culture that you don’t have time for when you’re a dad. With your last publication before New York Drawings being Scenes from an Impending Marriage (written as a gift for your wedding guests), will your next comics tend toward themes such as married life and babysitting? I’m sure the 20-year-old version of me would be disgusted with the 38-year-old version. But I don’t think I’m creative or inventive enough to fabricate stories or images out of nothing. When I was proposing the new book I’m working on to Drawn and Quarterly, I could sense an expectation that I would do a big graphic novel to pick up where my previous book, Shortcomings, left off, but I decided to do a collection of short stories. I originally had no concept of what the overarching theme would be and there’s no name for the book yet, but now that I’m about halfway through making it, it’s starting to emerge to me that this is reflecting my present day thoughts. Does your editor at the New Yorker ever say, “Can you keep it a little younger?” Or is the readership of the magazine ageing with you? I think the demographic of the New Yorker is actually getting broader. There are plenty of people who’ve been reading it since they were young, and there are younger people discovering it and finding that the quality of writing or the articles appeal to them. The New Yorker isn’t generally thought of as being a hipster kind of cutting edge magazine, but in this day and age they stand out in terms of a magazine that’s wiling to pay money for artwork – not just a cover illustration, but quite a few interior illustrations too. There’s one sketch in New York Drawings of two police officers and you have a note on it saying you felt they might suspect you were doing something suspicious if they saw you sketching them. But how do you get that feeling across to the viewer without the note? Do you feel limited by your New Yorker cartoons? That sketch was done in the lobby of a big skyscraper in midtown Manhattan and this was close to the 9/11 attacks, so the feeling to being in these buildings was like being in an airport – you better not do anything to arouse suspicion. But living in NY there are so many creative and bizarre people around you at any given moment that if you were in a restaurant or a café sketching in a notebook it wouldn’t draw any attention. I don’t feel limited. I think if my only job was to draw illustrations for magazines then I would feel certain limitations, but most days I’m working on my comics for Drawn and Quarterly, which are completely unfiltered and unedited and if anything I have too much freedom. So I actually appreciate the restrictions and limitations and even the sense of collaboration I feel when I work for the New Yorker. If you hadn’t started doing cartoons for the New Yorker, what would you have done? I was already pretty far down a path of being a lifelong cartoonist already, just doing my work for Drawn and Quarterly – that’s the publisher I’ve worked with my whole career. I actually go to Montreal a lot. Usually I get together with my friends from Drawn and Quarterly but just before my daughter was born my wife and I stayed in a hotel in the Old Port and just walked along the water and ate poutine. We enjoy the high and low ends of food, like in New York. We went to some restaurant one night by our hotel and ended up sitting next to ACDC, and I went home and looked on my computer and they were performing in Montreal that night. Could every major city benefit from an illustrator like you to turn day-to-day life into cartoon-based love letters to the city? I think it’s useful, and I think that can be done in any city. It reminds people about what they love about living there. There’s something about your surroundings, no matter how grim or how bland they might be, translated into artwork that’s gratifying in some way. Adrian Tomine in conversation with fellow cartoonists Charles Burns and Chris Ware, in honour of the 5th anniversary of the Drawn and Quarterly bookstore Sunday, November 11 at 7 PM Ukrainian Federation | 5213 Hutchison | drawnandquarterly.com click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product New York Drawings Los Angeles Review of Books video of Adrian Tomine in their Skylight Series Updated January 15, 2013 Skylight Series, Ep. 5: Adrian Tomine The New Yorker cover artist dicusses his recent collection "New York Drawings" at Skylight Books in Los Feliz, CA See link for full video.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product New York Drawings   Montreal Gazette calls Librairie Drawn & Quarterly, "more than just a bookstore" Updated January 15, 2013 Drawn & Quarterly: A binding force in Mile End The bookstore is such a vital part of the neighbourhood that it feels much older than its five years By Ian McGillis, Special to The Gazette November 9, 2012 “People have stopped saying things like ‘Oh yeah, that little comics shop.’ Now they just call us a bookstore.” Chris Oliveros, founder of the acclaimed comic and graphic literature publishers Drawn & Quarterly, is describing the breakthrough in perception of the shop he opened in 2007 as the public face of his rapidly growing company. But as anyone who has spent any time at Librairie Drawn & Quarterly knows, it is more than just a bookstore. Mile End — grumblings about gentrification from some quarters notwithstanding—remains one of North America’s most vital concentrations of alternative culture, and every Bohemia needs its nerve centre and spiritual haven. Librairie Drawn & Quarterly is already so entrenched in that role that it feels a lot older than it actually is. “For me the store is an institution, a local one but of international repute,” says Montreal writer and broadcaster Jonathan Goldstein. “I think of it in the same vein as Schwartz’s, you know? The kind of place I tell visitors in town that they have to check out. It’s like our own City Lights, a gem of a bookstore backed up by a history of publishing iconic writers and artists.” Madeleine Thien, a peripatetic novelist who makes Mile End her home base, agrees: “I really cherish this bookstore, for the publishing and bookselling they do but also because it’s evident every time I walk in or attend an event just how passionately they care about books and the community.” On the eve of the store’s fifth birthday, Oliveros and D&Q creative director Tom Devlin point out that it was another anniversary — the Canada Council for the Arts’ 50th, in 2007 — that got the ball rolling. “They had a surplus of money that year,” recalls Devlin. “They approached all the publishers who typically use them and basically said, ‘Offer us your craziest idea, what you’d want to do if you got some of this extra money.’ So we ran through all these options: some sort of anthology or elaborate book, or maybe some kind of major website revamp.” Then they came up with an idea they had both entertained independently at various points: a store. Their thinking was driven partly by practical considerations and partly by a desire to strike back against some good old-fashioned Canadian regional bias. “Very few people were aware that we were based in Montreal,” says Oliveros. “Most people just assumed we were in Toronto. Whenever we had an event, we’d have it in some bar, because, at least on the English side, there was really no other place to do it. And mainstream stores just weren’t stocking our books. So we wanted to make a community spot, yes, but we also just wanted to make people aware we were here.” The decision to go retail made, and literally a day after the Canada Council grant was secured, Devlin was cycling down Bernard St. W. when he saw an “ŕ louer” sign on an empty storefront at 211, between Esplanade and Jeanne Mance, the former site of a Hasidic children’s clothing store. (“I remember when I used to bring my youngest son to a garderie around the corner, we always used to stop and look at the baby mannequins in the window,” Oliveros says.) The property had been in the same family since the 1940s, and the landlord, when approached by Oliveros and Devlin, was happy with the idea it would be a bookstore. Once the space was secured and the work on it started, a certain amount of dumb luck came into play. Original period brick turned out to be behind all four walls, and a low added ceiling turned out to conceal much higher Edwardian-era wood. “We knew we didn’t want that ugly low ceiling, but had no idea what disaster might be underneath it,” recalls Devlin. “We worried that we might financially sink the whole company just trying to open the store. When we saw what was actually there, we thought, ‘Oh my god, that’s amazing.’ ” Says Oliveros: “Right from the beginning the idea was to make it not just a place to sell Drawn & Quarterly books, but a store with everything that we liked. Not just other graphic novels, but other books: fiction, art, design.” Adds Devlin: “Initially we just looked at our home bookshelves and said, ‘Hey, let’s order that and that.’ You know, ‘I like Denis Johnson, so let’s order a bunch of Denis Johnson!’ None of us had run a bookstore, but we knew we had enough space that for a while we could get away with just choosing based on personal taste. We had a little wiggle room.” That original winging-it approach has been refined under store manager Jason Grimmer to encompass a selection whose unifying sensibility is more philosophically driven than genre-defined — hard to pin down, but you know it when you see it. For sympathetic souls, it can feel like being in the apartment of an extremely clued-in bibliophile friend. “It’s all so well curated,” comments Goldstein. “You make discoveries there, stumble upon new favourite authors in a way that doesn’t happen when you go to Amazon already knowing what you want.” An important element in the store’s design and layout was that it be adaptable into a performance space. There’s a well-elevated stage against the back wall, and movable central tables to allow for seating and unimpeded flow. A plan to hold music events every Sunday hit a snag when an early “secret” show by Handsome Furs drew an overflow crowd and noise complaints; from that point on, literary events were deemed best, and for the past five years the store has hosted roughly 75 readings and launches per year. For the writing community, the store’s cachet and reputation are drawing card enough. “Doing my launches there feels like being a part of something, like getting a stamp of quality,” says Goldstein. “Plus, they’re all so nice to me.” (This reporter can concur, having done a reading there last spring, in tandem with Kevin Chong and Elise Moser, where I was treated with a deference most stores might reserve for international literary lions.) The goodwill and community outreach effected by such events aren’t their only motivation: altruism is all fine and good, but business, as Devlin points out, is business. “You have an event and you can sell 40 of somebody’s book. Without that event, you might sell four.” As momentum gathered and the store’s profile grew, it became necessary to shift some events to the Ukrainian Federation on Hutchison St., an equally atmospheric room with the advantage of being considerably bigger. That’s where Sunday’s fifth-birthday event, featuring three of the biggest names in graphic literature, will be held. Charles Burns is the author of the seminal graphic novel Black Hole and has illustrated every cover of the über-hip culture magazine The Believer; Adrian Tomine is at the younger end of the golden generation of comics artists and has had illustration commissions as iconic as the cover of the current issue of the New Yorker, for which he was given the daunting assignment of representing both the Hurricane Sandy flood and the presidential election in a single simple image; Chris Ware, described by Oliveros as “the most influential comics artist since Art Spiegelman,” has just published Building Stories, a monumental multi-volume boxed novel that raises the bar for the whole form. The presence of three such heavy hitters on one bill (a music equivalent might be, say, Arcade Fire, Bruce Springsteen and Leonard Cohen sharing a stage) tells its own tale: Drawn & Quarterly is doing well. The store, confirms Devlin, is now turning a profit. “It’s only in the last year that we’ve turned the corner. I guess it’s that classic five-year business thing. Every month (this year) has been far better than the previous year’s. We’ve reached that tipping point where people from, say, Westmount know we’re here, and will make a trip here.” Given such success, at odds with every book-retailing trend, it might be assumed that expansion or even a bit of franchising might be in the cards, but not so fast, says Oliveros. “There’s always the possibility, when you’ve got something that works, that you can expand too far and create a whole new set of problems. We believe that a store like this could work in other cities, but that would involve so much, not just in terms of investment but of having people in those other cities.” “The space next door came up for rent a while ago, and we went back and forth on it, thinking we’d like more room,” says Devlin. “But then you start projecting: you knock out a wall and that means a second clerk over there, suddenly your rent doubles and your staffing overhead doubles and your sales only go up 10 per cent ... so we’re very cautious. We don’t want to blow this.” Ultimately that space next door was taken by the music store Phonopolis, further cementing the street’s cultural vibe. Talking to Oliveros, it’s clear he takes some quiet pride in the part he has played in the neighbourhood’s ongoing renaissance. “After we opened, it definitely helped change Bernard. The street had just undergone a transformation, the sidewalks were widened, but there were still empty storefronts. There weren’t nearly as many diverse stores around here. There were no cafés. And the funny thing is, when we opened, we were worried. We had that initial cushion, but it was just a one-time grant — there was no other funding after that. We worried that after the first year the publishing end might have to support this. We were wondering how long we could last.” “Initially we did think that even if we just did this for just a year or two, it would be a fun thing we did,” says Devlin. “At the very least, we thought that years down the line we’d be laughing, saying ‘Remember that crazy store we had?’ ” Five years on, it’s hard to picture Mile End without that store, so much so that it sometimes feels like something slightly more ineffable is going on, an alchemical process by which the books themselves seem to come alive. “I love strolling among those wacko characters and superheroes,” says multiple award-winning novelist and Mile End resident Rawi Hage. “It is comforting to know that they live here, among us, in this neighbourhood.” Librairie Drawn & Quarterly marks its fifth anniversary with Charles Burns, Adrian Tomine and Chris Ware, Sunday, Nov. 11 at 7 p.m. at Ukrainian Federation, 5213 Hutchison St. Tickets cost $5, available at the bookstore, 211 Bernard St. W. Call 514-279-2224. click here to read more Featured artists Adrian Tomine Chris Ware Charles Burns            Thestar.com highlights Charles Burns and Adrian Tomine's new works as "graphic novel standouts" Updated January 15, 2013 The Hive and New York Drawings among October’s graphic novel standouts Published on Sunday November 04, 2012 October was a fantastic month for comic book fans, and a reminder that the authors we celebrate have strange, boundless imaginations. From a mutant-filled underworld called “the hive,” to quiet reflections on New York City, to literally star-crossed alien lovers, this month’s standout graphic novels explore a whole universe of possibility. Charles Burns, The Hive ($25.95, Pantheon Books) The celebrated Black Hole author returns with another surreal, nightmarish trip down the rabbit hole in The Hive, the second book of a trilogy that began with 2010’s X’ed Out. We follow Doug, an aspiring performance artist with a head injury, through several flowing, disorienting narratives. In one narrative, he recalls his relationship with ex-girlfriend Sarah, hinting at a traumatic incident; in another, he lives in an eerie netherworld populated by mutants. There, he delivers comic books to female “breeders” in a facility called “the hive.” Burns references Tintin with his drawing style, but while Hergé’s books were innocent and plot-driven, The Hive is dark, puzzling and deeply unsettling. With this engrossing graphic novel, Burns proves he is the master of creating a terrible sense of dread while not quite letting readers in on any secrets. Adrian Tomine, New York Drawings ($29.95, Drawn and Quarterly) Adrian Tomine opens New York Drawings with a three-page comic about his first time hobnobbing at a New Yorker party. Overwhelmed by sightings of Steve Martin and Philip Roth, he avoids making small talk by asking guests for directions to the coat check. His awkward interactions belie his incredible ability to capture humans on the page. This book is primarily a collection of his funny, evocative, character-driven art for theNew Yorker from 1999 to 2012, but it reads like a love letter to the Big Apple. Interesting odds and ends are thrown in, including his 2004 “New York Sketches,” when he spent much of his early days in New York drawing strangers sitting on the D train or standing on street corners. New York Drawings is a worthy read for fans of Tomine’s work or anyone who just wants to marvel at the power of a simple pen and ink.   click here to read more Featured artists Adrian Tomine Charles Burns            Featured product New York Drawings   Adrian Tomine explains his Hurricane Sandy cover to the New Yorker Updated January 15, 2013 COVER STORY: HURRICANE SANDY’S ELECTION Posted by Mina Kaneko November 2, 2012 “Where I was in Brooklyn, I don’t think I would have even known that there was a major storm happening,” says Adrian Tomine, the artist of next week’s cover, “Undeterred.” He continues, So I spent the whole night glued to the Internet and watching everything unfolding, just being shocked that this kind of dramatic destruction was happening just miles outside my home. And I started thinking about how it would affect the election. This is a first for me in terms of doing a cover that’s topical with a quick turnaround, and somehow these two significant events just came together into that one image for me. Tomine adds, For all its really horrible effects, I feel like the storm has made real a lot of issues in the election that were hypothetical, that were thrown around as debate topics—global warming; and Is Obama enough of a leader to handle a natural disaster?; and Do we need FEMA? It’s really interesting, and in a way useful, to see a lot of these things become actual issues that are right at hand. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Thestar.com interviews Adrian Tomine, Chris Ware and Charles Burns about their new work Updated January 15, 2013 Chris Ware, Adrian Tomine and Charles Burns discuss their best work Laura Kane Published on Friday November 02, 2012 As three of the world’s most respected graphic novelists prepare to discuss their new books in Toronto, the changing landscape of their medium seems to be top of mind. Chris Ware’s Building Stories is truly a book that cannot be read on a Kindle: an assortment of 14 graphic pamphlets, posters and books housed inside a large cardboard box. Adrian Tomine’s New York Drawings is a beautiful hardcover collecting the artist’s covers, drawings and cartoons for The New Yorker. Then there is Charles Burns’ The Hive, a disorienting, multi-layered tale that explores the theme of art as a lens to view the world. All three books are worthy arguments for art you can touch, hold and experience — not just scroll through. It’s not a surprise then that when asked by the Star to describe a favourite page both Ware and Tomine wrote, by coincidence, about the value of print in a digital world. Adrian Tomine, “Read Handed” from New York Drawings This image, which appeared on the June 9 & 16, 2008 cover of The New Yorker, was my attempt to sympathetically acknowledge the plight of the independent bookseller in the Amazon age, as well as the dilemma of the modern book buyer. When it was published, I saw this cover taped into the window of several book shops around New York. That was gratifying to me, and I felt like, in some small way, there was an unspoken conversation taking place between me, the retailer, and the store’s customers. Chris Ware, “Building Daughter” from Building Stories Since I don’t generally feel happy or confident about what I do, I can’t pick a “favourite” page. But if I had to choose one that sort of surprised me as I was working on it, it would maybe be this page. It’s a newspaper-scaled spread that arranges the main character’s memories of her recently deceased father around a drawing of her sleeping daughter, printed more or less the size that a child at 10 months actually is. Though we hear a lot lately about the usurpation of print and paper by electronic media, I believe there’s still a reason for art and storytelling that doesn’t arrive in a little glowing pit, but as a certain, real thing which one can actually hold. Even though it was only published a few years ago, it’s an image that’s already dated. If I were to create an amended version today, there would be another person in one of the windows above, enthralled by an “e-reader” and oblivious to the commotion downstairs. Charles Burns, pg. 19 from The Hive Whenever I leaf through The Hive, I find myself pausing to look at this page; perhaps because it comes close to capturing that subtle feeling of loss and regret I get when summer turns to fall. On this page, Doug, the protagonist, is walking with Sarah, his soon-to-be girlfriend. I never like “explaining” my stories, but in the centre panel, we see three groupings of figures: Doug and Sarah with hopeful, almost wistful smiles on their faces, an older hippie couple that look a little broken and sad and a young family sitting in the park, enjoying a beautiful autumn day. Why have they all been placed together in the same panel? How do they relate to each other? Those are the kinds of questions I want my readers to ask themselves as they make their way through my story. Adrian Tomine, Charles Burns and Chris Ware host audio-visual presentations of their respective new works on Nov. 12 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema, 8:30 p.m., as part of The Beguiling’s 25th anniversary.   click here to read more Featured artists Adrian Tomine Chris Ware Charles Burns            Featured product New York Drawings   Co.Design recommends Adrian Tomine's New York Drawings Updated January 15, 2013 The Lonely, Painfully Funny World Of Adrian Tomine’s New York Adrian Tomine’s drawings are the sort that make you secretly wonder if you might have served as a subject. The longtime New Yorker artist captures life in the city with a remarkably nuanced voice, drawing it as it is: lonely and funny in equal measure, often at the same time. This week, Tomine released his seventh book, an anthology of his New Yorker drawings and a collection of New York-centric sketches called New York Drawings. There are plenty of crowd favorites--his International Incident cover, for example, which shows a string of airport seats occupied by stranded travelers of a dozen different religions and ethnicities, each reading a book. But there are also a number of drawings no one has ever seen. A series of watercolor sketches shows Tomine examining his fellow subway riders, imagining their stories. A Japanese man in a snapback and headphones sits with his eyes closed (“He bowed when someone bumped into him,” Tomine notes). A woman rolls her blue eyes, squished between two i-bankers (“making subtle facial reactions as one Wall St. guy explains to another his plan for ‘scoring’ with his ex-girlfriend”). Tomine has a knack for picking out moments that capture the kinetic energy of a story that’s about to begin. In one drawing, a man boarding a train pauses as a woman struggles to carry her stroller up the stairs (the title: Be Kind). He captures immense loneliness, too, but never really reaches the point of melancholy. As a California native, he’s described himself as torn between the two coasts, which might work to his advantage. New York Drawings isn’t a love letter to the city so much as an attempt to diagram what social behaviors make it unique. Since he published his first drawing in the New Yorker over a decade ago, Tomine has emerged as a kind of diplomat for comics in pop culture. But in a 2011 interview in The Rumpus, Tomine says he has reservations about the medium moving into the mainstream. “For someone like me who’s always tried to make a living at it, it’s been great, I’m very grateful for it. But at the same time, it’s not a subculture-y thing anymore,” he says. It’s tough not to hear a description of New York embedded in the sentence that follows: And with this sort of increased visibility, there’s more money going around in the industry, and it changes a lot, in terms of who gets into the business as a creator, who sticks with it, and who gets pushed out. And I do think it’s sort of too bad that what once was a safe haven for truly eccentric, outsider artists is no longer that thing. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product New York Drawings Paris Review interviews Adrian Tomine, celebrating his New York Drawings Updated January 15, 2013 Urban Renewal: An Interview with Adrian Tomine October 29, 2012 | by Peter Terzian In “Missed Connection,” Adrian Tomine’s now-famous New Yorker cover illustration, a boy and a girl spot each other through the windows of subway cars headed in opposite directions. They’re both reading the same book—potentially perfect for each other, they’re destined not to meet. The image sums up what makes city life frustrating but also thrilling: the possibility of romance around every corner, the sense of isolation in a crowd, the higher-than-usual incidence of bookish hotties. Tomine began contributing crisp, colorful artwork to the magazine in 1999 and has continued to produce covers that often gently send up urban reading habits. The newly released New York Drawings collects the entirety of Tomine’s New Yorker work, along with his illustrations for other periodicals, book jackets, and album covers. But commercial illustration is only one part of Tomine’s career. The thirty-eight-year-old artist began publishing comics as a teenager. His stories of young misfits and malcontents, serialized in his semiregular comic book, Optic Nerve, have been collected in book form as Sleepwalk and Other Stories, Summer Blonde, and a full-length graphic novel, Shortcomings. His short, funny, loose autobiographical comic strips pop up throughout his books; last year’s Scenes from an Impending Marriage narrated Tomine’s wedding preparations in the style of classic newspaper funnies. A West Coast native, Tomine moved to Brooklyn eight years ago. We met one evening at a pastry shop near his home in Park Slope. It seems obvious that by now your New Yorker work has given you more visibility than your comics. How do you feel about that? It definitely reaches a broader audience. At this point there are a lot of people who know me through The New Yorker and have no idea about the comics I do. I guess that shouldn’t be surprising to me. I’ve separated the two jobs in my mind quite a bit, and that’s been useful. I’m sometimes a cartoonist and there’s an audience for that, and I’m sometimes an illustrator and there’s an audience for that. But there must be some relationship between the two. The art editor in charge of the covers at the New Yorker is Françoise Mouly. She’s very familiar with the eccentricities and personalities of cartoonists, so working with her is very easy. She knows how to criticize and cajole and encourage and praise a cartoonist in all the ways that will make him feel productive and comfortable. There are some illustrators she uses who are purely illustrators—like, for the food issue, they’ll have a nice painting by Wayne Thiebaud of a slice of cake. But I think she tends to gravitate toward cartoonists and narrative artists, and she holds them to a bit more of a storytelling standard. From the first cover I did for her, she was adamant that the image didn’t have to contain a gag per se, but had to have something that could be read visually—some suggestion of a story or message that could be gleaned from spending more than a second glancing at it. I don’t know if she would have hired me if I were just a guy with my middling drawing ability. How many of your images of New York life are based on incidents that you’ve actually seen? Almost all of the images in the book have some root in observation. I arrived in New York in 2004, after living on the West Coast for thirty years. Anything I knew about New York was through a filter of movies or comic books or novels. Especially when I was first taking on these assignments, I was conscious of my lack of authority. Certain artists capture New York very well because they’ve lived here their whole lives and can sit in their chairs and think back to some memory and put that down on paper. But I felt more like a reporter going out into the field and trying to capture what he sees. There are a few that were invented on a tight deadline, just in my studio, and I feel they have that fakeness you might see in a movie that’s set in New York but was actually shot in Toronto. My default version of New York is far more artificial than when I actually go out and get the details right. Do you sense a different mood or tone to your New York work, as opposed to your Optic Nerve comics set in Northern California? For a lot of the time I was in Berkeley I was single, I was living in a kind of collegiate apartment by myself—it was like a protracted summer vacation. So at least in hindsight I have gloomy emotions attached to Berkeley, whereas I started coming to New York because I was dating someone, and it was very exciting and romantic. Now we’re married and I have a daughter who brings me great joy, so I think that really tips the scales. I associate New York with a lot more happiness in my personal life, and I’m sure that plays a part in the artwork. If I had been dealt a different hand and my experience in New York was a real struggle, that would start to come through in the work, and I’m not sure that’s what The New Yorker wants to put on its cover. I feel like I can almost identify the book in the couple’s hands on the “Missed Connections” cover. People have discussed this quite a bit online actually. There’s a Malcolm Gladwell book that gets referenced a lot. Did you have a specific book in mind? No, and in fact that detail was a last-minute addition that came about from conversations with Françoise. I had that basic image but the books were blank, and she had the idea of making it so that they’re reading the same book. That cover came out in 2004, but I think today the boy and girl would both be reading Patti Smith’s Just Kids. In fact it has that same little square image in the center of the cover. It does, that’s true. Strangely that might be the closest one to it in terms of the actual design. In “Bored of Tourism,” I’m pretty sure that’s Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger. That definitely is a Salinger book. It has those diagonal stripes in the corner. It seemed like the right book for a gloomy teen to be reading on a tour bus. And then both books show up in the window of “Read Handed.” That’s right. You’re the first person who’s brought that up. Was that conscious? It was. They kept giving me assignments to do these book-related illustrations, and I thought, this is an opportunity to tie some of this stuff together. Almost all of the characters in your Optic Nerve comics were in their teens or twenties. Now that you’re in your late thirties, do you find it more difficult to use younger people as your material? I find it less appealing. The next book I put out is basically going to be a collection of short stories. I knew I had a kid coming along and my time was going to be fragmented. So I had to break it to my publisher—it’s not a graphic novel, it’s not an issue-oriented memoir, there’s no connective tissue to sell this whole collection with. Sorry! But as I started working on it, my present concerns and circumstances started to find their way in. In a totally subconcious way, it seems like it’s headed toward being a book about parental anxiety. Having a kid has surprised me—I almost feel like it’s a time-travel thing, where I’m thinking of the present as much as I’m projecting into the future, and it’s also making me reconsider a lot of my interactions with my parents from the past. Would you like to return to the long format of Shortcomings some day? That’s a good question. The most impactful comics that I’ve read are the ones where the artists swung for the bleachers and tried to immerse you in their world. I’m very envious of that accomplishment, and to be honest I still think of Shortcomings as being like a novella at best, or a warm-up to something much more ambitious, when the playing field includes Building Stories and Jimmy Corrigan and David Boring and Maus—all these things that are just out of my reach at this point. At the same time I don’t know for sure that comics are necessarily the best and most efficient medium for achieving those experiences, and that all cartoonists are going to excel at that goal. I think now that that’s become the ideal accomplishment, we’re starting to see artists of a lesser caliber than some of the ones I’ve mentioned who are aiming for that goal and falling short or getting frustrated with the process, or maybe stretching out something that would have been more potent as a smaller thing for the sake of having a thicker spine. I could eventually decide that I fall into that category—that I work better in little concentrated doses. We’ll have to see. Maybe every cartoonist has his or her own natural narrative length. If you were to go back in time and talk to the people who invented cartooning, and were doing it for newspapers, and told them that there were going to be guys who were going to do twenty-four-page long stories, they would think that was a strange use of the medium. And if you then said, they’re going to try and inject that with a singular vision and personal experience and do six-hundred-page long stories—I mean, their heads would have exploded. We might see when we look back that there were a few exceptional cases who could take this form and mutate it into something that it really wasn’t meant to do, and could do it with extreme grace and insight.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product New York Drawings   New York Drawings- a New York Times graphic books best seller Updated January 14, 2013 Graphic Books Best Sellers: Collections by Dave Stevens and Adrian Tomine By GEORGE GENE GUSTINES October 19, 2012 There are two newcomers to the graphic books hardcover best-seller list this week, and both shine a spotlight on artists — a trend worth supporting. “Dave Stevens’ Stories and Covers,” at No. 6, takes a look at the cover work of Mr. Stevens, who created the Rocketeer and was also well known for his renderings of women in a ’50s-pinup style. It is a 272-page retrospective that costs $49.99. Mr. Stevens died in 2008 at age 52. His work on the Rocketeer was lavishly reproduced in “The Dave Stevens’ Rocketeer Artist’s Edition” from IDW, which scanned its pages from the originals and printed them at a similar size. The smudges and blue pencil marks gave it a behind-the-scenes feel that was well worth the $100 price tag. At No. 8 on the list is “New York Drawings” (176 pages, $29.95), which showcases the work of the cartoonist Adrian Tomine. The book collects his work from The New Yorker as well as some of his sketches and comics. I recently interviewed Mr. Tomine and wrote about the collected edition. Some of the work captures his feeling of being a man of two worlds: a California native now living in New York. December will see the release of “The Art of Todd McFarlane: The Devil’s in the Details” (Image Comics), which weighs in at 300 pages and costs $64.99. The book will feature reproductions of original pages, previously published sketches and commentary from Mr. McFarlane, who created the anti-hero Spawn and who also once illustrated Batman, Spider-Man and the Hulk. As always, the complete best-seller lists can be found here, along with an explanation of how they were assembled. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            AV Club calls New York Drawings "a treat to look at" Updated January 14, 2013 By Noel Murray October 15, 2012 For much of the past decade, Adrian Tomine has filled the gaps between issues of Optic Nerve by contributing cover art and illustrations to The New Yorker (among other magazines). New York Drawings (D&Q) collects those commercial assignments, adding sketches and a few stray comics, with some brief commentary at the end of the book. They’re all a treat to look at—even the ones drawn to accompany reviews of sometimes long-forgotten movies and TV shows—but the best pieces here capture the quirks of life in New York in the 21st century, where new technology is transforming the way people relate to each other and to the city. Like most of the cartoonists that The New Yorker has been inviting to contribute covers and drawings in recent years, Tomine knows how to tell an entire story with a single image; but Tomine also has a wit all his own, and an eye for the small gestures and moments that others might miss…   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine              LAist calls Adrian Tomine "kind of a rock star" Updated January 14, 2013 Five Questions with Illustrator and Cartoonist Adrian Tomine Adrian Tomine is kind of a rock star in the graphic novel/comic book world. The Northern California-born illustrator and artist is probably best known for his emo comic book series Optic Nerve, which he first self-published as a teenager. The series was picked up in 1995 by the Canadian comic book publisher Drawn & Quarterly—home to Kate Beaton, Guy Delisle, among other artists—leading to a prolific partnership. Tomine is in town tomorrow for a booksigning at Skylight Books for his latest release: New York Drawings. The hardcover volume is an homage to his adopted home, and contains a collection of his covers, comics, illustrations and sketches from The New Yorker and other illustrations inspired by the city. We had a chance to ask Tomine about his work, his influences and what it was like scoring his first New Yorker cover. LAist: What was it like getting your first New Yorker cover? I'm assuming it's a pretty big deal for an illustrator...Is there another cover that you'd like to get that even compares? I drew my first cover five years ago, and to this day it still feels pretty unbelievable to me any time it happens. That logo and the bar of color along the left edge of the cover are iconic to me, and they're inextricably tied in my mind to some of my favorite illustrators from the past, like Peter Arno and Charles Addams. So it still seems very strange—almost wrong—to me when I see one of my own drawings juxtaposed with those design elements, and it's even stranger when I see that magazine out in the world. And I've said this before, but it was really helpful when I met my wife's parents for the first time. For some reason, it goes over much better when you say, "I work for The New Yorker" rather than "I draw adult graphic novels." And with regards to other covers I'd like to illustrate, the sad truth is that there aren't a lot of magazines left that use illustrations on their covers. Photography and type design really dominate that field, for the most part these days. If there was a Yo Gabba Gabba magazine, that might be something I'd have to do, just to impress my daughter. LAist: How does your approach to illustrating for The New Yorker differ from taking on an Optic Nerve drawing? I think of myself as having two different jobs: cartooning and illustration. When I'm working on my comics, I have no editorial input, no deadlines, and no restrictions. I also try to put more of an emphasis on the writing and the content than on each individual drawing. I want them to look nice, of course, but they're really in service of the story, and need to be legible more than anything else. When I'm working on an illustration, I actually view it as more of a collaboration between me and the art director. There's criticisms, suggestions, and changes. There's always a deadline, and it's usually tighter than I'd like. And especially with something like a New Yorker cover, I really allow myself to try to draw as well as possible, lavishing a lot more attention on that single image than I would on a panel in my comic. LAist: I read that your influences include Daniel Clowes and Jaime Hernandez...what attracts you to their work? Who/what are your other influences I've often said that studying the work of Dan and Jaime—and then getting to know them personally—was like my equivalent of art school. I basically owe my whole career to those guys, in a lot of ways. I could go on and on about what I like about their work, but it makes more sense for people to just check it out themselves, if they haven't already. There's some cartoonists that I love, but I know that their work isn't really everyone's cup of tea. But I've never shown Dan or Jaime's work to anyone and had them not immediately see why it's so important to me. As far as other influences, especially in regards to this new book, I should mention some of the great New Yorker illustrators that I've loved over the years. I already talked about Arno and Addams, but I'd also mention Ludwig Bemelmans, Whitney Darrow, Jr., Syd Hoff, Helen Hokinson, William Steig, and Saul Steinberg, just to name of few off the top of my head. Of the present-day artists, I'm always knocked out any time Dan Clowes, Chris Ware, or Richard McGuire do a cover. Actually, there's just too many to mention. I can't think of any other publication that has such an amazing track-record. LAist: Were you ever a fan of traditional comic books from DC, Marvel, etc? Of course! I first got interested in comics because of the superhero comics I bought from the corner store when I was a kid. And I loved everything: Marvel, DC, Archie, Harvey, Mad, etc. I was not at all discriminating. As long as it was in that language of comics, I wanted it. LAist: You're originally from Sacramento/Northern California and now are based in NYC. Have you spent much time in LA? Are there any places (landmarks, watering holes, hikes) here that are go-to spots for you? I've spent some time in LA, but not really as a tourist. I usually come to visit friends, or in the case of this week, I'm just making a quick stop on a book tour. So more than anything else, I think I'm most familiar with all the great comics and book stores of LA. Maybe some day I'll bring my whole family out here and finally check out the La Brea Tar Pits or something. Tomine signs New York drawings tomorrow (Sunday, Oct 14) at 5 pm at Skylight Books. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Two D+Q artists listed in Paste's Comic Book & Graphic Novel Round-Up Updated January 14, 2013 Comic Book & Graphic Novel Round-Up (10/4/12) Published at 8:00 PM on October 4, 2012 BY HILLARY BROWN AND SEAN EDGAR Each week, Paste reviews the most intriguing comic books, graphic novels, graphic memoirs and other illustrated books. The Hive by Charles Burns Pantheon, 2012 Rating: 8.9 I’m not going to tell you that you can’t read The Hive, Charles Burns’s second in a trilogy of shorter comics volumes that began with X’ed Out two years ago, without having read its predecessor. In fact, it may almost be a better place to start than at the beginning because of the disorientation that results from doing so. Where X’ed Out set up its drifting between dream and reality in a more conventional fashion, beginning in our world and setting up clear visual and thematic echoes between it and the realm of the unconscious, The Hive is more unsettling. The first quarter works like nesting dolls of fantasy, adding both dreamworld comics and their “real world” counterparts to the mix, and as you’re jerked among the narratives, you can’t find your footing, an experience both nauseating and somewhat pleasurable. Burns seems to be exploring a theme about the function of visual fantasy, but it’s never obvious. He’s always been a genius at bringing out the gross side of the uncanny as he’s focused on the desires our superegos do their best to quash—a Stephen King who says the horror is in us, not outside us, and more horrifying for that—and this series is no exception. It will provoke both attraction and revulsion, often within the same panel, as well as a deeply felt sadness veering into depression, “the bad thing” David Foster Wallace wrote of. Intelligent, carefully crafted and emphatically not for everyone. (HB) New York Drawings by Adrian Tomine Drawn + Quarterly, 2012 Rating: 7.6 More endearing than many of Tomine’s earlier works, this volume from Drawn + Quarterly collects his illustrations, many made for the New Yorker and all focusing on the city to which he moved about seven years ago. Informative but not overly rich notes in the back provide context for many but not all of the images, which reproduce beautifully and more than make up a nice portfolio. There are a few multi-panel strips in here, some of which are quite lovely, warmer and more vulnerable than I tend to think of Tomine as being. The one in which he circulates at the magazine’s holiday party, endlessly asking if people know where the coat check is to give himself a purpose, is glumly amusing. In some ways, it’s as if Tomine is turning into a Harvey Pekar who can draw, a professional complainer who manages to entertain as he bitches. A whole book of this attitude might get old, though, which is why it’s nice to have his drawings of Bob Pollard, Batman (drawn for Chip Kidd) and others in greater numbers. His sketches of people around New York are perhaps the greatest pleasure, far less polished than his finished work but more relatable because of it. The book’s not going to convert anyone, but it’s a good record of work that otherwise might have been merely ephemeral. (HB)   click here to read more Featured artists Adrian Tomine Charles Burns              Acclaim previews New York Drawings Updated January 14, 2013 NEW YORK DRAWINGS BY ADRIAN TOMINE EDITORIAL CARTOONIST, ADRIAN TOMINE, RELEASES A NEW BOOK OF WORK Posted By ACCLAIM Staff | 25-Sep-2012 For over 10 years Adrian Tomine has been creating covers, illustrations and comics for the New Yorker. With a recognizable style, the illustrations have all been complied into a book titled ‘New York Drawings’. Every cover, illustration and comic features in the book along with some sketches and other images not seen before in the New Yorker. With a distinct style, Tomine’s images are minimal yet memorable and are well known to many New Yorkers. Check out some pages above. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Design Week calls New York Drawings, "something to be celebrated" Updated January 14, 2013 New York Drawings Wed, 17 Oct 2012 | By Emily Gosling Adrian Tomine has become about as New York as a lox bagel prepared by Lou Reed atop the Empire State building. In short, very New York indeed. New York Drawings cover, Adrian Tomine The cartoonist’s works have graced the pages and cover of The New Yorker for over a decade, and now the new book New York Drawings brings together every cover, comic and illustration he’s ever produced for the publication. The volume will also reveal a little about Tomine’s practice, showing sketchy notes and dry, often hilarious annotations. New York Drawings, Pacific St. Station (7/12/04), Adrian Tomine Françoise Mouly, The New Yorker art editor, says, ‘Adrian Tomine arrives in New York, and we suddenly remember why we all love living in The Big City, whatever the hassles may be. ‘Tomine’s wit is as sharp as his heart is tender, and his portrait of the city is not only intellectually stimulating, but also emotionally and aesthetically rewarding.’ The book opens with a very sweet, partially autobiographical cartoon of a star struck awkward Sacramento boy arriving in New York, in awe of the bustle and beauty of the city. There’s more than a hint of New York poet Frank O’Hara in text such as, ‘and now here I am: the holiday party for the New York Magazine!’ New York Drawings, ‘Double Feature’ (The New Yorker, August 24, 2009) Adrian Tomine Tomine’s urban vignettes turn quotidian incidents into something special – to a packed tube carriage, the girl who ‘doesn’t move a muscle for four stops’, may seem unremarkable, but for Tomine, it’s something to be wondered at. There’s the boy on the D Train going uptown, ‘sweating profusely’; or the woman in the 3 Train ‘making subtle facial reactions as one Wall Street guy explains to another his plan for “scoring” with his ex-girlfriend when she comes to visit.’ New York Drawings They’re snippets of observation and conversation that would resonate with any city-dweller, but put through Tomine’s witty, sharp lens, they become something to be celebrated. And who knows, if you’ve found yourself on a New York subway over the last decade, perhaps one of Tomine’s characters is a portrait of you.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine              The List reviews the "lavish pages" of New York Drawings Updated January 14, 2013 A beautiful and thought-nudging collection from the New York comic artist Source: The List (Issue 705) Date: 15 October 2012 Written by: Brian Donaldson As a subway train passes another, a girl’s eyes meets a boy’s gaze across the electrified tracks. A clichéd moment is thankfully avoided as they just so happen to be reading the exact same book. Could an image get any more ‘Adrian Tomine’ than that? Actually, yes, and there are plenty more where that came from in New York Drawings. These lavish pages feature Tomine’s collected illustrations, drawings and sketches which have adorned the covers and inside pages of The New Yorker since his published debut there in 1999 as well as CD cover work for the likes of Yo La Tengo and Luna. Resplendent with cool, literature-loving women and geeky, awkward men, his collection platforms a fondness for capturing life on the NYC underground in all its oddness and irritations: what do you do when you can’t escape a nauseating macho conversation and should a guy help a woman struggling with a pushchair when his train is about to leave? Out on the hectic street, which businesswoman, if any, will back down with good grace as they hurtle towards a vacant cab and what can you say to the owner of a small bookshop next door when he catches you signing for an Amazon package? Tomine’s love of film culture is rampant here, featuring subtle images of Sean Penn, Orson Welles and James Gandolfini while there’s a tricky encounter between Kate Winslet and Jennifer Connelly. But ultimately the artist’s own doubts and neuroses have the greatest impact as he worries about whether he should even be at a party thrown by (postmodern alert) The New Yorker and his loathing of eBooks is undermined by both the younger and older generations. A beautiful and thought-nudging collection. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Comic Book Resources says New York Drawings "is filled to the brim with beautiful work" Updated January 14, 2013 Mon, October 15th, 2012 at 9:08AM (PDT) NEW YORK DRAWINGS by Kelly Thompson, As a big fan of Adrian Tomine's work, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this collection of his "New York Drawings." Unfortunately, though the theme of "New York" ties everything together nicely and is clearly a subject matter that Tomine is passionate about, there's great variety when it comes to the quality of the work included. Tomine always delivers at a high level, but seeing some of his much more detailed and well-considered drawings -- the ones that stand so effortlessly on their own and that "say" something about a variety of subjects (whether that be a love song to the city of New York or some deeper commentary) next to smaller less important sketches -- draws a sharp contrast that's a bit frustrating. The book is filled to the brim with beautiful work, but the bulk of it is made up of work he's contributed to "The New Yorker" over the last ten plus years. Most of those smaller works, when taken out of the context of the story they've been commissioned to illustrate, simply lose their impact. All of them remain lovely, but standing next to more important and more careful work makes them seem less than and it's an unfortunate comparison a reader can't help but draw. That said, the covers and some of the larger more important New York illustrations are stunning, filled with Tomine's quiet style that is simultaneously precise and effortlessly loose, a quality not easily captured by many artists. Additionally, there's a fantastic section of rare and never-seen-before sketchbook work that's evocative and easily the strength of the book, next to his strips of course. Though I've immensely enjoyed seeing Tomine's illustration work in "The New Yorker" over the years, and I hope that continues -- both for my benefit and for the steady work I'm sure it provides Tomine -- reading the few strips included here is a reminder that he is so much more than just a talented illustrator. He is an exceptional storyteller, one with a sharp self-deprecating and observational sense of humor that never ceases to make me laugh and think. Reading and absorbing this lovely book really leaves me yearning for more actual comics from Tomine. He's greatly missed, even though he's not really left us.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine              Papermag reviews the "incredible compilation" of Adrian Tomine's work Updated January 14, 2013 ADRIAN TOMINE'S WONDERFUL NEW YORK DRAWINGS By Gary Pini Artist, illustrator and frequent New Yorker contributor Adrian Tomine just released an incredible compilation of his comics, illustrations and sketches that highlight both the sense of loneliness/non-loneliness that comes with life in New York City. New York Drawings, his seventh book, is published by Montreal's Drawn and Quarterly press and features a decade of work from the California-born writer, now residing in Brooklyn. Tomine is wrapping-up a little tour to promote the book and will be in Berkeley, CA, at Pegasus Books on October 12; Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco on the 13th and in Los Angeles on the 14th at Skylight Books. He returns home for the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival on November 10th. Here's a little taste of NYC, as seen through the eyes of Mr. Tomine. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            dig Boston interviews Adrian Tomine Updated January 14, 2013 EARTH PRIME TIME: INTERVIEW: NEW YORKER COVER ARTIST ADRIAN TOMINE SIGNS ‘NEW YORK DRAWINGS’ AT HARVARD BOOK STORE Posted on October 3, 2012 by CLAY FERNALD Contemporary comic book artist, writer, cartoonist and New Yorker cover artist Adrian Tomine signs his most current Drawn and Quarterly hardcover at Harvard Book Store tomorrow. New York Drawings is an anthology of New Yorker covers, record covers, and character sketches from in and around New York City. Adrian spend most of his life on the West Coast, cultivating a cult following for his Optic Nerve mini-comic. Here is an exclusive interview with Adrian touching upon his successes, the comic market, and insight into the process behind his signature clean line style. Thanks for taking the time with us today, Adrian. The preface to New York Drawings is a short autobiographical strip wherein you find yourself at a New Yorker Christmas Party. Like a true artist, you find yourself full of self doubt, even at a point where you can be proud of your successes. Is there a lesson in humility there or was this a passing observation? Well, I didn’t intend for it to be didactic, but I suppose if someone is putting together a book of all their work for The New Yorker, it wouldn’t hurt to add a drop or two of humility. Basically, it’s just a little story I’ve had in the back of my mind for a while now, but didn’t know what to do with. I initially sat down to write a more traditional prose introduction for the book, and then it just seemed like it would be more interesting to do it as a comic. Optic Nerve had it’s origins as a self-published mini-comic. Do you feel like the kind of success you had at an early age in comics could be duplicated in the market today? I think the market has changed so much since then that what was considered “success” for me at an early age wouldn’t really register now. I was elated when five copies of my mini-comic sold at the local comic shop—now people can track the number of “hits” to their website, they get big advances for their first book, etc. If I was any kind of success back then, it was mainly because the stakes were so low! Adrian Tomine - New York Drawings Cover Was the leap from autobiographical comics to more in-depth stories about other characters a natural move? In other words, how were you able to start writing more complex stories and building your ‘world’? Did your English education at UC Berkeley drive your creative writing? My college classes certainly exposed me to a lot of literature that would’ve been too intimidating for me to tackle on my own, but I don’t know that that had a direct influence on my comics. I mean, if you look at the stuff I was doing back then and then you look at the books I was reading for school, it would be pretty hard to find any kind of direct correlation. I was reading the best literature ever created and I was drawing the worst comics of my career. I think that progression towards longer, more fictionalized stories is really the result of a rather embarrassing competitive streak. I was watching a lot of other cartoonists achieve great success and acclaim with ambitious “graphic novels,” and I felt like I needed to try to at least get in the race. And now I’ve reverted back to short stories, so I guess we know now how that all played out. Were you the first of your friends to get published and get attention for your work? Optic Nerve put you on the map as a young man. You assume that I had friends! I actually started doing Optic Nerve in response to being an unlikeable teenage loner, so it wasn’t like I was part of some cartooning community then. And when I did eventually make some friends in the comics world, they were basically already seasoned veterans, so any little accomplishment I might’ve experienced wasn’t anything new to them. You are also known for multiple record covers, illustrations, and your famous New Yorker covers. New York Drawings is a hardcover book composed of many of these covers, skits, and sketches. Even your sketches are of high quality and have a clean line. Are you still thrilled when you see The New Yorker on the newsstand with the logo typeset over your art? I don’t think that drawing a cover for The New Yorker is the kind of job I can ever take for granted or become blasé about, mainly because of all the work I do, it’s the thing that still garners the biggest response by a wide margin. If I told some in-law that I got nominated for a Harvey Award or whatever, they would have no idea what I was talking about. But especially around here, The New Yorker is a big part of people’s everyday life. Adrian Tomine - Shortcomings page 21 You capture people in these little ‘moments’ that life sets us up with. Does the young man help the struggling mom with a baby carriage? He seems like he wants to, but doesn’t want to miss the train. Two readers are sharing the experience of reading the same book, stuck between stations, pausing for just a moment as their two trains are aside each other for a tiny second. These are moments that will make you feel alive and connected for a second, especially in a big city. Do you feel like an outsider in New York City? You appear to feel very at home after your transplant there. Like most cartoonists, I think I’m kind of an observer no matter where I go. Even after living in Berkeley for fifteen years, I still felt like someone who had moved there from Sacramento. And it’s the same thing here in New York. I’ve lived here since 2004 and I still feel like the typical West Coast transplant who complains about the weather and the bad burritos. Recently I’ve come across two of your books, Scenes from an Impending Marriage and Shortcomings. Impending Marriage was a short and fun read about you and your wife Sarah preparing your wedding. This honest and fun book gave nods to Family Circus and Peanuts while being set in the very real world nightmare of picking guests and a DJ for the wedding. In stark contrast, Shortcomings was the story of a man sorting out why his relationships suffer. In Shortcomings, there is humor, but the laughs are more subtle and conversational. Also, race, gender, and sexuality play a huge part in Ben Tanaka’s biases in the book. Does your writing and planning process change to adapt to the kind of book you are working on? Of course, yeah. When I was writing Shortcomings, I went out of my way to block out thoughts of how it would be received. I knew it was the kind of book that would suffer the more I worried about a hypothetical audience’s reaction. Whereas with the wedding book, I had a very specific target audience (the guests at our wedding) in mind completely, and I was basically trying to create something they’d enjoy. 'Guest List' Adrian Tomine - Scenes from and Impending Marriage Do you draw digitally or with pen and ink? I do all my drawing with ink on paper, and just use computers to color the artwork. Many will continue to aspire to reach some of the creative milestones you have under your belt, Adrian. Please continue to inspire. In what ways do you see challenging yourself next? Do you have any book projects coming up? I’m working on a book of short stories in comics form, and I’m challenging myself to approach each story in some different way. I chose this format mainly because I have a two-year-old daughter at home now, and getting any kind of work done is something of a challenge. But I think it will be a useful book for me because in a lot of ways, I’m still trying to figure out what my own style is, and it’s nice to not feel locked into one big story for the next five years. Adrian Tomine - WFMU, New York Drawings ADRIAN TOMINE DISCUSSES NEW YORK DRAWINGS THU 10.4.12 HARVARD BOOK STORE CAMBRIDGE 617.661.1515 7PM/ FREE   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine              New York Times Magazine calls New York Drawings "elegant and minimal" Updated January 14, 2013 Bookshelf | New York State of Mind By George Gene Gustines October 2, 2012 “New York Drawings,” a new hardcover from Drawn & Quarterly that is out today, is a wonderful celebration of the artwork of the cartoonist Adrian Tomine. The book is filled with his work from The New Yorker as well as some of his comics and sketches. The book achieves a great balance between allowing the drawings room to breathe and a notes section that details how the assignments came about and the artist’s process. The cover for the book, “Missed Connections,” which is pictured, was Tomine’s first cover for The New Yorker. “I’m sure it never would’ve happened without the tireless coaxing and immeasurable guidance of art editor Françoise Mouly,” he writes. “The main thing that Françoise stressed throughout the process was that the image should contain at least a kernel of a story — not necessarily a ‘gag,’ but something beyond just a pretty picture — and I think it’s that quality that made this drawing resonate with people.” Indeed, as someone who reads a lot of graphic novels and who often finds himself focusing more on the words than the pictures, I had a different experience of reading “New York Drawings”: I lingered over the illustrations and imagined the narratives that could go along with them. One other image, in particular, stayed with me: “Be Kind,” in which a commuter must decide to get on his train or help a woman up the stairs with her baby stroller. The book was designed by Jonathan Bennet, and it was Tomine’s first time working with a designer. “I’ve always designed all my books from cover to cover,” he said. “This was the one that I thought would really benefit from an objective eye.” The results are pleasing: the book feels elegant and minimal, and avoids any temptations to cram too much onto every page. “New York Drawings” is also a testament, in part, to Tomine’s move from the West Coast to the East coast. Tomine was born in California and went to college in Berkeley. “It’s hard to be objective about the two places,” he said. “When I was in Berkeley, I was living alone, in a crummy student-styled apartment. It has a lonely, gloom-type of memory. In New York, I’m married and I have a 3-year-old daughter, so I associate New York with a happier, more fulfilling part of my life.” He has tried to express his frustrations with the change — including his struggle to acclimate to the climate — in his illustrations, to mixed results. One image, “Waiting It Out,” depicts New Yorkers waiting at the base of the subway stairs for the rain to stop. Tomine thought of it as an unpleasantly scented stairwell. Others had a different reaction: “What a beautiful, romantic image of the city,” he recalled. “You really know all the things that we love about the city.” Tomine’s book tour in support of “New York Drawings” continues tonight at McNally Jackson Books at 7 p.m. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            BoingBoing describes New York Drawings as a "vibrant... portrait" Updated January 14, 2013 Comics Rack: Boing Boing's comic books picks for October Brian Heater at 9:20 am Mon, Oct 1 There have been all of, what, three issues of Optic Nerve published in the past decade? Adrian Tomine, you’re given those of us in the indie comics trenches some serious abandonment issues here -- those of us who cite the series along with Eightball and Hate and Love & Rockets as the books that helped up our eyes to the potential of this medium in high school and college. Oh, we know why you haven’t been around a lot. We get it it. We live in a world where making a living as a cartoonist is a tricky proposition even for someone whose convention lines wrap around to the other side of the room. And yeah, if we thought for a minute that The New Yorker wanted what we were selling, we’d drop everything in an instant -- and once they did, tales about angsty 20-year-olds might not have the same resonance. But then you open this collection and realize Tomine is still Tomine. That the sequential floppies have mostly morphed into single-page illustrations (which, wild guess, likely pay orders of magnitude more than full issues ever did), but the cartoonist has used this opportunity to condense short stories into single panel tales. Yeah, some of the content is likely just commissioned supplementals for others’ text stories that do most of the heavy lifting, but divorced of text, Tomine has become a master of conveying real world complexities in the context of a single frame. And as you stare and search, the book store is changed from a stationary object for coffee tables and dusty bookshelves into something more vibrant -- not quite a graphic novel per se, but a portrait, certainly, of the world around him.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine              FlavorWire recommends Tomine's beautiful New York Drawings Updated January 14, 2013 Preview Adrian Tomine’s ‘New York Drawings’ By Emily Temple on Sep 29, 2012 In Adrian Tomine’s New York, strangers in two passing subway cars connect, or next door neighbors bashfully turn away from each other, children gaze wistfully at the cityscape or cautiously at its streets, people are all alone, yet inevitably, irrepressibly connected. Tomine’s New York Drawings, which hits bookstores early next week, collects a decade of illustrations, sketches, drawings and, perhaps most recognizably, covers of The New Yorker in a beautiful single volume. We’ve picked out a few of our favorite illustrations (the first slide is this writer’s favorite cover of The New Yorker, bar none) after the jump. Click through to get just a taste of this great book, and if you happen to be in New York next week, you might consider stopping by to see the artist on October 2nd at McNally Jackson – otherwise, catch him at another stop on his tour. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            In-depth review of Adrian Tomine's OPTIC NERVE! Updated February 28, 2012 Comics Time: Optic Nerve #12 (Review) By Sean Collins Attention Deficit Disorderly Feb. 16th, 2012 Man, is this thing ever happy to be a comic book. The format of a comic doesn’t matter to me a whole lot, unless the format in question is notably detrimental to the comic it houses. I like the idea of serial alternative comic book series mostly for the promise of seeing a lot of work from alternative cartoonists on a regular basis, but today that need is met by the web. (Which can’t meet all needs, to be sure — it doesn’t meet the need of retailers to have that kind of material showing up fresh every few months and consequently attracting a different clientele to the shops on Wednesdays, but that’s not my bailiwick.) But in Optic Nerve #12, Adrian Tomine reminded me what can make an alt-comic such an attractive and pleasurable way of packaging material, something not even the most well-stocked RSS reader can provide. In addition to the usual letters page, its weirdly personal mix of praise and criticism as po-facedly selected as always, the issue consists of three comics. The first, “Hortisculpture,” feels like an homage to the apparently final two issues of the greatest of the alternative comic books, arguably the two best single alternative comic book issues by anyone: Dan Clowes’s Eightball #22 and #23. Like them, the story is constructed from individual self-contained strips, in this case a full “week”â€�s worth: six black-and-white four-panel strips plus a full-color “Sunday” page, over and over till the end of the story. Said story recounts a family-man landscaper’s quixotic career detour into the world of contemporary art via his own unique blend of sculpture and horticlture, an unappreciated (arguably unappreciatable) hybrid his pursuit of which upends his life. As a crypto-autobiography it’s a corker — a keyed-up, hyperreal representation of the travails of Tomine’s chosen form of self-imposed artistic marginalization. It’s as engrossing to watch him work his way through as, say, Gabrielle Bell’s similar fictionalizations of her family life. (Plus it allows Tomine’s customary preoccupation with the intersection of race and romance a new, markedly less hostile environment in which to flower.) Things have gone a lot better for the cartoonist than the hortisculptor, to be sure — the former just received some of the best notices of his career for the wide release of the comics he made about his marriage to the mother of his kid, while our last glimpse of the latter is of he and his daughter gleefully smashing his work to smithereens — but the anxieties underlying the worst-case-scenario comic are obviously real, and really funny. And once again like Clowes, in Eightball #22 and later in Wilson, Tomine’s working with a much “cartoonier” style — a curvier line, bulbous noses, dot eyes, doughier physiques — that enjoyably invokes similar work from Sammy Harkham or Chuck Forsman. It feels right, somehow, to look at art like this on a staple-bound page. Next up is that staple of one-man anthology series, the reprint from some other anthology. In this case it’s Tomine’s “Amber Sweet” from the broadsheet-sized Kramers Ergot 7, attractively scaled down to the size of the floppy comic, its muted color scheme even more clearly centered around the nutmeg-colored hair of the young woman who discovers she’s the spitting image of the titular porn star. “Sweet” is fascinating to me in that it’s about how unsexy sex can be: our protagonist’s love life, and more besides, is basically destroyed by her resemblance to Amber, a resemblance the men in her life are either daunted by or way too into. Tomine’s perhaps uniquely suited to explore this plight: his cartooning is as sexy as it gets, I’ve always found — his line elegant, his compositions enticingly icy, his character designs very attractive, from Amber and her never-named doppelganger on down — but his work relentlessly cuts against that with the awkwardness and selfishness of his characters. Here we see a beautiful girl who looks like another beautiful girl who makes her living by taking her clothes off and having sex have sex herself as drawn by one of alternative comics’ great unsung sensualists, but the story denies us the pleasure on every possible level. It’s a blast to watch Tomine so successfully negotiate that obstacle course on the way to the story’s knockout ending, a beautiful and satisfying opening-up of the story’s emotional claustrophobia. The third and final strip — two pages, 20-panel grids — is Tomine’s Lament, pretty much, a self-effacing mock-autobiographical strip about Tomine as “The Last Pamphleteer,” his adherence to the alt-comic format earning him the laughter of his peers and the indifference of his audience. And here, perhaps, he’s trying a little too hard. Throwing “tweet” into sneer quotes as if the term is an affectation instead of just, y’know, email or website; saying things like “I even liked it when the artist was obviously just trying to fill a few extra pages, and you’d get a pointless, dashed-off autobio strip or something!”, as if both he and we didn’t notice that he had to cram this thing onto the inside back cover to get it to fit; using D&Q publicist Peggy Burns as an antagonist, as if he weren’t still core Drawn and Quarterly artist Adrian Tomine; setting up Anders Nilsen and Kate Beaton as models for the new book-driven publishing model, as if they too weren’t primarily collecting work they published in smaller chunks elsewhere…He doth protest too much, and while the result is amusing, who needs it? He’s Adrian Tomine. He writes great and draws great and is as good at using his chosen format as anyone else is at using theirs. That’s all you need.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Optic Nerve #12   IT'S A GOOD LIFE IF YOU DON'T WEAKEN and SHORTCOMINGS among the Guardian's 10 Best Graphic Novels Updated January 12, 2012 October 30, 2011 Rachel Cooke It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken Seth (1996) Seth - the pen name of the Canadian comic artist Gregory Gallant - is perhaps best known as the designer of the complete Charles M Schultz’s Peanuts (25 volumes so far). But he is a star in his own right, too. It’s A Good Life… was originally serialised in his comic Palookaville, and details its author’s obsessional quest to discover more about Kalo, an elusive New Yorker cartoonist from the 1940s (whether this is fact or fiction, I’m not telling). Wry, funny and shot through with nostalgia, Seth’s sepia tones have an autumnal, elegiac quality all their own. Shortcomings Adrian Tomine (2007) This is the tale of Ben Tanaka and Miko Hayashi and what happens to their relationship when Miko moves temporarily to New York. Miko is a somewhat earnest political activist who is deeply involved in American-Asian cultural issues. Ben is a 30-year-old theatre manager who resents being boxed in culturally, and who has a wandering eye, especially when it comes to Caucasian women. Left behind in Berkeley, and egged on by his randy friend, Alice, Ben basically goes a little nuts. A fantastic book about race, sex and modern life, it’s as dry as a good martini. click here to read more Featured artists Seth Adrian Tomine            Featured products It's A Good Life If You Don't Weaken (PB) Shortcomings (PB) Adrian Tomine interviewed on KPCC Updated January 12, 2012 November 1, 2011 The Madeleine Brad Show Writer and illustrator Adrian Tomine recently published the highly-anticipated twelfth installment of his comics series, "Optic Nerve." Tomine has helped redefine the graphic novel genre with his stories about average people. Mainly, single people in their twenties and thirties struggling to find some kind of meaning or connection in their lives. Tomine will discuss "Optic Nerve," as well as his other work with Madeleine. Guest: Adrian Tomine has published many books. His art has graced New Yorker covers and albums of bands like Weezer and Luna. Listen to the show here!   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Optic Nerve #12   CBR advises comic newbies where to start, with SHORTCOMINGS and PAYING FOR IT Updated January 12, 2012 November 9, 2011 Sonia Harris How to get new readers addicted to comic books… People who have never read a comic book often ask me where to start. Sometimes the question is only half serious, more of a sort of bewildered curiosity about what I could possibly get out of it. Maybe because of this column or because my house is filled with comic book ephemera, but people come to me when they want to start and I’m starting to see some patterns about where they like to start, and it isn’t with superheroes. Across the board, people who’ve never read comic books before are (at least initially) completely turned off by superheroes. From what I can gather, the way they’re reading comic books is already challenging enough, asking them to also buy into the idea of spending time reading about people in tight costumes asking too much. Even the comic books that I’ve come to think of as crowd pleasers because they appeal to such a huge variety of readers, like Batwoman or All-Star Superman are just met with a casual brush off. Despite the plethora of superhero movies, I’ve found that there is still a certain amount of surprise that a grown woman like myself would actually read about them. The stigma of reading superhero comic books is alive, albeit in a slightly less aggressive form. It is one thing to ask a new reader to buy into taking reading words and imagery, it is another to ask them to also get into a (supposedly) juvenile area like superheroes. It doesn’t matter if they like so-called escapist movies with action and science fiction elements, they’re still going to have some hang ups about the superhero genre. That’s fine, they’re be plenty of time to feed them the greats. Initially we just want to take their interest past the amused curiosity and into genuine personal involvement. At most, they might read a crime, fairy tale or horror book, but initially at least, the fastest way to get them to take comic books seriously is to show them books which are as close to real life as possible. Here is a short list of books which have been my entry point for a number of new readers. These are books which have been happily bought by the people I recommended them to, although I would also recommend these as gifts too, as they are so well made. Shortcomings Adrian Tomine’s slice of relationship moratorium is a great place for people to start. First of all, they literally always can follow the rule of reading from left to right and top to bottom. He doesn’t break this rule and so new readers actually have a chance to get comfortable reading a comic book for the first time. For men or women, at best they recognize the path not taken or at worst, they feel a kinship with these misguided but lovingly depicted people. Most importantly the book is stylish and understated, never asking the reader to make any weird steps out of their own perception of reality. This is relatable and funny and pretty enough to draw people to it. Tomine really ought to design more covers; books, fashion magazines, whatever. Overall, he has a lovely way of creating very normal looking characters and making their lives seem special. It is a feeling which he managed to impart to the mundane life of the reader, allowing us to see the rhythms and beats of the art in our everyday lives. Paying For It Chester Brown’s diary of being a “john”, wherein he writes of his own experiences with prostitutes, not in a lascivious way, but in a rather detached way, as a complete alternative from the messy and challenging business of romantic relationships. A controversial book, in many ways I think that this book was written by Chester Brown simply so that he’d have an excuse to disseminate his long essay in the back (documenting his own feelings about the legality of prostitution.) That aside, I still think it is fascinating. A bit dismal and bizarre, but still fascinating. I would hate to be this man or have his life, or even have to interact with him for any sustained amount of time, but still… there is no other way I can imagine getting this much information revealed to me. He is totally vulnerable and open about his depressing life and it makes for great reading. click here to read more Featured artists Chester Brown Adrian Tomine            Featured products Shortcomings (PB) Paying For It OPTIC NERVE #12 is top of Playback:stl's 2011 list! Updated January 11, 2012 January 10, 2012 Steve Higgins 1. Optic Nerve (W / A: Adrian Tomine; Drawn and Quarterly) Adrian Tomine has only put out one single issue of his comic in the last three years, yet Optic Nerve #12 was easily the best comic released in 2011. It had humor, it had poignant human interactions, it was beautifully drawn, it was insightfully written. The question people ask should not be “why can’t Tomine put out his comics faster?” It should be “if other artists worked at Tomine’s pace, would their work rise to his skill level?” Honorable mentions go to Image’s Chew and Oni’s The Sixth Gun. They topped my last year, and they continued to be excellent reads this year as well. Greg Rucka’s take on The Punisher brought the character back to basics with great results, while Peter Milligan’s version of John Constantine in Hellblazer has taken the character in new and interesting directions. Jeff Lemire is also having a fantastic year, not just with his contributions to the New 52 books from DC but also with his continued ongoing Vertigo series Sweet Tooth, which featured a spectacular three-part story this year with guest art by St. Louis’ own Matt Kindt. Finally, speaking of the New 52, DC really knocked it out of the park with their relaunch, creating a ton of new series that featured some of the most solid storytelling in comics. In fact, the new 52 books have been so great, they deserve a list of their own… | Steve Higgins   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Optic Nerve #12   Adrian Tomine's signed SCENES for a good cause Updated January 10, 2012 A bit late to get a copy, but read on nonetheless! November 29, 2011 Deb Aoki COMIC BOOK LEGAL DEFENSE FUND: SIGNED AND PERSONALIZED GRAPHIC NOVELS FOR GIVING The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund offers legal support to comics creators, retailers and readers in some pretty challenging times. With the case of Brandon X looming (the U.S. manga reader who had his laptop searched at the US/Canada border and is now facing possible jail time), the CBLDF needs your support more than ever. This holiday season, 25 top comics creators are offering to sign and personalize copies of their graphic novels for the perfect gift for the comics reader on your list. Get a copy of Sandman signed by Neil Gaiman, a Walking Dead graphic novel signed by Robert Kirkman, or even Adrian Tomine's charming Scenes from an Impending Marrriage is a great gift for any newlywed or soon-to-be wed friend. Check out the full list of comics creators and graphic novels at CBLDF's "Spirit of Giving" campaign page. But hurry, you'll need to place your order by December 5, 2011 to get your books in time for holiday giving. As an added bonus, The Will and Ann Eisner Foundation will make a donation for every donation made to CBLDF as a part of this campaign. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage Austin Chronicle highly recommends OPTIC NERVE #12 Updated January 9, 2012 September 30, 2011 Wayne Alan Brenner Who needs it hard all the time? *cough* Just because this new volume of short stories by Adrian Tomine (AKA the comix world’s second coming of Raymond Carver) isn’t a perfectbound bastion of bookcase-puffing proportions, that doesn’t mean that its contents aren’t as deep and deft as that of what some people are calling graphic novels these days. In fact, since it’s published by Drawn & Quarterly, that doesn’t even mean that, despite the book’s being saddle-stitched and relatively thin, it’s other than perfectly printed on fine thick paper befitting the creator’s superlative design. Your sweetheart's skin should have such lovely texture. But, okay, never mind that – Look: Tomine, whose style may be recognizable to you from numerous New Yorker cover and interior illustrations if not from his previous, longer works (Summer Blonde and Shortcomings, say), offers two main stories in this issue. “A Brief History of the Art Form Known as ‘Hortisculpture’” is a look at a would-be artist trying to get some recognition & respect for the creations he’s become obsessed with bringing into the world; it’s lighter and funnier than the typical Tomine-eye-view of angst-ridden youth (and, whoa, there are no angst-ridden youth in this story) and rendered in a style that nods to the drawings and panels of newspaper funnies by way of telegraphing its relative levity. “Relative levity,” we say, although it’s often fucking hilarious. Kind of like, we’re thinking, the Best Episode Ever of some modern, arts-oriented version of "The Life of Riley” starring William Bendix as Riley, from radio’s Golden Age. No, really. And the other story – “Amber Sweet” – is more along the lines of what we’ve come to expect, atmospherically and stylistically, from this precise teller of tales: A young woman dealing with being a dead ringer for a well-known porn star. Oy, girl, what a world. The rest of Optic Nerve #12 is taken up with a letters column, wherein the author’s fans write in to congratulate or castigate him, and an autobiographical comic about the various consequences of releasing this sweet collection as a floppy. “This sweet collection,” we say, because it’s highly recommended. And because, if more “floppies” were this gorgeously produced, we’d be less likely to wait around for any eventual hardcover compilations that might see the light of day.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Optic Nerve #12   CBR interviews Adrian Tomine Updated January 3, 2012 November 29, 2011 Jorge Khoury As we get older and the seasons change colors, most of our friends move forward with their lives by entering marriage and building their own families. Inevitably, many of them won't have the time to hang out at their old stomping grounds and fraternize like they once did. With time and distance, the only thing left are warm memories as we think about them, now and then. It had been three or four years since the last issue (#11) arrived, and after hearing of his wedding in the pages of "Scenes from an Impending Marriage" I sadly assumed that Adrian Tomine's "Optic Nerve" had ended. I thought that the days of writing and drawing biting sagas of unfulfilled romance and despair were over for him. Thankfully, I was wrong. Amongst the DC Comics Reborn hullabaloo in September, there it finally was -- "Optic Nerve" #12 -- and it was more than worth the wait. The series, published by Drawn and Quarterly, originally began in 1991 as a self-published effort by a teenage Adrian Tomine. All of the Drawn and Quarterly issues have been lavishly designed and collected within three books ("Sleepwalk and Other Stories", "Summer Blonde" and "Shortcomings"). And with his latest issue, Tomine continues to prove that as a writer and artist he's unafraid to push himself towards wherever his creative inspirations take him. Pop!: The last issue of "Optic Nerve" came out in 2007. Adrian Tomine: Oh, god, that's depressing. Well, let's try not to dwell on that, okay? Next question! Were there times over the last several years when you contemplated ending the series? Well, there were times when I was afraid that I would be forced to end the series, especially as I watched pretty much all of my favorite cartoonists move on to different formats, either by choice or due to demands of the industry. For whatever reason, I still have a real attachment to the old-fashioned comic book, and I'm eternally grateful to Drawn & Quarterly for allowing me to continue to work this way. Tomine chronicles "A Brief History of the Art Form Known as 'Hortisculpture'" in a series of intriguing newpaper-like cartoon strips. Were there particular reasons for the hiatus? Yes, there were quite a few reasons. After finishing "Shortcomings," I felt like it was a chance for me to take a little break from the schedule I'd been on for the past few years and do other kinds of work: illustration, screenwriting, some regular prose writing, etc. Things I'd been interested in but put aside in order to finish "Shortcomings," basically. Some of this stuff saw the light of day, a lot of it didn't, but I think it was all useful in some way. I also took care of some other things I'd been putting off, namely moving across the country, getting married, and starting a family. When I finally sat down to work on my next comics project, I felt obligated to attempt a real "graphic novel." I was looking at these giant tomes that some of my peers were working on, and I felt really envious of that kind of achievement. It also just seemed like that was the direction everything was moving in, and my old habit of publishing short stories in the comic book format was already an anachronism. So I pursued that for awhile, doing a lot of the kind of preparatory work which is actually the hardest part for me, and the whole time I had these nagging thoughts like, "Do I really want to work on this for ten years? Do I want to draw and write in the same way for that long? Does the material really merit that much of an investment?" I actually completed about twenty pages of this material -- completely written, drawn, and colored -- and I still couldn't shake the growing suspicion that I was headed down the wrong path. The scope of the project was completely draining any amount of joy from the work for me. Then when my daughter was born and I essentially became a stay-at-home dad, that really changed everything. I felt like that needed to be the main focus of my life for the time being, and I'd need to find a way of working that would accommodate that. So returning to short stories seemed like the right solution, and now I honestly think that, at least at this point in my life, it's the mode that I'm best suited to. I love being able to draw twenty pages in one style, finish that story, then start the next one completely fresh. With most of your prior stories, issues with the nature of young despair, romances, sex and relationships were at the forefront. As a regular reader, this new entry seemed like a bit of a radical departure in style, tone and format -- was that an intended effect and the sort of reaction you wanted fans of the book to have with the newspaper comic strip presentation of "Hortisculpture?" Yes, it was very much a conscious choice. Even though I received some nice feedback for "Shortcomings," I was aware that the last thing people wanted from me after that was more of the same. I'd mined a certain vein long enough, so to speak, and I think some readers would've just given up on me if issue twelve was the start of, say, "Shortcomings, Part 2." "Amber Sweet" involves a young lady facing the burden of looking eerily similar to a porn actress and the personal repercussions that come with being seen as just a sex object. What triggered the cartoony approach to "Hortisculpture?" I was influenced by all the great comic strip reprint projects that have been going on recently, especially "Peanuts," "Walt & Skeezix," "Little Orphan Annie," and some of those giant books from Sunday Press. It also just had to do with trial and error. I think I spent a lot of my early career trying to distance myself from some of the more "comic book-y" techniques of the medium, maybe because I wanted so badly to be "taken seriously" or something. But I realized how foolish and weirdly self-hating that was, especially when I found myself having real emotional reactions to things like "Walt & Skeezix" and also being kind of grossed out by some of the more earnest, "realist" comics that had come along. I don't know if that "Hortisculpture" story is entirely successful as it is, but I'm pretty sure it works a lot better than if I had drawn it in a dead-serious, photo-realistic style. And it goes without saying that those classic strips are a great example of using humor and silly drawings as a means of probing some pretty dark aspects of life. Like your character Harold, do you still find yourself, as an artist, constantly asking why you do what you do, the plight and cost of art on an individual and those around him or her? Do you often question the need to share these stories with your audience as you mature? Another mandate I set for myself when I started issue #12 was to move away from autobiography, or more to the point, seemingly-thinly-veiled autobiography. I have only myself to blame, but I wasn't prepared for how much that would be the focus of the reaction to "Shortcomings." It was kind of tough when I realized that everyone assumed the main character was me -- and they hated him! I think to a degree that little dance I was doing -- baiting people into thinking about me as the author of the story -- kind of overshadowed a lot of the work I put into the actual writing and drawing. So I tried to move into a more fictional realm, to write about people and situations that were different from my own life, and to just basically allow for a little more creative license. And when I finished the issue, I had the feeling that, if nothing else, I'd achieved that goal. And, of course, a lot of the response I've received has been people trying to "decode" that "Horstisculpture" story, figuring out how various things correspond to my real life and whatnot, and some of my closest friends have actually told me that they thought it was like the most nakedly autobiographical thing I've ever done. "Amber Sweet" was seemingly the most familiar in tone to your prior work. In it you had a woman who men could not see beyond her outward appearance because of her resemblance to the porn actress Amber Sweet. Were there any particular reasons why you felt this story belonged within this issue? Did you think it didn't belong in the issue? My hope is that it's an okay story, or at least that it's still different enough from my previous work that it doesn't seem repetitive, but I suppose I'm not the best judge. I guess I thought it was an intriguing idea, and it was a way to play around with some of the issues of subjective narration. In Tomine's final brilliant strip of the book, he pontificates his place in this comics industry. In your closing strip, you seem to be having a tough time with all the changes that have happened in the comics industry -- do you feel out of place in today's market? And with release of issue #12, do you remain committed to making "floppies" over doing a "graphic novel?" I've always felt out of place in the market! My plan is to release several more similarly-formatted issues of "Optic Nerve," collect those stories into a book, and then take it from there. I mean, I'm still very envious of these monumental achievements some of my peers are making with their gigantic graphic novels, but I have to accept my fate for now. Has maturity given you the confidence to trust your readers to follow along to wherever your work takes you? Do you see future issues taking "Optic Nerve" into more unpredictable possibilities? I don't know if it's confidence or just not worrying too much. "Optic Nerve" has always been something of a labor of love, so if I can't use it as a venue for doing exactly what I want, I might as well spend my time doing illustration work. At some of the recent signings I've done, I've had the pleasure of meeting readers who've been following the series since the very beginning, and that's really amazing and gratifying to me. When might readers expect your next issue? It won't be as long of a wait as it was for issue #12! Because of the nature of my day-to-day life now, I'm in the totally novel position of having a backlog of stories written and roughed out, and the main hold-up is finding the time to draw the finished artwork. So it's still a little frustrating, but it's a lot better than where I was three years ago. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Readings lists HARK!, SCENES FROM AN IMPENDING MARRIAGE among best of 2011 Updated January 3, 2012 November 28, 2011 Fiona Hardy and Andrew McDonald Hark! A Vagrant Kate Beaton One of the internet’s best webcomics comes to print form: Kate Beaton’s illustrations, seen in publications like The New Yorker, are casual, loose sketches done to perfection. From Nancy Drew mysteries (based off the covers alone) to historical figures behaving badly to reality-based Mystery Solving Teens (they do a lot of smoking), you’ll laugh, you’ll learn, you’ll be glad you bought it. – Fiona Hardy, Readings Carlton. Scenes from an Impending Marriage Adrian Tomine The sheer act of planning a wedding can be overwhelming for anyone on the outside, and now we have Adrian Tomine and his clean drawing style to lead us through the quirks and pitfalls (and name-censored conversations about who to invite) that come with getting hitched. Small, snappy and great fun. – Fiona Hardy, Readings Carlton.   click here to read more Featured artists Adrian Tomine Kate Beaton            Featured products Scenes from an Impending Marriage Hark! A Vagrant   Adam Cadwell names SCENES FROM AN IMPENDING MARRIAGE best comic of 2011 Updated January 3, 2012 December 22, 2011 Adam Cadwell Comics: 1 – Scenes From An Impending Marriage by Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly). Although this had a spine, you could never call it a graphic novel, it’s a comic. Tomine hones his wryly amusing observational style and draws seemingly effortlessly in a looser style that suits it really well. It is somehow curmudgeonly and sentimental all at once. It’s an honest and sweet story of Tomine and his wife made for the guests at their wedding and never intended for publication. I feel lucky to have been able to read such a personal work of art. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage A bit belated, but HARK!, PAYING FOR IT, SCENES FROM AN IMPENDING MARRIAGE make holiday gift guide! Updated January 3, 2012 December 6, 2011 Josh Christie For the friend with a double-major in History and English: Have a friend that would rather read about the crew of the Nautilus battling a squid than Batman* fighting the Joker? Give them Kate Beaton’s new collection, Hark! A Vagrant (Drawn and Quarterly, 19.95). The book collects the best of Beaton’s web comic, along with previously unpublished content and additional commentary. Beaton draws heavily on historical figures and classic literature, marrying them with filthy language, absurdity and non-sequiturs. Some of the strips may fall a bit flat if you aren’t well-versed in the historical bits, but there’s something here for everyone to love. * If your friend does need at least a little Batman, the book contains the awesome Sexy Batman strips. For the friend who doesn’t mind incredibly challenging content: Want a book that will make someone question their moral code? Give them Paying for It (Drawn and Quarterly, 24.95) by Chester Brown. Brown’s memoir is an unflinching and honest look at the years he spent frequently employing prostitutes in his home city in Canada. Or, at least, the first 200 pages are. Brown, a former Libertarian political candidate, devotes the back half of the book to a polemic on why prostitution should be decriminalized. It’s a tough read, especially if you don’t share Brown’s views, but it’s an important book that takes an unblinking look at both the subject of prostitution and the memoirist himself. For the friend tying the knot in 2012: For those of you planning on popping the question, keep in mind that choosing to get married is the easy part. The planning of the wedding? That’s where coupledom really gets tested. In his slim hardcover Scenes from an Impending Marriage (Drawn and Quarterly, 9.95), Adrian Tomine looks at his nuptials in a series of short vignettes. This isn’t as draining as Optic Nerve, or as dark as most of Tomine’s other work. Instead, it’s a book that just oozes charm and sweetness. The topics of the comics don’t sound engaging (registering, designing invitations, choosing a DJ), but they provide a window into the personalities of Sarah and Adrian, and you pick up enough bit about their personalities that they feel like old friends by the time you hit the wedding day. At under $10, a great stocking for the recently engaged or for the married comic fan, who will surely find echoes of their own wedding in the pages.   click here to read more Featured artists Chester Brown Adrian Tomine Kate Beaton            Featured products Scenes from an Impending Marriage Paying For It Hark! A Vagrant   Adrian Tomine interviewed in Rumpus Spotlight Series Updated December 29, 2011 December 29, 2011 Emma Silvers Like most things I liked when I was 16, I first got into Adrian Tomine’s comics because of my older sister, who let me borrow her early issues of Optic Nerve. The series began as a set of self-published mini-comics, Xeroxed and distributed by Tomine when as a teenager in Sacramento. By the late 90s, though he had left his own adolescence behind, his protagonists generally hadn’t. They are introverted, creative, awkward souls, and unsurprisingly, the world they inhabit felt closer to the one I lived in than Dawson’s Creek did. Fast-forward a decade, and Tomine’s illustrations regularly appear on New Yorker covers; in the world of graphic novels, he’s a household name. He published two books in 2011: an illustrated collection of the trials and tribulations leading up to his marriage, and the long-awaited Optic Nerve #12. In between the two, I had the opportunity to pick his brain on fatherhood, his aversion to e-books, and the evolution of comics over the past decade. *** Rumpus: So much has changed in comics since you started publishing. If a teenager these days feels alienated and needs something to relate to, do they even walk into comic book shops anymore, or are they doing something on the Internet that I don’t even about? Adrian Tomine: I guess I’m afraid it’s more the latter than the former. Look, there’s no denying that comics have moved dramatically into the mainstream in North American culture in the last 10 years, and for someone like me who’s always tried to make a living at it, it’s been great, I’m very grateful for it. But at the same time, it’s not a subculture-y thing anymore; it’s something that’s in the New York Times and the New Yorker. And with this sort of increased visibility, there’s more money going around in the industry, and it changes a lot, in terms of who gets into the business as a creator, who sticks with it, and who gets pushed out. And I do think it’s sort of too bad that what once was a safe haven for truly eccentric, outsider artists is no longer that thing. But there are definitely pros and cons. You could also look at it as bringing in a more diverse crowd. Rumpus: Ten years ago, it was always part of the conversation that graphic novels didn’t get any respect as an art medium. And that’s changed with your success, with what Art Spiegleman’s done. Daniel Clowes gets movies made. Tomine: I’ve certainly benefited from it. Just in terms of being able to be a professional artist, but also it’s nice to not have to dread introductions. “What you do for a living?” It used to be easier just to tell people that I was a magazine illustrator than try to explain that I did comics, but not the kind of comics that they were used to, and no, it’s not pornography, etc. And now people even of our parents’ generation are familiar with the term “graphic novel,” which is kind of amazing. Rumpus: One thing that feels like it hasn’t changed much is that it still feels like a very male-dominated field. Tomine: Yeah. I think that’s changing, for sure, but there’s such a long history… I think it’s going to take a while to balance things out. I think in terms of getting new artists who are not in that sort of stereotypical teenage boy demographic; there’s been a lot of progress recently. And I shouldn’t make a definitive statement about this, but my impression is that the main impediment to progress in that regard is the number of people who are choosing to make a go of it. I think, to its credit, this is one of the last forms of popular entertainment that I don’t sense to be discriminatory in any way. I think there’s this general hunger for greater diversity, where publishers are really excited about finding different voices than what has been done. Rumpus: Growing up in Berkeley, the specificity of Berkeley locations always added an extra fun layer for me since so much of your earlier work took place there. Tomine: It’s interesting. When I was working on Shortcomings, the process that I was going through in my real life was moving away from the Bay Area and to New York, and it was this drawn-out process of going back and forth. Working on that book, it wasn’t intentional, but I think wound up having kind of an emotional thought process where in some ways I was saying goodbye to the backgrounds of the old places I was drawing, and looking forward to new ones. And now, the book I’m working on now (Optic Nerve #12) is the first thing I’ve done entirely in New York, and totally by surprise, it seems like most stories are taking place in California. Sometimes it can be sort of emotional for me if I’m trying to envision the setting for a story. I’ll go “I don’t know why, but I feel like this should be in this certain neighborhood in Sacramento that I remember.” And now you can go on Google maps and basically walk through that neighborhood. There’s something satisfying for me in being able to draw the precise kind of crappy architecture that I had in my mind. Rumpus: You’re a father now. Have you thought about your daughter reading your comics for the first time when she reaches a certain age? Tomine: Yeah, I don’t like that idea. I’ve thought about many different things with regard to her growing up and most of them are very disturbing and unsettling to me. It’s not like there’s any content in my work that’s controversial, I don’t think she’s going to be disturbed or grossed out or shocked by anything I’ve done. I guess the real fear I have, which will most likely prove to be correct, is that she’ll grow up to be smart and cultured enough that she’ll look at my work and be critical of it. Like, Oh, this is a little repetitive, or, why were you wringing your hands over such juvenile concerns? Get over it! That’s heartbreaking to envision. It definitely occurs to me, but I don’t have to really face that for some time. There’s an alternate reality I get to live in for a while, where I can do a quick doodle of a cat face with a crayon and she’ll be delighted by it. But then, a lot of the cartoonist friends I have are older and have children, and I can’t think of a single one whose children have grown up to be rebellious. I think we joke about it – us being who we are – that for our kids to be rebellious they’d have to be, like, football-playing accountants or something. Rumpus: When you’re working out of the house, especially, you can imagine that she might absorb some of that creativity or at least an appreciation for art just kind of by osmosis. Tomine: That’s the best you could hope for. I do think it’s getting more and more rare in this country to raise a kid with the attitude that creativity is something valuable. The idea of trying to make the effort to produce something, to put something out into the world, rather than just taking in all the stuff the world’s putting out at you…I think it’s harder for each generation. Even I just feel completely separate from teenagers today who have access to the Internet. And I’m amazed that this interest in video games has never gone away. It just keeps growing. When I talk to people who have teenagers now, their rooms are filled with screens. There are their phones and their DVD players and TVs and all these things to produce distractions for them, and I think it would be hard to find the time to create something. I think that’s really changing something about adolescence. There’s also an immediacy to everything that has changed everybody’s expectations. Now if I can’t get a hold of somebody on their cell phone I’m, like, angry with them. And in my mind, all the things that I really value in terms of art, really good novels or films or comics, I know they all take a long, long time to create, and they take a lot of concentration and dedication…and I just feel like the training for that is becoming more and more rare when people are used to seeing things like YouTube clips, and being able to acquire things instantly. I get nervous about the effect that the high speed of everything will have on creativity. It’s already sad for me to see that a lot of young aspiring cartoonists are putting stuff on the web, doing animation on the computer rather than making zines or mini-comics, which seem to be going the way of the dinosaur. Rumpus: What do you make of the whole world of online comics? Tomine: Basically, I know there’s no turning back the clock, and it’s sort of pointless to mourn what has passed, but I don’t know if the alternatives now really replicate the learning experience that I had, in terms of what I gained from making mini-comics. There were certain components of it that are completely gone because of being able to just throw stuff up on your blog the minute you’re done with it. And also, as a consumer now, it’s weird that when I used to go to a book signing I would leave with a stack of pamphlets people had made to show off their work, and now I just leave with business cards where people have the URL to their websites. And I never go home and take out those business cards and go to those websites. But if there was a mini-comic here in my hand, I’d read it while I ate my lunch. I’m also probably one of the few remaining holdouts who hasn’t consented to making the e-book versions of all my work, which is annoying to some of my publishers. Rumpus: What do you have against e-books? What do you think it changes about how you read a comic? Tomine: I think a lot of the bells and whistles that become available to you would be impossible to resist for some people, so it’s just never going to be a real stand-in version of your comic. People will have to take advantage of the ability to have sound, or zoom in and out, whatever it is. One thing that heartens me about New York is I went to the Strand looking for a couple of books recently and it’s shocking, and great, to walk into a bookstore 20 minutes before closing and everybody’s carrying an armload of hardcover books up to the counter and plunking down their money for it. And they still seem to have classic used-bookstore employees, eccentric people who would rather be reading a book but they have to work at the store. In terms of e-books, though, I haven’t quite gotten to the bottom of it yet, but for some reason everybody I know seems to want to engage me on that topic, or convert me. I think there are a lot of people who just want to hear me embrace e-books or finally say, ‘OK, I bought an iPad and it’s awesome!” There are a lot of people who would get a kick out of it, that’s for sure. Rumpus: Which freaks you out more, being compared to Raymond Carver [I can’t find any original attribution for this – some people say it was Dave Eggers at first but nothing I can fact-check] or when people call you the voice of a generation? Tomine: Oh, God. If I had to pick, probably the second one. The first time I did a reading/signing thing at Cody’s, the woman who did the introduction said something like that, and I wasn’t the only one cringing. I remember looking out into the audience and seeing people’s faces and people whispering to each other, and thinking like “Ugh, can we just cancel the whole thing? I can’t go out there after she said that.” The Carver one doesn’t come up that often anymore, that used to just embarrass me because I was such a fan of his work, and I was so clear-headed about the fact that I wasn’t working in the same ballpark as him. That’s probably even more complicated now since that biography of him that came out. Which, I guess in the author’s head, the point was to paint a true portrait of this guy, but it seems like main effect was to bum out anyone who was a big fan of his. Turns out a lot of the stuff that I was a big of fan of about his work, he was opposed to or it was the work of his editor. And you know, he was not the best husband, not the best father, and so coming to it as a writer and a father and a husband I kept thinking “There has to be some kind of other aspect of his life that I could aspire to,” and then, oh no, he fucked up there too. So I guess in the future, if someone makes any comparison, I’ll just keep my fingers crossed that they mean it in a complimentary way, with regard to his work, and not his life as a husband and father. Rumpus: Ideally, they’re not calling you an alcoholic who cheats on his wife constantly. Tomine: It was especially painful for me to read the stuff about his relationships with his children as I was, you know, bottle-feeding my six-month-old daughter. And then I was just recovering from that and I see there’s a memoir by the son of Andre Dubus, who’s a writer in his own right, and I’m like, OK, I’m not ready for this. But then, the older I get the more I realize, if you found out every single thing about the personal life of most artists you love…well, in my case, most of them are just drunks. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            OPTIC NERVE #12 ranks on CBR's Top 100 Comics of 2011! Updated December 29, 2011 December 28, 2011 44. Optic Nerve #12 Written & Illustrated by Adrian Tomine Published by Drawn & Quarterly "Tomine jumped back on the pamphlet bandwagon with this new, self-contained comic. While the story 'Amber Sweet,' originally seen in 'Kramer's Ergot' #7, holds up find even in a smaller, black and white format, it's the other story, 'A Brief History of the Art Form Known as Hortisculpture' that's the real gem, as Tomine explores in humorous fashion the travails of attempting to create art and the nagging underlying feeling that you are completely ill-suited to do so." -- Robot 6 Writer Chris Mautner "Generally, getting 12 issues of a comic book over 16 years is not a great average, but when the book you're getting is as good as 'Optic Nerve,' you'll wait as long as it takes and you'll like it. Published by Drawn & Quarterly since 1995, 'Optic Nerve' #12 was released this year and with it, yet another wonderful peek into the mind and heart of one of the best creators in the business, Adrian Tomine. Collecting two wildly different fictional pieces that somehow still feel nicely connected, and adding to them 40 brilliant perfectly constructed autobiographical panels about independent comics publishing, 'Optic Nerve' continues to be one of the best independent books around. While I would welcome a gorgeous hardcover collection, or better yet a big beautiful graphic novel from Mr. Tomine, it's nice to see someone still pushing the floppy form, and showing everyone exactly what it's capable of." -- CBR Reviewer & Comics Should Be Good Columnist Kelly Thompson   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Optic Nerve #12   BIG QUESTIONS, DAYBREAK, OPTIC NERVE #12 highlighted in AV Club's Best Comics of 2011! Updated December 29, 2011 December 29, 2011 Noel Murray Top Five Collected Graphic Novels 2. Anders Nilsen, Big Questions (D&Q) In serialized form, Anders Nilsen’s Big Questions was a curious little artifact, featuring page after page of similar-looking birds philosophizing about survival, in between sequences of a grumpy downed pilot and a half-naked, mentally handicapped man wandering through the same sparse landscape. Big Questions reads much differently in book form, where the extended stretches of repetitive, dialogue-light panels feel more deliberate than indulgent. The pleasure Nilsen takes in pure scene-setting is infectious, as he clusters his little animals in and around clearly defined spaces in various configurations. These birds have their own little society, and they are filled with wonder and terror by what they confront as they go about trying to fulfill their purpose. Sometimes they find donut crumbs scattered on the ground, and life is good. Sometimes they find pieces of other birds, blown to smithereens by something beyond avian comprehension. 3. Brian Ralph, Daybreak (D&Q) Although Daybreak is set in yet another world ravaged by a zombie plague, Brian Ralph takes a slightly different approach to the “ragtag band of humans united against the inevitable” genre, by telling the story strictly from a first-person perspective. The reader is put behind the eyes of one survivor, encountering other survivors in a ravaged wasteland, and not always alert to the mortal dangers lurking just outside the panels. While Daybreak doesn’t do anything that George Romero and countless others haven’t already done satisfactorily, Ralph’s first-person approach is brilliantly cruel, locking us into the point-of-view of someone who says nothing and thinks nothing. We’re left to play judge along with the main character, determining the lines between helpful and unhelpful, hero and villain, living and… something else. Top Three New Issues 3. Adrian Tomine, Optic Nerve #12 (D&Q) Adrian Tomine is one of the medium’s masters of the short form, and the new Optic Nerve contains one for the canon in “Amber Sweet,” a beautifully brittle story about a young woman who discovers that she resembles a famous porn star. The other pieces in the book—a funny autobiographical two-pager about the creation of this issue, and a strange, semi-experimental piece called “A Brief History Of The Art Form Known As ‘Hortisculpture,’” about a gardener who thinks of himself as an artist—also explore the line between craft and art, and the difference between a whim and a waste. (Tomine also receives extra credit this year for widely releasing his previously limited-edition Scenes From An Impending Marriage, an amusing and true document of wedding-planning.) click here to read more Featured artists Adrian Tomine Anders Nilsen Brian Ralph            Featured products Big Questions (paperback) Daybreak Optic Nerve #12 The New Yorker features Haruki Murakami's TOWN OF CATS, illustrated by Adrian Tomine Updated September 8, 2011 Town of Cats by Haruki Murakam At Koenji Station, Tengo boarded the Chuo Line inbound rapid-service train. The car was empty. He had nothing planned that day. Wherever he went and whatever he did (or didn’t do) was entirely up to him. It was ten o’clock on a windless summer morning, and the sun was beating down. The train passed Shinjuku, Yotsuya, Ochanomizu, and arrived at Tokyo Central Station, the end of the line. Everyone got off, and Tengo followed suit. Then he sat on a bench and gave some thought to where he should go. “I can go anywhere I decide to,” he told himself. “It looks as if it’s going to be a hot day. I could go to the seashore.” He raised his head and studied the platform guide.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine              Miami Herald reviews ADRIAN TOMINE's SCENES FROM AN IMPENDING MARRIAGE Updated May 26, 2011 Optic Nerve auteur and New Yorker cover artist Tomine documents his final step toward conjugal domesticity in this slim volume illuminating the pre-nuptial preparation. Apparently originating as an idea by his betrothed as a wedding favor for their guests, Tomine wisely decided to share the story more widely, with the serendipitous acquiescence of his publisher. He told interviewer Edward Champion (http://www.edrants.com/the-bat-segundo-show-adrian-tomine/) that the other intent of this collection was to jump-start a college fund for the couple's new daughter. Regardless, it's a sweet mosaic of unashamedly authentic moments preceding a new union. Tomine has tapped a fresh vein of creativity and if he ever chooses, could probably use this as his entree to a newspaper daily strip -- for better or for worse. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage The Library Journal loves ADRIAN TOMINE's SCENES FROM AN IMPENDING MARRIAGE Updated May 26, 2011 The challenge facing Adrian and Sarah: navigate their Wedding Adventure without breaking up. In extended vignettes that suggest unpacked New Yorker cartoons, Tomine walks us through the major milestones. Guest list: should an invitation go to "the ex-boyfriend who cheated on you"? Reception venue: "It's my favorite combo: Hideous and expensive!" Invitation: "I can design an invitation with my eyes closed!" Epiphany: "WAAAAH! ... We’re getting sucked into a black hole of nuptial narcissism!" Remedy: Sarah talks Adrian into doing a little minicomic as a favor for wedding guests: "It would be so CUTE! You could do a bunch of short strips about us getting ready for the wedding!" The result delighted everyone, of course. And so Tomine expanded the wedding favor minicomic into this charming and tender line-drawn collection. VERDICT Tomine, known more for psychologically darker stories like Shortcomings than for straight humor, reveals considerable talent with goofy comedy. Scenes is far too short, and hopefully Tomine will draw more comedies to come. Recommended for all public libraries and, of course, as an engagement gift for this season's bridezillas and groomzillas.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage   The Guardian loves ADRIAN TOMINE's acid wit in SCENES FROM AN IMPENDING MARRIAGE Updated May 16, 2011 Do you have a friend who is in the process of turning into Bridezilla (or even Groomzilla, since women certainly don't have a monopoly on wedding madness)? Then I have the perfect gift for her - though on second thoughts, perhaps this is a treat best left until after her nuptials when, one hopes, your friend will miraculously recover her mislaid sense of humour. Adrian Tomine, author of the brilliant Shortcomings and a cartoonist at the New Yorker, has written a "prenuptial memoir" called Scenes from an Impending Marriage in which he lays bare, with ruthless efficiency, the bizarre effect that organising a wedding can have on even the sane and the cynical (and Tomine, as fans will know, is nothing if not cynical). Is it accurate? Yes, as a laser. Is it hilarious? All I can say is that it will make you - if not your good pal Bridezilla - snort like a dragon. Don't, on any account, combine reading it with lunch. Tomine's specialist subject is angst and alienation among young bohemians; his characters wear heavy spectacles and cool sneakers, they eat a lot of takeout, and they worry excessively about fitting in. It's a world he knows well: Tomine has never flinched from the idea that much of what he writes and draws is thinly disguised autobiography. But because he's so devastatingly observant, he cannot be anything other than hardest on himself. Scenes from an Impending Marriage is more of the same, really, only this time it's explicit: the book began its life when his fiancee, Sarah, begged him to draw a miniature comic book for their guests as a wedding "favour". I wonder what those guests think now. One of the book's funniest sections is about who one invites to a wedding, and why. His list, compared with hers, is tiny. "Come on!" he yells, in a funk before they've even begun. "We've gotta break this endless cycle of obligation and reciprocity!" It's all here: from choosing a venue, to picking a DJ, to registering for a wedding list ("It's emblematic of our whole culture: 'I want lots of stuff and I want to shoot a gun!'" observes Adrian in Crate & Barrel, where couples must use a barcode scanner to compile their list). There is even a section entitled: "An Even-Handed Acknowledgment of Both Families' Cultural Heritage", whose moral is that taiko drummers (Tomine has Japanese roots) and bagpipe players do not, under any circumstances, mix. The blurb on the back of Faber's British edition remarks that the book is replete with "unabashed tenderness" – which is sweet, but not entirely true. I counted just one lovey-dovey frame in the entire book. Even the moment when, late on their wedding night, the happy couple wind up companionably eating greasy burgers in their hotel is shot through with futility. At the wedding, they failed to eat anything at all; in the end, they passed through the fruits of all their labours as if in a crazy dream. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage ADRIAN TOMINE opens up about SCENES FROM AN IMPENDING MARRIAGE during radio interview Updated May 12, 2011 Britain's royal couple has a wedding planner, but what about everyday people who aren't as fortunate to have a fancy wedding planner? Graphic novelist Adrian Tomine offers comic relief in his pre-nuptial memoir, Scenes from an Impending Marriage. Host Michel Martin speaks with Tomine about those "special moments" that capture the humor and absurdity of planning your own wedding. Transcript MICHEL MARTIN, host: Tomorrow, British cultural officials tell us, an estimated two billion people around the world are expected to watch Prince William marry his longtime love Kate Middleton. Until now, most details of the royal wedding have been kept under wraps. But one thing is certain; the happy couple has had plenty of help and centuries of tradition to help them plan the big day. What about the rest of us? Back in the day, perhaps the bride's family, especially her mother, did most of the heavy lifting. But that is a nonstarter for most modern couples today. The groom is invited - no, expected to weigh in. And when you mix that along with the different cultures that many couples bring to the table, well, wedding planning can be a fairly stressful experience. So says graphic novelist and illustrator Adrian Tomine when he married his love Sarah Brennan. And he decided to chronicle some of those special moments and turn it into a wedding favorite. The result is the book Scenes from an Impending Marriage. And Adrian Tomine joins us now from our NPR studios in New York to talk about his book and also perhaps his tips for planning the special day. Adrian, thanks so much for joining us. Mr. ADRIAN TOMINE (Author, Scenes from an Impending Marriage: A Prenuptial Memoir): Thanks for having me. MARTIN: Now I have to be honest, in the spirit of full disclosure, I approach this conversation with some skepticism about your role. I see, for example, on the title page there's an illustration where Sarah is seated at the desk with the phone to her ear calling, how to get some information about the wedding, reading a book, How to Plan to a Wedding. The picture of you sitting on the couch chomping some popcorn, watching the tube. Mr. TOMINE: That's right. MARTIN: And I kind of think that captures the scene for many couples. Am I right? Mr. TOMINE: Yeah. That was I think the starting point for the story of this book. And as you read further you'll see that that dynamic didn't last for too long. MARTIN: How come? Mr. TOMINE: I guess mainly because I have an annoying personality that feels the need to be involved in every little detail and... MARTIN: You just couldn't help yourself. Mr. TOMINE: Yeah. Despite all my intentions, I got swept up in the whole process. MARTIN: Well, you know, there is some fairly hilarious scenes in the book where, you know, you're taking dancing lessons. And at one point you even go to her hair consultation with her... Mr. TOMINE: Yeah. MARTIN: ...hairdresser to talk about how she should wear her hair on the - did you really do that or were you taking some liberties there? Mr. TOMINE: No, no. That's - if I took any liberties it was to make myself look better than I actually behaved in real life. (Soundbite of laughter) Mr. TOMINE: You know, in hindsight I think the hair salon thing might have been a misstep on my part. (Soundbite of laughter) MARTIN: You think? Mr. TOMINE: Yeah. (Soundbite of laughter) MARTIN: Well, in the book the hair consultant, she's giving you the benefit of the doubt. She's like oh how sweet. You know, this is the first fiance who's ever come to a consultation. And Sarah is quoted as saying the truth is he's just a control freak. Mr. TOMINE: That's right. MARTIN: So... (Soundbite of laughter) MARTIN: Now they're all kinds of preparations that you went through. You know, exercising, learning how to dance. The best one is Sarah plucking your eyebrows. But you say at one point in the book we're getting sucked into a black hole of nuptial narcissism. Mr. TOMINE: Right. MARTIN: What is it about weddings that you think seems to bring this out in people? Mr. TOMINE: Oh, I mean it's definitely a cultural thing. I think, you know, having grown up on so many books and movies that dramatize the wedding process in such a way, you can't help but let some of that seep into your mind. MARTIN: Well, you know, girls are raised with this at least I was. You know, I think at least girls of my generation were raised with this like what's the wedding going to be like and, you know, fairy tales, happily ever after, that's kind of the endpoint of a lot of romantic novels and so forth. But boys aren't. At least they have not been. (Soundbite of laughter) MARTIN: What I was wondering is and, you know, because you're kind of a culture guy, do you think that now that we live in this reality show world where it used to be that we really weren't privy to elaborate weddings, that now that we've become so much more exposed to it it's something that everybody thinks they have to do? Mr. TOMINE: Well, I don't know. I think some of the increased media exposures actually might have a little bit of the opposite effect. You watch some of these programs that the focus seems to be on people behaving badly, beating up at the wedding, and we certainly watched some of those shows during our preparations and at least consoled ourselves into thinking we're not as bad as these people. (Soundbite of laughter) MARTIN: If you're just joining us, you're listening to TELL ME MORE from NPR News. We're speaking with graphic novelist Adrian Tomine. His new graphic novel is actually a prenuptial memoir. It's called Scenes from an Impending Marriage. It's about the funny and some of the not so funny episodes he went through with his then fiance, now his wife, Sarah Brennan, as they were planning their wedding. Now one of the things that you wanted to do is balance cultural differences. Because you are Japanese-American and Sarah comes from an Irish Catholic background. And there's one thing that involved like the music that each of you wanted. Mr. TOMINE: Right. MARTIN: Could you tell us a little bit about that - or at least your mothers wanted. (Soundbite of laughter) Mr. TOMINE: That's right. That might be a little more accurate. We got a phone call from my mom who suggested the idea of having some Japanese Taiko drummers perform at the wedding. And if you're not familiar with Taiko drummers, they're generally fairly scantily-clad musicians and pounding very violently on these gigantic drums and chanting and shouting along. So my instant reaction was that there was no chance that that was going to be part of our wedding. MARTIN: I don't know that sounds kind of fun, but maybe that's me. (Soundbite of laughter) Mr. TOMINE: It would have been fun. It would have been fun for... MARTIN: I don't know, we can kind of - my family would've gone for the loincloth guys making a lot of noise but that's, you know, maybe that's us. (Soundbite of laughter) MARTIN: But anyway. Mr. TOMINE: Well, then Sarah reminded me that her mom had suggested the idea of having bagpipe players at the wedding. She wanted to have them surprise everyone by marching up the street and entering into the ceremony or something like that. And we told her that we didn't want that either. MARTIN: You say in the name of cultural sensitivity and harmony we'll have neither. Mr. TOMINE: Right. MARTIN: Is that how it really went down? Mr. TOMINE: Yeah. Disappoint everybody instead of favoring one side or the other. MARTIN: But, you know, on a more serious note, you do say that actually planning a wedding is in fact good preparation for marriage. How so? Mr. TOMINE: I thought so. I guess I'm always surprised when I hear people who are having sort of a contentious wedding-planning process and they're just thinking well, we've just got to get to the big day and then everything will be fine. And I'm always thinking like well, I'll check in with you in a year and see how that's going, you know, because it's the process - at least in our case involved, figuring out how to communicate and disagree without being hurtful to the other person or the other family, which has actually served us well in our marriage. MARTIN: Yeah. You had to learn to negotiate, discuss. Mr. TOMINE: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I mean... MARTIN: Yeah, kind of put everybody's stuff on the table. Work it out. Mr. TOMINE: I think I had to do more learning in that area than Sarah did. But, yeah, we both benefited and you know... MARTIN: Well, how did it turn out? Mr. TOMINE: It was great. Everything that we had worried about, you know, there's the gag panel about the seating chart where I'm just saying it wouldn't hurt to have a buffer zone between the quiet West Coast Asians and the drunken East Coast Irish or something like that. MARTIN: I'm not saying that. I'm not - this is you saying that. (Soundbite of laughter) MARTIN: Send him the letters, not me. Mr. TOMINE: A fictional version of me in the book is saying that. MARTIN: Yes, exactly. So did you wind up having a buffer, maybe put the buffet table in the middle? But you didn't have to do all that. Mr. TOMINE: No. No. And any kind of concerns that we might have had were unfounded. And the main thing is just that a lot of the things that we got hung up on and wrung our hands about, you know, six months or a year later it's like a distant memory. MARTIN: Before we let you go, you know, the big day for Prince William and Kate is tomorrow. And I'm assuming that they've had no shortage of advice on planning their day. But if they should happen to hear this and you wanted to offer some advice on getting through the big day tomorrow. Mr. TOMINE: Right. Well, I'm sure the chances are pretty good that they are listening to this and that they're looking for advice from me. From my perspective, the only advice I'd have would be to tone it down. I mean I would... MARTIN: Wait, wait, wait. You're telling - he's the heir to the throne. Mr. TOMINE: Well... MARTIN: I'm sorry I... (Soundbite of laughter) Mr. TOMINE: That's, you know... MARTIN: Okay. Mr. TOMINE: I'm coming at it from an American perspective, perhaps. MARTIN: Okay. Mr. TOMINE: I'm just thinking $32 million or whatever the equivalent would be that it's going to cost and take 90 percent of that and give it to charities and you'd still have an extremely lavish wedding. MARTIN: I was thinking something along the lines of have the caterer put aside a plate for you. (Soundbite of laughter) MARTIN: But, no. (Soundbite of laughter) MARTIN: No, we wanted - I think it might be too late to un-invite the 200 heads of state. Mr. TOMINE: I think so. I think... MARTIN: Maybe it's me. Mr. TOMINE: I think it's a bit late. MARTIN: Adrian Tomine is a graphic novelist. He's the creator of the acclaimed comic book Optic Nerve. He's also a contributing illustrator for The New York Magazine. His most recent work is called Scenes from an Impending Marriage: A Prenuptial Memoir. And he was kind enough to join us from our bureau in New York. Adrian, thanks so much for joining us. Mr. TOMINE: Thanks very much. (Soundbite of music) MARTIN: And that's our program for today. I'm Michel Martin and you've been listening to TELL ME MORE from NPR News and the African-American Public Radio Consortium. Let's talk more tomorrow. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage   The Brooklyn Rail reviews ADRIAN TOMINE's SCENES FROM AN IMPENDING MARRIAGE Updated May 12, 2011 Another memoir out recently from Drawn & Quarterly press is Adrian Tomine's Scenes from an Impending Marriage. Tomine, who is perhaps best known for his New Yorker covers, draws inspiration here from a different set of 20th-century cartoonists: Charles Schultz, of Peanuts fame, and Bil Keane, who draws Family Circus. Tomine is an excellent storyteller - one of his best covers for the New Yorker was of two people reading the same book on separate subway trains. The perspective is from the train where a woman is engrossed in her book. Through the window, you see the same book in the hands of a man, who has noticed the woman. The mixture of surprise, attraction, and frustration at the impossibility of their ever meeting is readily apparent on the man's face. The cover is both heartbreaking and funny. Scenes is similarly funny, though because the subject matter is so hopeful, it's much more heartening. He makes you like both him and his fiancee as they navigate the frustrations of wedding planning. The book's style is much less detailed than a lot of Tomine's other work, keeping the references to weekly comic strips. Still, Tomine is adept at drawing a lot out in a single frame, and his mixture of pathos and humor are very much at play. The story is told in discrete sections, each outlining one of the frustrating details, from designing invitations (which Tomine, as a graphic designer, takes way too seriously) to getting in shape, to choosing a D.J. And at the end, when you find out what the book is actually intended for, it feels both heartwarming and special: a gift to his readers from a funny, very conventional person, who has let you into his life a little. These two books couldn't really be more different. And yet, they're both warm and quirky memoirs. In both, the authors present a persona that will make readers feel they want to know the authors a little better. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage Stella magazine loves SCENES FROM AN IMPENDING MARRIAGE by ADRIAN TOMINE Updated May 12, 2011 Adrian Tomine, an illustrator for The New Yorker, drew a series of comic strips detailing his hectic, and at times surreal, journey from engagement to wedding day. It has now been compiled into a delightful little book, Scenes from an Impending Marriage.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage   ADRIAN TOMINE answers a few questions about SCENES FROM AN IMPENDING MARRIAGE Updated April 29, 2011 One of my first buys as an acquiring editor was Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli’s great adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass. We (re)published this book in 2005, along with Picador in the US, and it’s done well ever since. It wasn’t part of a plan to pursue a line in graphic novels, but when we subsequently had the opportunity to publish the brilliant Adrian Tomine, it was too good to turn down, and I soon found out that there were, like me, a number of fans of his work in house here at Faber. So, after the rapturously received Shortcomings (2007) – published simultaneously with his long-term North American publisher Drawn & Quarterly – we brought out two of his backlist collections, Sleepwalk (2008) and Summer Blonde (2009) for the first time in the UK. This month, and just in time for a certain â€�Wedding’ (although not by design), we publish Scenes from an Impending Marriage. Already excerpted in the Guardian, and something of a gear change for Adrian, it documents his impending marriage in a uniquely funny and (mostly) sweet-natured way. To mark publication, I asked those fellow fans at Faber to help put Adrian in the hotseat … Silvia in Marketing asks … Scenes … was put together for a very personal purpose. Did you think you would end up publishing it while you were writing it? And do you find it a more nerve-wracking experience releasing something so overtly autobiographical? A.T.: I honestly thought it would be read by the friends and family members at our wedding, and that would be the end of it. I don’t think this book would exist if I was given the task to create it for publication. And yes, I did have to consider a number of things that normally wouldn’t apply to the publication of my fiction. My main concern – and one of the things I edited between the original version and the Faber edition – was making sure we didn’t get sued. The wedding industry can be extremely competitive, and I didn’t want any of the vendors that I depict in the book accusing me of adversely affecting their business! So a lot of those names and depictions were altered between versions of the book. And yes, that means that I did invent the name â€�DJ Buttercream’. Scenes from an Impending Marriage #1 Hannah in Editorial asks … One of my favourite sections in the book is the â€�Guest List’ sketch, has the book caused offence to any â€�friends’ since publication? How well did you disguise the names? Did you use real names and scrawl through to erase them or just invented ones? A.T.: One friend of mine said that he actually studied those panels closely to see if he could make out the real names beneath the scratch marks. The truth is, that strip, along with pretty much the rest of the book, is basically a simplification or distillation of any real conversation that might’ve transpired. I’d like to point out that the bit about me not inviting someone because they didn’t respond to my previous book is a total fabrication, only written for comedic effect! Andrew in Sales (who is about to get married) asks … With reference to the running/getting fit panels: How many weeks before/after the wedding did the nonsense end? And were the dance lessons a waste of time? A.T.: Without getting too specific, I will say that, contrary to the recurring gag in the book, some of that nonsense did not end the minute I got married. And no, the dance lessons were totally worth it. Unless you’re a naturally good dancer, then I’d recommend it whole-heartedly. As much as the idea of dance lessons might horrify you, just think about being forever haunted by video footage of yourself flailing around on the dance floor, not knowing what to do with your hands, stepping on the bride’s toes, etc. etc. Even though I had the lessons, I was still a terrible dancer, but at least that fear of not knowing what to do was taken away, and that was a relief. Angus (yours truly) in Editorial asks … Have you had any good letters from fans yet, in response to this publication? (Anyone telling you you’ve â€�sold out’?!) A.T.: Not letters, but there has been some disgruntled responses to this book from long-term readers of my work, both in person and online. There’s a certain type of fan (not just of comics), who basically wants their favourite artists to stay the same, and to continue to just refine or improve upon the same thing they’ve always done, and some of these types of readers did not appreciate the change in style and tone of this book. And there are some people who’ve made it clear that they just dislike or aren’t at all interested in the topic of weddings and marriage, which I totally understand. I’m very up front with people: this is not a â€�graphic novel’ and it’s not for everyone. On the other hand, I felt like it was very important that the book I put out after Shortcomings be something rather different, and this certainly fits the bill. [Angus again]: An early issue of Optic Nerve had a great list of albums you listened to while working on it (Pixies, Stone Roses etc). Is music still important to you, and was there anything particular on the Tomine turntable as you worked on this? A.T.: Music is still important to me, but I’m not nearly the connoisseur/consumer of current music that I was in my teens and twenties. I still stumble upon new-ish bands that I get excited about every once in awhile, but for the most part, my interest in the latest hip thing has kind of dissipated. I left my fancy turntable in storage when I moved to New York, and now I basically just have an iPod and a laptop plugged into speakers in my studio. And I’m usually listening to classical music. To my younger self: I apologize. Scenes from an Impending Marriage #2 Ruth in Editorial asks … How did your design work for The New Yorker come about? Has your style developed or adapted since taking it on? Is it different to the way you’ve worked on your own art? A.T.: Most of the illustration work I’ve done over the years has kind of fallen into my lap, mainly as a result of someone seeing my comics work. But The New Yorker is the one job that I actively pursued. I put together a portfolio, looked up their address in the phone book, and dropped my samples off in person. It’s a very different working process than my own comics work in that it’s a collaboration between me and at least one other person at the magazine. There’s a fair amount of back and forth, and sometimes I’m asked to make changes I wouldn’t have thought of. I’ve actually developed a pretty close working relationship with a couple of people there, and I really value their input, suggestions, and guidance. It’s a nice counterbalance to my comics work, where I’m totally on my own. Angus again … I imagine you’re approached to do commissions quite often, and probably turn a lot down, is there anything you really hate being asked to do? A.T.: I’m not a big fan of the â€�theme sketchbook’. If you’re not familiar with this phenomenon, it’s where a person brings a blank sketchbook to a comics convention or book signing, and goes around asking for free drawings of their particular favorite subject. Sometimes it’s a certain superhero that I have no idea how to draw, and sometimes it’s something so specific and weird – like a guy falling off a cliff – that it’s just a chore. And the worst innovation to this tradition is that now the drawings (which are invariably not very good) are often scanned and posted on the internet for everyone to see! This new book has also brought out a lot of requests to â€�make the same kind of book, only for OUR wedding’. It’s tough to decline because some people get very emotional about anything related to their wedding, and can’t stand the idea of anything not working out exactly as they want. Silvia again … Am I right in thinking you call yourself a cartoonist rather than a graphic novelist? And how is it that non-fiction graphic works are always called graphic novels? A.T.: I’m pretty sure I’ve never referred to myself as a â€�graphic novelist’. And if I do, please come and put me out of my pretentious misery. Obviously there’s flaws with the term â€�graphic novel’, especially, as you point out, when most of the books in question are not at all novels. But what can I do? The term, for better or worse, seems to have stuck, and if the world finds it more respectable than â€�comic books’, who am I to argue? Kate in Publicity asks … Can you remember when you drew your first cartoon/strip, as such, and what it was? And can you remember first knowing that it was what you wanted to do? A.T.: I think I first started drawing things that resembled comic strips when I was about six. They weren’t divided up into panels, but they were meant to be sequential images on the same page. So, in other words, I’d draw a bunch of images of the same crude figures on one page, and I was attempting to tell some kind of little story. Usually, it was something along the lines of: this guy punches that guy, then that guy punches him back. Most of my drawings from that time were very science fiction-based … probably inspired by Star Wars and Japanese animation. I think by the time I was in third or fourth grade, I was pretty determined to be a cartoonist when I grew up, although my vision of that at the time was a lot more like a real job: going into an office, drawing alongside a bunch of other artists, etc. Scenes from an Impending Marriage #3 Ian in the Faber Academy asks … In third-person (no-picture) fiction, the author’s voice can always be heard separately to the voices of the characters – sometimes even to the detriment of the work. Do you feel that graphic novelists have an authorial voice? Do the same rules of fiction apply? A.T.: Wow, these are a couple of big questions; probably too big for me to properly answer here. I think, if anything, the authorial voice is more pronounced in comics, if only because every mark on the page is made by the author’s hand. I think it might be a bit easier for a prose author to recede from the reader’s thoughts due to the mechanical and often unobtrusive nature of typesetting. But like many qualities of cartooning, I see this as a particular advantage, or a positive quality. I love the fact that even though all of the characters in the Peanuts strip are very much individual and â€�alive’, I’m still always â€�hearing’, in a sense, the voice of Charles Schulz. Angus again … Can you tell us anything about the new book? Will it publish as issues of Optic Nerve first, as usual (and, if so, when!)? A.T.: I can’t say too much right now, only because a lot of it is still in progress or unknown even to me. It’ll be a collection of very loosely-linked short stories, and it will be in colour. I’m approaching each story as a chance to work in a different manner, which is liberating for me, and will, I hope, create some interesting variation within the book. And because I’m pathologically afraid of change, it will be published in the same manner as I’ve always worked: first in the form of several comic books, and then as a book. The first comic book (Optic Nerve 12, for those keeping track), is scheduled to be published at the end of the summer by Drawn & Quarterly. And finally, Silvia asks … In classic comic book tradition, who would win in a fight between you and your wife? A.T.: I guess it depends on if you mean a physical or verbal fight. Scratch that … she’d win either way. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage NEWSDAY calls SCENES FROM AN IMPENDING MARRIAGE "refreshingly humble and very, very funny." Updated March 30, 2011 FANFARE BOOKSHELF: COMICS BY SAM THIELMAN. Special to Newsday 20 March 2011 Newsday [...] Adrian Tomine's future is secure. Though the slice-of-life cartoonist has made his mark as a graphic novelist (and a New Yorker cover artist) many times over, he's managed to craft the perfect engagement party favor with "Scenes From an Impending Marriage" (Drawn & Quarterly, $9.95). The tiny volume is out just in time for wedding season, and it's certain to change hands over the course of many a nuptial shindig. Its plot is simple: The author recounts the difficulties he and his wife (of Japanese and Irish ancestry, respectively) worked through during their engagement, from managing the guest list to deciding between Taiko drums and bagpipes (in honor of cultural harmony, they choose neither). Tomine's influences are as appealing as they are unconventional: He pays homage to Charles Schulz and even Bil Keane ("The Family Circus") over the course of this short book, portraying himself as an overgrown child. The result is refreshingly humble and very, very funny. [...]   Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage   The Onion AV Club eagerly awaits SCENES FROM AN IMPENDING MARRIAGE Updated March 4, 2011 11. Adrian Tomine, Scenes From An Impending Marriage (March 1) Although he now graces the covers and interiors of The New Yorker, cartoonist Adrian Tomine got his start making a Xeroxed, self-published mini-comic called Optic Nerve that told stories of his own life as well as poignant, understated vignettes about hip young urbanites. He returned to his roots in 2007 with the similarly DIY mini-comic Scenes From An Impending Marriage. A funny, sometimes moving, always immaculately drawn recounting of his prenuptial preparations with his then-fiancée Sarah, Scenes was issued in limited quantities, after which it quickly disappeared. Finally, though, a hardcover collection of the series is on the way from Drawn & Quarterly, in a half-sized package that perfectly suits Tomine’s humble, quirky look at love and tradition. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage ADRIAN TOMINE interviewed on The Bat Segundo Show Updated March 4, 2011 EXCERPT FROM SHOW: Correspondent: I wanted to get into the ineluctable autobiographical angle through a different mechanism. Interviewers, critics — they’ve all said, “Oh, well, Tomine is totally autobiographical.” But here, you are tempting fate again with the subtitle of the book: “prenuptial memoir.” Tomine: Right. Correspondent: You mentioned in the introduction to 32 Stories that you “learned the useful trick of taking a personal experience and veiling it with a sex change or two.” Tomine: Right. Correspondent: So we have to talk about this. But I’m going to ask you: Which of your characters is least like you? How much of Scenes [From an Impending Marriage] emerged out of your reality? Or is there some liberation, so to speak, in the fabrication? Tomine: Oh completely. I mean, everybody has been focusing on the autobiographical nature of this book and I think some of the promotional materials are talking about how it’s such a personal work or something. But I think in truth, in some ways — well, I wouldn’t say the least personal, but it’s certainly no more personal than the other books. And I think that definitely in the fictional stories, I feel a lot of the freedom that you refer to. And the flip side to that is there’s an inhibition that comes along with drawing yourself as the main character. And I think this book, this current one, is all definitely drawn from real experience, but very carefully edited and selected. Correspondent: Yeah. Starting with the first story, where we see scratched out words of names and places and the like. Which, to my mind, didn’t necessarily mean privacy, but possibly meant an ode to the Victorian literature, where you have the first letter and the line long after that. Tomine: Yeah. And also I think that this was the first time I just embraced the idea that this would be intended for as wide of an audience as possible. So it set up the ending, where I have the one swear word of the book scratched out too. So it doesn’t quite jump out as much as it would otherwise. Correspondent: So wait a minute. I understood that this started out as something to be disseminated to wedding guests. Tomine: Yes, that’s right. Correspondent: Okay. So was it always intended for public consumption? Tomine: No. Correspondent: No. Tomine: No. The original version that was slimmer. There were fewer pages. It was basically just Xeroxed and assembled. And it was meant to just be given out at the wedding. So the only audience was really going to be our close friends and family. Correspondent: Well, this is interesting. Because 32 Stories came back in a third life, I suppose, by having that box of minicomics. And it seemed to me from the introduction that it also came about under a certain amount of duress. I’m wondering if people have to push you or kick you into getting things published these days. How does this come about? Tomine: Well, I think that if someone really wanted to read between the lines and investigate. The dedication of this book explains a lot about why it’s now in stores. Because it’s dedicated to Nora, who’s my one-year-old daughter. Correspondent: Aha! The father’s fund. Tomine: Yeah, exactly. We know a lot of people are confused. They say that in the book you say your wife’s name is Sarah. Who’s this Nora that this book is dedicated to? Correspondent: Your mistress, I thought. Tomine: (laughs) Right. My Irish mistress. Correspondent: (laughs) Yes. Tomine: Yeah, my wife was actually joking about that and saying, “Nobody ever has an Irish mistress.” I mean, there were a lot of reasons that went into the decision to actually publish it. But if I’m honest, one of them would definitely be just a bit of that new father panic of “I’ve got a life that I’m responsible for other than mine now.” So that was part of the thought process. At the same time, there was also the element of just how off the beaten path this book was for me. And that was appealing. Because when I finished my previous book, and digested a lot of the reviews and the response, that it was really clear to me that whatever it is that I publish next had to be pretty different. I think people had their fill of that specific tone and that meticulous realistic style of drawing. I don’t think it was — well, I take — the criticisms of that I took to heart. Not that it was poorly done, but that I’d been putting out a lot of that in that same vein for a number of years. So I didn’t really have a plan of what I was going to do next. But then it was kind of a relief to me when I realized that I basically had a complete book just sitting in my sketchbook. And it was as dramatic of a change as I was looking for. Correspondent: Well, we’ve brought up a number of things just in the first few minutes. Tomine: Right. I derailed you. Correspondent: No, no. It’s great. I love this. Working on art for money. Working on art for audience response. And then simultaneously mining from your own personal life to generate narratives that often take an immense amount of time. In the case of Shortcomings, four years. So this leads me to wonder whether there’s possibly a double-edged sword here, if you are revolving your creative process around what the audience is telling you. Clearly, you still read reviews. Tomine: Yeah. Correspondent: Clearly, there is an interest to stay in this business. Obviously. But on the other hand, the fact that this book, this latest volume, came from a safe place. Where you were almost buffered by the possibility of critics dissecting every little aspect of your work. I mean, how does this work? How do you gravitate between the two? Or is it all one unified theory here? So to speak. Tomine: No. I think you touched on a lot of the things that were in my mind really. Because this wedding book was definitely the most breezy and loose and — a word that’s never applied to my work, but — fun. And I think it was because of what you’re talking about. The idea that it basically wasn’t meant to be published. And that no one but a handful of people that I knew and loved would be seeing it. And really, even though I knew the people at the wedding would be seeing it, the only real audience I had in mind when I was creating it was my wife, Sarah. A lot of it was just a question of not “Is this going to be a great strip?” or “Is this going to be beautifully drawn?” or anything like that. But just “Is this going to make her chuckle at the end of the day?” Correspondent: So really she’s your first audience. Tomine: For this, especially. Correspondent: Do you see that being — she’s going to be your future audience? Her and Nora perhaps? Tomine: Yeah. Correspondent: I mean, how do you insulate yourself from the constant probing? Tomine: Well, I mean, whether I like it or not, she’s going to be my first audience. Just as the nature of working at home, and her curiosity. When she scrolls through my studio each day, she does take a look at what I’m working on. But at least so far, it’s been a real asset to me. Because she’s more well-read than I am. She used to work in publishing. And she has editing experience. She also, along with that, knows the fine art of dealing with the fragile ego of the writer or the artist. And she also just has a really good sense of humor. And I think that she’s, if anything, encouraged me over the years to try and tap into that a little bit more in my work.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage   Star Advertiser loves SCENES FROM AN IMPENDING MARRIAGE Updated March 4, 2011 A graphic walk up the aisle I'm a big fan of alternative comic book creator/illustrator Adrian Tomine, whose stories of angsty youth drawn in his clean style have been his calling card. The former Northern Californian moved to Brooklyn to be closer to the woman he eventually married, and their journey to legal "couplehood" can now be found in little-book form in "Scenes from an Impending Marriage" (Drawn & Quarterly, $9.95). Tomine originally drew most of the strips as wedding reception favors, and they have a looser feel than his previous work. Even if you're not familiar with Tomine, you're likely to relate to his wedding-planning travails, such as finalizing a guest list, finding the right reception venue, and picking the right music (no "old rock 'n' roll!"). Measuring about 4-by-5 inches, this is a little joy of a book. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage The Onion AV Club's round up features SCENES, MID-LIFE AND DENYS WORTMAN'S NEW YORK! Updated March 4, 2011 Cartoonist Adrian Tomine was one of the great success stories of the ’90s mini-comics scene, wowing fans of DIY pop-art with both his breezy autobiographical strips and piercing literary short stories. Over the past decade, Tomine’s done well for himself as an illustrator and graphic novelist, but while he’s been performing on bigger stages, he’s done less of the kind of work that made him such an early standout. That’s what makes Tomine’s Scenes From An Impending Marriage (Drawn & Quarterly) such a treat. Originally written and drawn as a gift for the guests at Tomine’s wedding, Scenes From An Impending Marriage consists of short, funny vignettes about all the chores of getting hitched, like making an invitation list, hiring a DJ, and striving to look presentable. The book is an unexpected return to the mini-comics form—not unlike a serious rock band stepping back from concept albums to knock out a fun 45 again. The expanded, hardbound Scenes is still small in size, which befits the light tone and the spare, character-focused art. And though the book isn’t meant to be taken too seriously, neither is it completely frivolous. Among its strengths: Scenes From An Impending Marriage accurately captures the peculiar blend of public and private that marks the beginning of a marriage. The betrothed couple is overwhelmed with thousands of tiny details, nearly all of which have more to do with how they’ll be perceived by their families and friends than with the couple’s actual preferences. (Throughout the book Tomine shows himself doing things he wouldn’t ordinarily do to prepare for the wedding, all while muttering, “This nonsense stops the minute we’re married.”) Tomine includes scenes of him and his fiancée dealing with their guilt over wasting so much money on a party they’re barely going to get to enjoy, and scenes where he imagines their friends greeting the news of the happy occasion with a shrug. It all feels very honest, and though Scenes From An Impending Marriage isn’t exactly revelatory, in a way that’s to be expected, because a newlywed’s rites of passage are familiar by design. If anything, it’s reassuring to know that even an artist as talented as Tomine had to suffer through the same crap as any other young groom. Joe Ollman’s graphic novel Mid-Life (D&Q), on the other hand, does feel revelatory, because the protagonist’s situation is so particular and painful. The hero, John, is a 40-year-old art director for a general-interest magazine who finds reasons every day to lose his cool: his job, the two snippy grown daughters from his failed first marriage, or his exhausted new wife and their toddler son. When John becomes obsessed with a Laurie Berkner-like kiddie-music star named Sherri Smalls, he risks his family, his career, and his self-image to meet with her while on a business trip to New York. But even without the potential affair clouding his thoughts, John would likely be on the brink of self-destruction, because he’s constantly depressed about how much of his youth he’s squandered on a lifestyle he never really wanted. Ollman (who previously wrote and drew the Doug Wright-winning story collection This Will All End In Tears) works here with cramped nine-panel pages, conveying both the drudgery and the clutter of John’s life. Ollman’s character designs verge on the grotesque at times, and his perspectives on both the children’s entertainment industry and middle-class family life seem overly influenced by clichéd notions of “cool” and “square.” (Sherri describes her own fans as “an audience of spoiled kiddies and their yuppie parents,” which is reductive even for a character who’s not happy with her career choices, while one of John’s biggest worries is that his son will never know that he was once a hip, vital guy.) But Mid-Life is remarkably nuanced within its rigid parameters. Ollman is a whiz with facial expressions and body language, depicting emotions as varied as uncontrolled rage, guilt, self-pity, and affection with just the right placement of an arm or an eyebrow. Plus, his characters are genuinely aware of how many of their decisions are based on bullshit obsessions with self-image. What makes Mid-Life work so well both as fiction and as comics is the way Ollman has John and Sherri engage in running dialogues with themselves, with the better parts of their nature represented in a caption while the worst parts come out in what they actually say and do. The book approximates what it’s like to be at the halfway point of life, with memories and past regrets bleeding into daily interactions, even as middle-aged folks retain enough optimism about the future to keep pushing ahead. The second half of Mid-Life considers whether John’s flirtation with Sherri counts as an example of that optimism or as proof that he’s given up. And as Ollman pushes toward the resolution of his maybe-romance, his raw-looking art and frank writing build tension to rival any Hitchcock film. Denys Wortman drew cartoons and illustrations for multiple New York magazines and newspapers between the ’20s and ’50s, but never became as well known as some of his peers, perhaps because his dense panels, sketchy lines, and whimsical captions lost some charm when reduced to a quarter-page. The James Sturm and Brandon Elston-edited Denys Wortman’s New York: Portrait Of The City In The 1930s and 1940s (D&Q) arranges hundreds of Wortman originals—saved in a shed by his son—into a tour through the city over the course of a single day. The impressions of city life over a half-century ago are invaluable, but even better, Denys Wortman’s New York features one panel per large-sized page, which does due justice to the artist’s detailed, dynamic drawings of fire escapes, busy lunch counters, jumping dance halls, and dimly lit parlors.   click here to read more Featured artists Adrian Tomine Denys Wortman Joe Ollmann            Featured products Denys Wortman's New York Mid-Life Scenes from an Impending Marriage   Elle Decor recommends SCENES FROM AN IMPENDING MARRIAGE Updated March 4, 2011 Adrian Tomine’s wry graphic novels about alienated, hapless twentysomethings have been compared to the stories of Alice Munro and Raymond Carver. But his latest book began life as a party favor. Scenes from an Impending Marriage, originally written for the guests at Tomine’s wedding, is a funny, charming memoir of organizing a ceremony that will make both the grumpy artist and his cheerful fiancée happy. Tomine, a frequent cover illustrator for The New Yorker, takes the couple through the painfully familiar pitfalls of wedding planning, from registering for housewares to hashing out the invite list. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage Town & Country takes a look at SCENES FROM AN IMPENDING MARRIAGE Updated March 4, 2011 Conceived as a one-of-a-kind souvenir for his wedding guests,graphic novelist and artist Adrian Tomine’s Scenes From an Impending Marriage is a selfdeprecating, witty look at the all-consuming nuptial-planning process   Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage   Booklist reviews SCENES FROM AN IMPENDING MARRIAGE Updated March 4, 2011 Once the initial euphoria of popping the question wears off, the minefield of putting together a wedding takes shape. In small, nine-panel-grid vignettes, Tomine documents the perilous process, fraught with onetime decisions that few are qualified to make, from settling on the reception venue to making tactful negotiations on whittling down the guest list, agonizing over invitations that invariably wind up in the trash anyway, and picking from an assortment of cookie-cutter DJs. Interspersed are a few full-page panels that take a subversive, Family Circus spin on exercise (“This nonsense stops the minute we’re married!”), dance lessons (ditto), and eyebrow-tweezing (ditto plus expletives). With the obsessive self-awareness bred into all great autobiographical cartoonists, Tomine incisively depicts the monumental-feeling pressures and expectations that can toss a fledgling couple into “the black hole of nuptial narcissism,” or, in Adrian and Sarah’s case, provide ample proof that they should be making the plunge after all. The institution of marriage as a whole just might benefit from having this little book as required reading. Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage SCENES FROM AN IMPENDING MARRIAGE reviewed by Publishers Weekly Updated February 18, 2011 The sweet scenes in this little book are a contrast to the sometimes jaded tone of Tomine's work in the great Optic Nerve series and his previous books, Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Sleepwalk. Many have suspected an autobiographical subtext in those previous works, but this intimate tome is billed as the artist's "first nonfiction book." As such, it casts a gentle light on Tomine's nuptials and relationship with Sarah. The two are pictured discussing the guest list, DJ, seating arrangements--in short, all the nightmarish details of wedding planning--and throughout we see their personalities emerge. Adrian starts out insisting he doesn't really want to invite most of his friends, but then gets obsessed over every detail of the invitation's design. Meanwhile, Sarah navigates caterers, florists, and gift registries, fielding Adrian's oddball requests at every turn. We watch as the two get sucked into the vortex of wedding consumerism in spite of themselves. It's a familiar scene, but a sweet one, and the ending is as tender and satisfying as a wedding day should be. A lovely personal book from a great comics creator, and it's sure to end up getting unwrapped at many an engagement party.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage   Dan Kois recommends SCENES FROM AN IMPENDING MARRIAGE for The Vulture Updated February 18, 2011 Adrian Tomine's Scenes From an Impending Marriage A death-defying quest of a different sort, as the sharp-edged New York cartoonist (Shortcomings) writes about his own wedding. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage The Comics Journal reviews SCENES FROM AN IMPENDING MARRIAGE Updated February 18, 2011 Halfway through reading Adrian Tomine’s new release, Scenes From An Impending Marriage, I was baffled. This comic was certainly funny and strangely sweet in the way it tweaked himself, his wife-to-be Sarah and (most especially) the borderline-psychosis that can occur when planning a wedding. What was baffling to me was why on earth he would do this, and why it would be so short. The work was far too polished and considered to simply be sketchbook fodder. It also felt very “in-the-moment”, not something that was done long after the wedding was done. The reason why it was baffling was it made me wonder why on earth he would attempt to do this sort of thing in the middle of planning a wedding? The answer is contained in the comic itself: because his fiance’ asked him to. How could he say no? What Tomine captures so perfectly in this book is the way the most reasonable person can devolve into a frantic, obsessive-compulsive state. What would seem to be a cute, personalized touch for a wedding (like making one’s own invitations, or in the case of this book, crafting a minicomic as a party favor) can wind up taking over one’s life–and often to no effect whatsoever. Reading this book only made me shake my head at the memory of the dozens of hand-made chocolate lollipops my wife & I made for our wedding that went uneaten. Tomine nails that feeling with the ridiculous lengths he went to in order to create the perfect wedding invitation (down to using hand calligraphy on each envelope), only to imagine each guest casually tossing aside the lovingly-crafted envelope. Tomine is ordinarily an astute observer of the ways in which our unspoken obsessions wind up destroying all of our most treasured relationships. His protagonists are frequently selfish, jealous, petty and incapable of putting the needs of others ahead of themselves. To a degree, his characters have always incorporated bits of Tomine’s own personality, though perhaps exaggerated for narrative effect. Even in this mini, Tomine’s self-depiction demonstrates a lack of patience for the stupidity of others and exhibits a sort of hurtful bluntness, as opposed to his more conciliatory fiance’. That said, Tomine in real life understands his own flaws, the ones that he likes to write large on the page, and is even willing to mock them here. The same is certainly true of his fiance’, he cops to her own need to be liked while avoiding the gaze of a ridiculous DJ (“DJ Buttercream”, whose name alone demanded that this comic be made) that they chose not to hire because of his awful musical taste. Tomine varies his formatting between a 9-panel grid and single page/single panel comics page-style cartoons. He uses the same drawing style throughout, a variation on Charles Schulz’ simple character design. Indeed, Tomine borrows a number of elements from Schulz, like his characters saying “WAAAAH!” with their heads thrown back. The single panel strips use a number of repeating motifs for a single punchline, like Tomine repeatedly noting that “nonsense” like dance lessons, exercise and eyebrow tweezing will stop the moment they’re married. The result is a breezy, relaxed look–much looser than his normal pages, but every bit as expressive. For an artist as fastidious as Tomine, it’s refreshing to see a project like this see the light of day. It’s not unlike Seth releasing Wimbledon Green, a quickly-drawn project that’s mostly just for fun. Just as Seth’s sense of whimsy and imagination are qualities that are underplayed in his regular work but brought to the fore in his more relaxed comics, so are Tomine’s gag timing and sense of affection for his characters qualities that one doesn’t normally see in Optic Nerve. While I certainly wouldn’t want his work reduced to those qualities, it would be nice to see more of them from time to time.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage   The National Post reviews SCENES FROM AN IMPENDING MARRIAGE Updated February 18, 2011 In As You Like It, Shakespeare described weddings as a “blessed bond of board and bed.” However, that line was written for the god of matrimony — like today’s florists, jewellers and stationers, he had a certain bias. I’ve never come close to proposing, but I have seen commercials for those three-months’ salary engagement rings, the ones designed to inflame modern anxieties. Though the bloated wedding industry serves as Adrian Tomine’s comic foil throughout Scenes from an Impending Marriage, this sprightly book never spares its own creator (or his fiancée) for going along with the madness. The graphic vignettes documenting months of frazzled planning turn out to be his breeziest, most immediate work yet, inviting for romantics and formalists alike. For Tomine, this is a stylistic departure. The cartoonist made his name with austere yet meticulously drawn stories about frustrated, self-deluding young people; even if a particular anti-hero was flailing around in desperation, their body language and surroundings would be almost mathematically precise. Scenes’ nonlinear strips are looser and less realistic: They were drawn in Tomine’s sketchbook after his future bride, Sarah, suggested the autobiographical minicomic as a wedding favour. That’s not to say these miniatures are unpolished. Alternating between a snug nine-panel grid and full-page jokes, the strips have a fetching slim-lined style reminiscent of Charles Schulz — at one point Tomine simply throws in a direct Peanuts homage. The nonchalant, semi-improvised bent of the cartooning extends to his lettering: Instead of redrawing panels that once mentioned real friends or family members, he just scratched their names out. When it comes to the betrothed couple, Tomine eschews such discretion. He’s gentler than in past books, but still great at capturing awkwardness. One panel depicts his dancing lessons with Sarah: He’s stepping on her foot, she’s frowning down at it and he’s staring nervously off into space. Encouraged to spend absurd amounts of money and time on every aspect of the ceremony, Tomine and fiancée see themselves falling into a “black hole of nuptial narcissism.” He asks: “Do you think they still need help at that AIDS dinner?” The pair’s guilt-ridden volunteering ends up happening off-panel. That clever elision is a mark of Tomine’s light touch here: Working with barely 50 pages and what must have been a tight matrimonial deadline, he manages to preserve some nuance even in this happy relationship. Tomine the character is fixated on controlling minute details and is politely curt towards awful wedding DJs, while Sarah tries to remain diplomatic even when faced with inane obstacles like, well, DJ Buttercream. Every spouse has their limits, though. Wandering through the single person’s hell, a Crate & Barrel store filled with blissful registering couples, the cartoonist finally has a mini-meltdown: “What’s with these bar-code scanners? It looks like everyone’s casually aiming a gun at wicker tissue box holders or whatever! It’s emblematic of our culture: ‘I want lots of stuff, and I want to shoot a gun!’ ” Then his wife-to-be holds him up with a scanner and demands a flatware preference. In 2005, the Canadian cartoonist Seth published a sketchbook-spawned graphic novel of his own. If anyone saw the unexpectedly whimsical Wimbledon Green as a trifle at the time, they probably don’t now; it presaged a growing vein of dry humour in his characteristic nostalgia. Turning point? Recreational detour? Regardless, I’d be glad to see more Tomine comics like Scenes from an Impending Marriage, even ones that simply elaborate on its stylistic experiments. Constrained by space, time and autobiography, he’s drawn an artistic exemplar of John Donne’s very debatable phrase: “To enter in these bonds is to be free.” click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage Emily Flake of More Intelligent Life interviews ADRIAN TOMINE Updated February 18, 2011 Adrian Tomine, a Brooklyn-based cartoonist, is something of a poster boy for a certain kind of carefully studied mopery. His spare, elegant lines bear the influence of such comics greats as Dan Clowes ("Ghost World") and Jaime Hernandez ("Love and Rockets"). But his dialogue and stories skew more Woody Allen, if Woody Allen were a young Asian guy from the West Coast. His highly regarded comic book "Optic Nerve" began life as a mini-comic in 1991 when Tomine, who is Japanese American, was still in high school in Sacramento. It was picked up in 1995 by Drawn + Quarterly, a Montreal-based comics publisher, and Tomine remains with the outfit today. "Optic Nerve" was most recently collected and released as the graphic novel “Shortcomings” (2009), which found Tomine’s protagonist and possible alter-ego Ben Tanaka navigating the fraught territory of romance, desire and identity with his girlfriend, Miko. Ben’s fondness for the white ladies spins the couple out into the kind of conflict at which Tomine excels, his sharp ear for dialogue limning both the political and the highly personal. Those not initiated into the comics scene might recognise Tomine’s work from the New Yorker, where his clean, stylish drawings and muted colour palette grace the cover from time to time. His covers carry a strain of his usual melancholy, but the mute, single-panel format tempers it into something more like wistfulness. Still, Tomine’s figures seem to be strangers to happiness, or even contentment, which is why his latest offering, "Scenes From an Impending Marriage", comes as such a nice surprise. Originally conceived as a party favour for his 2007 nuptials, "Scenes" is tender, funny, and—there’s no way around it—downright cute. The little blue book takes us through the usual frustrations of planning a wedding—finding the perfect venue, the perfect DJ, the perfect hairstyle—and executes them in a style looser and freer than Tomine’s usual fare. This lightness of touch lets some air in without letting the final product get too frothy, and the size announces the book as a thing that doesn’t take itself quite so seriously. More Intelligent Life caught up with Tomine via e-mail for a chat about romance, weddings and new directions—as the city around us entered the anxious frenzy of Valentine’s Day. As a cartoonist, I’m very curious as to what form the original wedding mini-comic took. I can very easily see myself saying “Sure, I’ll just make a comic!” and then handing out hastily scribbled nonsense straight off the Xerox machine. Yeah, it's one of those situations in life where you're kind of punished for being an artist. Like, if I sent someone a Hallmark card for their birthday now, it would be a slap in the face. So when the topic of these "wedding favours" came up, I knew there was no getting out of it. Unless I wanted to give out chocolate bars with our faces embossed into them. How much of the book as it exists today was included in the mini? I tinkered with some of the original pages, re-drew a few, and added a bunch. Obviously, the whole post-wedding epilogue was done after the fact. Basically I would just pull out that sketchbook and add to it whenever I was waiting to hear back from an art director, or if I felt like I needed a break from the other, more "serious" book I'm working on. What made you decide to release it into the world at large? I probably first started thinking about publishing it when a copy appeared on eBay. I assumed that since it was only given to close friends and family, that would never happen, but I was wrong. And like I said, since I was slowly adding pages to the book, I eventually found myself with 50 or 60 pages worth of material, and I just proposed the idea to my publisher. If he had declined, I would've happily filed it away, but he seemed to think there would be some interest in it. Were you upset that it ended up on eBay? I wondered if that would have happened. Well, it's a whole sordid story that I probably shouldn't go into, but the short answer is "yes." But then after some further investigation, I ended up feeling really bad and almost wanted to send the eBay seller in question a whole stack of the stupid comics to sell. The subject matter also seems a bit outside your usual wheelhouse; how do you suppose fans of "Optic Nerve" will feel about a happy, well-adjusted Adrian Tomine writing about a conventional rite of passage, especially one in which everything seems to have gone so well? If the hypothetical reader's life has progressed similarly to mine, they'll probably enjoy the book. If it hasn't, then they might want to sit this one out. What can I say? I took a gamble! The one thing I'd say is that the only thing this book really whole-heartedly endorses is a good relationship. I should mention that another impetus for publishing this work was the simple fact that it was time for me to do something different. I think the worst thing I could've done to follow up “Shortcomings” would be to do another book with a similar tone and drawing style. So it was kind of exciting for me when I realised that kind of departure that I was aiming for was already completed and ready to go. Do you see this as a permanent shift, or just something you needed to get out of your system before returning to the “Optic Nerve” universe? I think of this wedding book more like a fun little detour. It's a mode that I'd be happy to return to at some point, and will continue to use in my sketchbook. But right now I'm actually working on something that's pretty different. You and your wife Sarah now have a young child. How has becoming a family man affected your comics work? On a practical level, it's made the comics work more difficult. Working from home used to be the world's greatest luxury to me, and now with a one-year-old daughter, it can be tricky. On a broader level, having a kid is one of the only events in my life that significantly changed my perception of a lot of things, so that's probably going to show up in some form. You've called “Optic Nerve” "thinly veiled autobiography". Will we see a happily married Ben Tanaka navigating fatherhood and marriage? If a character of mine is widely criticised and reviled, then it's all fiction. If the character is admired and beloved, then that's pretty much straight autobio. Having said that, what does Ben Tanaka have to do with me?   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage   See Magazine talks with JOE SACCO and ADRIAN TOMINE Updated February 18, 2011 According to comics journalist Joe Sacco, every cartoonist probably has a bit of a masochistic streak. “Artistically, what I do is exhausting, very labour intensive,” says Sacco, who won an American Book Award in 1996 for his comics journalism series, Palestine. Just glance at almost any given page of Sacco’s art — whether it’s from Palestine, The Fixer (2003) or Footnotes in Gaza (2009) — and you can see the sheer grinding effort staring back at you. The painstaking line work of a torrential rainstorm in Palestine suggests untold hours of wrist-cramping action at the drawing board. Look at the meticulously ordered and precisely designed panels of Chris Ware in his Acme Novelty Library series. By contrast, there’s a laboured chaos in the work of underground Quebec artist Richard Suicide; his technique in 2007’s My Life as a Foot sometimes seemingly consists of blanketing the page with drawing from one side to the other. For decades, the roughly standard comics industry practice was for various hands to complete various aspects of the finished book or strip; one person penciled, another inked, etc. The division of labour increased productivity. However, with the rise of so-called “alternative” or “literary” comics, emphasis has shifted back to the individual artists’ visions. Which means some of the most celebrated artists today are people who insist on making a lot of work for themselves. “Drawing is generally like digging a ditch,” Sacco says. “I basically know how far I’ll get each day.” On average, he completes two pages every five days. Adrian Tomine, whose 2007 Shortcomings was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book, required about a week to complete a page for that project. Of course, he utilized what he admits was perhaps an “overly obsessive drawing style.” “I think ‘labouring’ is the perfect word,” Tomine says. That’s evident in Tomine’s precise style in Shortcomings — a certain minimalism, or reductionism, that looks deceptively simple on the surface, but suggests great effort put into the final look of every panel — reflected most prominently in the exactness of the characters’ facial and body language. “It’s hard to break down whether form follows function or the other way around,” Sacco says. Sacco felt it necessary to provide readers a genuine sense of place. “There’s that journalistic imperative to draw things as I saw them: cars, buildings, clothing, etc.,” he explains. “Basically, the work calls for accuracy and detail.” Of course, the ever-present risk for any comics artist is overworking the image, which on the reduced page will be unforgiving of excess. By contrast, during the drawing of Shortcomings Tomine “was constantly fighting against an undercurrent of stiffness” that usually comes from photo referencing. (For that matter, when he looks back now, the work still looks too detailed.) The art in Tomine’s brand-new, Scenes from an Impending Marriage, by contrast, has a looser, more “cartoony” look. And it’s not wrong to think the style is less labour intensive or that Tomine’s use of it had only to do with stylistic experimentation. “The style of Scenes from an Impending Marriage was completely reactionary — almost like an antidote,” he says. This is likely because the project wasn’t originally intended for publication and Tomine felt totally uninhibited, and emancipated in terms of drawing style. He completed one to two pages daily. “It was a welcome reminder that drawing comics could actually be fun,” he says. “Not just an arduous slog towards a very distant goal.” It prompts the question of if the time and labour invested is worth it. The trick, Sacco says, is to choose projects wisely. Not that we would consider simplifying his style for journalistic work. But in answer to the question: “I think the payoff is worth it, yes.” Featured artists Adrian Tomine Joe Sacco            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage Slant Magazine analyzes SCENES FROM AN IMPENDING MARRIAGE Updated February 18, 2011 Given its Tiffany Blue cover and petite size, Adrian Tomine's Scenes from an Impending Marriage seems less like a book about someone getting married than an inexpensive gift for someone getting married. This is a short—54 tiny, square-shaped pages—collection of comics about what it's like to be engaged to be married for a pair of liberal, PC, urban-dwelling yuppies. As such, we get vignettes and anecdotes about consumer guilt, respecting ethnic difference, getting in shape, passive aggression, and self-consciousness. All these themes and their accompanying minor epiphanies occur along the common route of how one gets ready for a wedding: selecting guests, finding a venue, designing invitations, hiring a D.J., registering for gifts, etc. Most of the comics are two or three pages long and involve the bride and groom to be talking to each other, pondering nuptial necessities, and picking out marital must-haves. They're drawn in Tomine's black-and-white, clean-line style, a couple of scenes paying visual tribute to Peanuts and The Family Circus. The title of the book is a play off Ingmar Bergman's five-hour teledrama Scenes from a Marriage, and the cover drawing of Mr. and Mrs. Tomine trotting off to, presumably, their conjugal coitus, looks a lot like Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann. Bergman's film, however, was long and intense, portraits that let you really gaze at two people and peer into their relationship—ugly, embarrassing, and frustrating (and also hopeful, comforting, and passionate) as it could be. Tomine's scenes, on the other hand, feel airbrushed, glossed over; they're close-up without being intimate, deprecating without being revealing. Surely to be engaged involves some doubts and disappointments, despite the mood of general hopefulness. And surely to be a conscientious fan of Ingmar Bergman involves at least some bleak pessimism creeping into your day to day life. However, the tone of Tomine's Scenes from an Impending Marriage makes sense when you learn the origins of the book. They're revealed in an obligatorily self-referential scene toward the end, a vignette called "Favors." The future Mrs. Tomine suggests that Mr. Tomine make a little comic as a wedding favor—a comic about planning the very wedding for which it would be a take-home trinket. Is it a literary sin to make a front-cover allusion to Bergman, but instead of a dense, high-fiber feast, you get served a sugary alt-comics cupcake written as a thank you gift for in-laws and cousins and well-wishers? Maybe. Regardless, Tomine's book is cute and quaint. It's as easy to swallow as the proverbial piece of cake, and takes about as much time to get through too. It was born as a party favor and it lives as a party favor. Purchase accordingly.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage   Westender.com reviews SCENES FROM AN IMPENDING MARRIAGE Updated February 18, 2011 In the uneventful, latter half of February, gone are the fancy dinners, beautiful flowers and, for some, edible garments that comprise Valentine’s Day’s showy, ritual displays of affection. Those of us who are in love (to use a phrase which is, in any public context, admittedly obnoxious) will settle back into sharing quieter, everyday moments: buying groceries, taking public transit, gossiping about friends, family, and co-workers. New Yorker cover artist Adrian Tomine’s charming, winning new book of comics, Scenes from an Impending Marriage, captures a couple in one of the rare phases that combines both romantic ritual as well as mundane organization and preparation: planning their wedding. What becomes abundantly clear is that the lion’s share of the love, intimacy, and humour is to be found in the humble day-to-day. Like any good engagement, the book (published by Montreal-based imprint Drawn + Quarterly) is short (54 pages!) and sweet. In a series of multi-page, multi-panel comics — punctuated by occasional one-page/one-joke wonders that were described by a friend as “like Family Circus, but funny” — we watch Japanese-American Adrian and his Celtic-American fiancée, Sarah, as they book DJs, register for gifts, and navigate the politics of the guestlist. The couple is self-consciously privileged, skeptical of the marital hullabaloo, but ultimately excited about a beautiful wedding. It’s this semi-detachment, the ironic distance between the couple and the traditions that they’re nevertheless indulging, that makes Scenes from an Impending Marriage such a success: at once cutting and sweet, world-weary but genuinely excited. So we get the groom-to-be angrily dressing-down a potential DJ (a self-styled “musicologist”) on the subject of Bob Seger: “We do [like old-time rock and roll]! We just don’t like bombastic songs about old-time rock and roll!” Then sheepishly, in the next panel, he turns to his fiancée: “Right?” We get Sarah busily working out details for the big day over the phone while Adrian eats chips and watches The Wire. We also get her aiming a department store’s wedding registry scanner at her fiancé like a gun and demanding, (literally) point blank, that he choose between the “‘Grand Hotel’ flatware or the ‘Charlemagne.’” Adrian earnestly questions why he has to buy a $100 necktie, and can’t just wear the one he bought for Sarah’s grandmother’s funeral. Eventually, they volunteer at a soup kitchen for AIDS patients and have their trivial worries thrown into sharp relief. Adrian and Sarah also engage in negotiations that will be immediately recognizable to many Vancouverites: working with, and around, differences of “Cultural Heritage.” Adrian’s parents want Taiko drums at the reception, Sarah’s want bagpipes. In a particularly hilarious sequence (with one of the best punchlines in the book), Sarah gently accuses Adrian of only wanting to hire a particular florist because they are of Japanese descent. When he protests this assessment, she demands the names of his accountant, optometrist and dentist (who are, respectively, “Ken Takahashi,” “Peggy Ouchida,” and “Mariko Fujiwa”). In the North American context, there is little or no widespread prejudice against relationships between white folks and East Asians. Even if no one wants to stop us from being together legally or socially, cultural differences linger. Usually it’s the stuff of minor frustration, the coal that makes comedy diamonds. More than three years into this reviewer’s interracial marriage, we’re still catching each other up on what it means to be Chinese, French-Canadian, or British. (Last year, I had to explain what a meatloaf is.) Tomine’s gentle, probing insights on this score are one of the real triumphs of the work. Scenes from an Impending Marriage captures what stays exotic in a partner, and what quickly collapses into instant familiarity and everyday intimacy. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage The New York Times' ArtsBeat takes a look at SCENES FROM AN IMPENDING MARRIAGE Updated February 18, 2011 The ups and downs of planning a wedding are many: where to do it (and how much to spend), whom to invite (and what the invitation will look like), what to serve, how to entertain your guests and more. In “Scenes From an Impending Marriage,” which lands at No. 2 on our hardcover list this week, the cartoonist Adrian Tomine chronicles his own march down the aisle in a series of comic strips. The end result also served as an atypical wedding favor for the guests at his nuptials. The publisher, Drawn & Quarterly, has a six-page preview available for download. A previous graphic novel of Mr. Tomine’s, “Shortcomings,” a novella about Asian-American characters and how they handle being in a minority, was one of The New York Times Book Review’s 100 notable books of 2007. “Vaguely misanthropic and sexually insecure, Ben is the not-so-lovable protagonist of ‘Shortcomings,’ a meticulously observed comic-book novella by Adrian Tomine,” Jim Windolf wrote in The New York Times Book Review. “When Miko leaves Berkeley for an internship in New York, Ben finds he dislikes his own company even more than he disliked hers.” “Ben is a fascinating, maddening character, a young fogey whose snobbishness doesn’t prevent him from enjoying DVDs with titles like ‘Sapphic Sorority,’ much to Miko’s chagrin. She accuses him of having a thing for white girls, which really sets him off — and Tomine takes voyeuristic delight in capturing every gruesome facial expression of a couple in mid-argument. The author is an expert at hooking the reader without tricks or obvious effort, and you’ll be tempted to buzz through “Shortcomings” in an hour. But you’ll want to slow down to take in the detailed black-and-white panels that casually document the way we live now.” Drawn & Quarterly has a six-page preview of “Shortcomings” too. As always, the complete lists can be found here, along with an explanation of how they were assembled. See you next week!   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage   Scenes From an Impending Marriage in the National Post Updated February 9, 2011 Scenes from an Impending Marriage By Adrian Tomine Drawn & Quarterly 56 pp; $10.50 February 4, 2011 Reviewed by Chris Randle In As You Like It, Shakespeare described weddings as a “blessed bond of board and bed.” However, that line was written for the god of matrimony — like today’s florists, jewellers and stationers, he had a certain bias. I’ve never come close to proposing, but I have seen commercials for those three-months’ salary engagement rings, the ones designed to inflame modern anxieties. Though the bloated wedding industry serves as Adrian Tomine’s comic foil throughout Scenes from an Impending Marriage, this sprightly book never spares its own creator (or his fiancée) for going along with the madness. The graphic vignettes documenting months of frazzled planning turn out to be his breeziest, most immediate work yet, inviting for romantics and formalists alike. For Tomine, this is a stylistic departure. The cartoonist made his name with austere yet meticulously drawn stories about frustrated, self-deluding young people; even if a particular anti-hero was flailing around in desperation, their body language and surroundings would be almost mathematically precise. Scenes’ nonlinear strips are looser and less realistic: They were drawn in Tomine’s sketchbook after his future bride, Sarah, suggested the autobiographical minicomic as a wedding favour. That’s not to say these miniatures are unpolished. Alternating between a snug nine-panel grid and full-page jokes, the strips have a fetching slim-lined style reminiscent of Charles Schulz — at one point Tomine simply throws in a direct Peanuts homage. The nonchalant, semi-improvised bent of the cartooning extends to his lettering: Instead of redrawing panels that once mentioned real friends or family members, he just scratched their names out. When it comes to the betrothed couple, Tomine eschews such discretion. He’s gentler than in past books, but still great at capturing awkwardness. One panel depicts his dancing lessons with Sarah: He’s stepping on her foot, she’s frowning down at it and he’s staring nervously off into space. Encouraged to spend absurd amounts of money and time on every aspect of the ceremony, Tomine and fiancée see themselves falling into a “black hole of nuptial narcissism.” He asks: “Do you think they still need help at that AIDS dinner?” The pair’s guilt-ridden volunteering ends up happening off-panel. That clever elision is a mark of Tomine’s light touch here: Working with barely 50 pages and what must have been a tight matrimonial deadline, he manages to preserve some nuance even in this happy relationship. Tomine the character is fixated on controlling minute details and is politely curt towards awful wedding DJs, while Sarah tries to remain diplomatic even when faced with inane obstacles like, well, DJ Buttercream. Every spouse has their limits, though. Wandering through the single person’s hell, a Crate & Barrel store filled with blissful registering couples, the cartoonist finally has a mini-meltdown: “What’s with these bar-code scanners? It looks like everyone’s casually aiming a gun at wicker tissue box holders or whatever! It’s emblematic of our culture: ‘I want lots of stuff, and I want to shoot a gun!’ ” Then his wife-to-be holds him up with a scanner and demands a flatware preference. In 2005, the Canadian cartoonist Seth published a sketchbook-spawned graphic novel of his own. If anyone saw the unexpectedly whimsical Wimbledon Green as a trifle at the time, they probably don’t now; it presaged a growing vein of dry humour in his characteristic nostalgia. Turning point? Recreational detour? Regardless, I’d be glad to see more Tomine comics like Scenes from an Impending Marriage, even ones that simply elaborate on its stylistic experiments. Constrained by space, time and autobiography, he’s drawn an artistic exemplar of John Donne’s very debatable phrase: “To enter in these bonds is to be free.” click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage SCENES on The Daily Cross Hatch Updated February 1, 2011 Scenes From an Impending Marriage By Adrian Tomine Drawn & Quarterly January 17, 2011 Brian Heater The news of Adrian Tomine’s new book no doubt sent a wave of excitement out amongst the cartoonist’s loyal fan base—not only due to the fact that his comics output has seemingly slowed over the past several years, it also promised to offer a certain level of insight into the psyche of the man himself. Tomine, after all, has largely stayed away from overt autobiography in his Optic Nerve series, and while readers have, no doubt, attempted to read flashes of his own person into the rotating cast of characters, such connections are largely the fabrications of amateur psychoanalysts. Scenes from an Impending Marriage promised both glimpses of the man behind the work and a belated invitation to one of the biggest moments in his life, as a mass produced reprinting of a wedding favor created by Tomine at the best of his soon-to-be-wife. The news of the extremely limited run mini-comic hit the Internet around the time of the artist’s 2007 wedding, and no doubt drove many a fan a bit crazy with the knowledge that there was non-Optic Nerve work out there that they would likely never actually see. But while the book’s title is a tongue-in-cheek homage to Ingmar Bergman’s much-beloved, but utterly devastating 1973 film, Scenes from a Marriage, the book doesn’t offer much in the way of stripped naked critiques on the state of matrimony in contemporary society—a fact that likely won’t come as a revelation to those aware of the book’s origin. After all, stripped naked critiques on the state of matrimony in contemporary society make for lousy wedding favors. Rather, the book is a suitably breezy and light-hearted collection of strips taken from real life vignettes in the months leading up to marriage. The art is some of the simplest we’ve seen from the notoriously meticulous Tomine—small ink drawings that look as though there were pulled directly from a sketchbook, often borrowing from Schulz’s drawing book both for comedic effect and to offer up a quick distillation of a scene in cramped panel real estate. Insights are offered into Tomine and his relationship with his fiancée, Sarah, but for the most part, they exist to serve punch lines to cute stories about eccentric wedding DJs and tie shopping. In the end, those bits and pieces do come together to form a picture of its leads—Sarah attempting to pull together her dream wedding and Adrian doing what he can to make his future wife happy in that respect, while tripping things up a bit with minor resistance and little obsessions along the way. An epilogue, created specifically for this collection, offers a warm reminder of precisely what this whole story is about: two people really in love, willing to look past—or perhaps even embrace—their respective shortcomings. The warmest and strongest moment in the book emerge once the pomp and circumstance of the special day has come to a close, a reminder that, once the DJ has stopped and the bar has closed, we’re left with two people who have pledged themselves to one another To that end, Scenes from an Impending Marriage will likely have a life beyond those Adrian Tomine fans happy to see their artist stretch his legs outside his often somber subject matter for a funny and breezy take on a serious subject—this $10 hardcover pocket book will likely be gifted to many young newly-engaged couples in the coming years. It’s a small book that is ostensibly a lighthearted take on the trials and tribulations of planning a wedding—but in between the lines, it’s a reminder about why we put ourselves through such difficulty in the first place.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage   The Comics Reporter reviews Scenes from an Impending Marriage Updated February 1, 2011 Scenes From An Impending Marriage posted January 20, 2011 Tom Spurgeon Creator: Adrian Tomine Publishing Information: Drawn & Quarterly, hardcover, 40 pages, February 2011, $9.95 Ordering Numbers: 9781770460348 (ISBN13), 1770460349 (ISBN10) As you've probably suspected, Scenes From An Impending Marriage is certainly the most adorable comics effort to stroll down the red carpet in quite some time. Writing critically of it feels like it would be a faux-pas on the level of refusing a gift -- literally; most of what's contained within its covers are the comics that were in a different form the actual wedding gift from the happy couple to their assorted guests. Tomine uses a stripped-down style here, attractive and lean; it's partly reminiscent of some of the essay comics he published in his early mini-comics and partly the obvious end result of years of cartoon-making since. The cartoonist employs this body of techniques to depict tableaux from the various wedding planning absurdities that crop up between I will and I do. Each is affectionately relayed, even the ones involving people that might be unpleasant to meet on different terms. It all comes together in the end and because we know this, everyone else is forgiven. The serene and lovely thing about Scenes From An Impending Marriage is that the couple seems blissfully united against these various not-exactly-earth-shattering obstacles, to a degree that their seeming compatibility almost all by itself puts a smile on your face. You're happy for them to have a relationship that can be depicted in that way, and additionally happy for the cartoonist to be coming from such a position of apparent joy that this kind of art is the result. Most fans don't get enough of Adrian Tomine to suit them, and I include Myself in their number. This isn't Tomine's fault: he is very earnestly focused on making comics according to certain standards he has for art and certain issues he wants to see explored there. These impulses are a large part of what makes him worth reading in the first place. But that means a long time between comics, and an even longer time -- somewhere between 12 years and forever -- to see him work in a different style, say, or towards an effect far removed from his grim, taut, bitterly humorous portrayals of human weakness. The nicest thing I can say about Scenes From An Impending Marriage is that it satisfies an itch I thought I might never see scratched. Let's hope the marriage lasts forever, but that there are more such works in Adrian Tomine's future. If this is all we get, that's okay, too. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage WSJ Profile on Adrian and Review of Scenes from an Impending Marriage Updated February 1, 2011 Negotiating the Union: A Local Cartoonist Gets Real in His Book About Marriage By Bruce Bennett February 1, 2011 Immortalizing a wedding via video has become nearly as commonplace as pre-vow jitters. But for Brooklyn-based cartoonist and illustrator Adrian Tomine, the preparation for his 2007 wedding was an experience the artist couldn't resist documenting on paper. Originally handed out as a 16-page Xeroxed favor to the couple's guests, Mr. Tomine's wryly confessional cartoon depiction of the leg work, negotiations, logistical decisions and procedural compromises that he and his fiancée, Sarah Brennan, encountered en route to the altar comes out Tuesday in a 54-page volume called "Scenes From an Impending Marriage: A Prenuptial Memoir." The book's easygoing humor represents something of a tonal departure for Mr. Tomine, who is perhaps best known for his ongoing graphic-novel series "Optic Nerve." His 2007 graphic novel, "Shortcomings," was a bracingly detailed—and fictional—relationship forensic that novelist Jonathan Lethem compared in look to the work of French filmmaker Erich Rohmer and in character complexity to the prose of Alice Munro. "The wedding book is by far the cleanest and least cynical and least sarcastic thing I've ever done," the artist acknowledged recently over coffee near his home in Park Slope. "Not just because of the subject matter, but also because originally the only audience that was going to read it was going to be our grandparents and distant aunts." Mr. Tomine, a 36-year-old native of California, pointed out that the lighter tone of his new volume is largely due to the two-part nature of its genesis. "This book was created during two unusually chaotic times in my life," he said, referring to his wedding and the subsequent birth of his daughter in 2009. "The original stuff was done as we were really coming to the finish line of the actual wedding itself, which was overtaking my life in a way that was insane." When the process of parsing out, pricing out and putting together the big event proved too much, he said, he could always find respite in the calm of applying himself to a related task with which he was more familiar. "It was fun to be able to say, 'Well, I've gotta go work on the favor, and then sit there with my headphones on and draw." But it became more difficult with a baby on the way, as Mr. Tomine worked to expand the book to publishable length. "The finishing touches and the stuff I added was done right after our daughter was born," he said. With a newborn in the household, "The idea of getting serious work done was just out of the question." Within "Scenes From an Impending Marriage," Mr. Tomine, who is fourth-generation Japanese-American, pokes fun at the differences between his own family and his wife's Irish-American forebears. At one point in the book, the couple strikes a compromise by denying suggestions from the groom's family to include traditional Japanese Taiko drummers in the ceremony and from the bride's side to have bag pipes. But the author, who moved to Brooklyn from the Bay Area to be with Ms. Brennan, said the marriage process also led to a West Coast-East Coast culture shock. "I think I'd probably been to one or two weddings in my life prior to my own," he said. Being from California, "my sense of a wedding even at its most grand scale was like a glorified barbecue in someone's back yard that's been nicely decorated. There's just a lot more rules or expectations [in New York]. Out here I really felt more like I was plugging into this industry." While "Scenes From an Impending Marriage" lampoons much of that industry, Mr. Tomine said the experiences that provoked humor in the book also inspired real-life empathy for those whose jobs it is to fulfill New Yorkers' wedding expectations. "I felt their pain," he said of negotiating with caterers, DJs, florists and other wedding enablers. "Any time I got that little prickly vibe from somebody, I thought, 'Who knows who did what five minutes before we walked into this room.' We're not rude, we're not pushy, we're not having temper tantrums, but we're still annoying and it would still suck to have to cater to us. I imagine that we're on the reasonable end of the spectrum of people getting married, but just imagine what the spectrum is." While his vocation qualified him to interpret the pre-wedding experience, Mr. Tomine said it did little to prepare him to co-direct it. "I've never been in any position where I was a boss," he said. "It was very uncomfortable, especially when you're looking across the table at some 75-year-old woman from Japan who really just wants to work on her orchids for the orchid show at the Javits Center, but instead she's got to do your stupid bouquets."   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage   BoingBoing profiles Scenes from an Impending Marriage Updated February 1, 2011 Adrian Tomine's "Scenes from an Impending Marriage" February 1, 2011 Mark Frauenfelder I like autobiographical comics, especially because they are about the lives of cartoonists. Adrian Tomine's (Optic Nerve, Summer Blonde) Scenes from an Impending Marriage (Drawn & Quarterly, 2011) is a 54-page book with 1-4 page vignettes of the events leading up to his marriage with his fiancée Sarah. The stories include making a guest list, booking a reception venue, designing the invitations, hiring a DJ, registering at Crate and Barrel, hiring a florist, etc. This may sound humdrum, but the events are funny, and anyone who has gotten married will see a little of themselves in these comics. Adrian comes off as a slightly grumpy cheapskate (doesn't it seem like most good cartoonists are?), but the sweet-yet-firm Sarah has no problem getting her way and making Adrian come to his senses (see sample above). This book was originally designed as a little gift that Adrian and Sarah gave to each of the wedding attendees. I'm glad they are sharing these entertaining and endearing personal stories with a wider audience. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage Scenes from an Impending Marriage on the LA Times Jacket Copy Blog Updated February 1, 2011 David L. Ulin on Adrian Tomine January 30, 2011 Adrian Tomine's "Scenes from an Impending Marriage: A Prenuptial Memoir" was first conceived as a party favor for guests at his wedding, or at least that's what we're supposed to think. Whether or not this is really true is beside the point, since either way, it offers a useful strategy for thinking about the book. Tomine has always been a master of the small gesture, as anyone familiar with his work knows. Such encounters motivate the deceptively informal stories in his series "Optic Nerve," as well as his graphic novel "Shortcomings," which explores the limits of identity and intimacy. With "Scenes from an Impending Marriage," though, he seems almost willfully understated, tracing, in a series of offhand comics, the peculiar rigors of the wedding dance, from guest lists to seating charts to invitations and beyond. That this is the perfect approach to an event that has become fetishized in our culture should go without saying: Tomine's point is not to play into (or even against) perceptions about marriage so much as to particularize his account. It's not even the wedding that's important (it does not appear here), but rather the interaction between Tomine and his fiancée Sarah as they try to create a ceremony that will have meaning for them. "You need to stop approaching this like you're doing people a favor by not inviting them," Sarah tells Tomine about his reluctance to add to the guest list. "Okay," he replies, "but I also think you shouldn't use this as an opportunity to make amends or re-connect with everyone you've ever known." It's a vivid interaction, made moreso by its kicker -- "Boy ... People would really be appalled if they ever heard some of these discussions," which, of course, suggests the irony and revelation of the autobiographical form. And yet, for anyone who's ever made up such a guest list, the details resonate, highlighting the ability of such a story to extend beyond itself. That's what Tomine does so beautifully, here as in his other work, using his experience to create a portal into our own. "Scenes from an Impending Marriage" is a short book, barely 50 pages, but it reverberates with an unexpected depth. This is a function not only of content but also of form, which, at times, reflects some unlikely antecedents. A one-panel strip called "Exercise" is reminiscent of the syndicated strip "The Family Circus," with its circular frame. Elsewhere, Tomine and Sarah cry out, "WAAAAAAAHH!!" in exasperation, their heads back and mouths open like Charlie Brown and Sally in "Peanuts." That's part of the fun of the book, finding the points of reference, as it were. But more essential, Tomine has created a heartfelt, recognizable portrait of the anxiety that surrounds the public declaration of love. "My hero!" Sarah declares on their wedding night, after he goes out at 4 a.m. to bring back food. The two of them sit on their hotel bed, eating and looking at each other. "Holy ....," Tomine says. "We're married." -- David L. Ulin   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Scenes from an Impending Marriage   SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by Here Updated December 14, 2009 Two books deal with different social issues by Bernard C. Cormier Like it or not, we're all born into groups. That fact is largely the focus of both books reviewed this week: Shortcomings and The Big Kahn. The first one we look at, Shortcomings, written and illustrated by Adrian Tomine, is a reprint book collecting Optic Nerve#9-11. Its protagonist is Ben Tanaka, a 30-year-old Japanese-American movie theatre manager in Berkeley, California. His girlfriend, Miko Hayashi, also Japanese-American, is involved with the local Asian-American cultural scene. Their relationship appears to be headed off a cliff because they regularly argue. Miko continuously accuses him of being "ashamed to be Asian" and accuses him of cheating on her after seeing his new employee, a cute 22-year-old blond named Autumn. One day, the heat goes up in their arguments when she finds porn DVDs in his desk. "The thing that kind of bothers me is that all the girls are white", she tells him. Not long after that event, she moves to New York for a four-month internship at the Asian-American Independent Film Institute. Due to her departure, they inevitably take some time off from each other. After a brief fling with a bisexual woman, Ben receives a telephone call from his best friend Alice, a Korean-American lesbian, while she's in New York visiting friends. She tells him to join her there because, as she puts it, there's something he has to see with his own two eyes. Tomine's art and storytelling style are absolutely top-notch. He presents the characters in a realistic way to the point where all of them have noticeable personal problems and flaws. Adding to the realism, the dialogue between characters is as realistic as it can get in a graphic novel. Via empathy for his characters, Tomine forces readers to ask themselves important questions. Of course, based on the story, as you may have guessed, most of those questions are related to race and sexuality. However, it does contain moments of humour, like when Ben is watching Autumn's band perform at a gig. The second book this week is The Big Kahn. Written by Neil Kleid and illustrated by Nicolas Cinquegrani, The Big Kahn is about Rabbi David Kahn who is, once deceased, revealed by his brother to never have been Jewish in the first place. It focuses on how such devastating news about the rabbi, along his death, affects his immediate family, which consists of his wife and three children. Before the revelation of his faith, his eldest child, Avi, was to be his successor as a rabbi in their synagogue. Unfortunately, now some people with influence and power in that synagogue don't see it that way anymore because Avi's not "100 per cent Jewish". He's not the only person being treated differently. His mother and brother are, too, in different ways. Oddly enough, his sister, the family's bar-hoping rebel, is becoming more spiritual. The Big Kahn touches the fact that there are always snobs in all groups, including religions. As a result, there's always the chance of discrimination, too. I don't know if the problems Avi had in the book would happen in real life but, really, so what if a Rabbi's parents weren't Jewish? In brief, the book's visuals look good. Its overall message, despite a (spoiler alert) cliffhanger-style ending, appears to be too pro-religion/faith, especially when one of the characters is described on the back cover as "re-awakening". Don't get me wrong: being religious can be okay except, in my opinion, it doesn't make much sense for the characters to be discriminated by the religious institution that they are members of and then continue to want to be affiliated with the organization. Generally speaking, Shortcomings and The Big Kahn are still good books to trigger thoughts within the readers of their own lives. Shortcomings: 8/10 Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly The Big Kahn: 8/10 Publisher: NBM click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) SN&R discuss Sacremento's comic scene and ADRIAN TOMINE Updated November 9, 2009 Four ordinary, 30-something guys gather around a dimly lit table at the back of downtown’s Fox & Goose restaurant. Anthony Leano, a key player in the local comic-book scene, taps away on his laptop; he’s compiling a list of names, nearly three decades’ worth of Sacramento comic-book writers, pencilers, inkers, publishers and store owners. He tilts the screen and leans over the laptop as if shielding a confidential CIA manuscript. A roughed-up cardboard box loaded with comics, all created by local talent, rests on the table next to a pitcher of Guinness. Nowadays, comics are more mainstream than ever, but vestiges of comic-book ignominy are something these artists still endure. Parents no longer feel mortified by their kids’ affinity for Technicolor tights and improbable cleavage, but it still isn’t that easy to escape the “geek” stigma or make money as a comic artist. But, as Leano’s secret list attests, Sacramento apparently has a thriving, semi-underground comics community, complete with famous legends, steadfast fans, scene boosters and aspiring newbies. So who are these geeks—and will they ever make it? Leano goes over the list, name by name, while artists and pals Paul Allen, Brandon Bracamonte, and Mike Hampton interject with pertinent info—and one-liners—amid beer gulps. Leano praises illustrator Dan Brereton, of Lincoln, “one of the few who’s been hand-painting comics his entire career.” Then Bracamonte jokes that he also “has an awesome beard.” This overview takes hours; pitchers refill, Bracamonte moves on to the hard stuff, and everyone eventually opens up, revealing hopes and fears. “We’re all about 30,” says Hampton, peering through his messy, chin-length hair. “This is what we want to do with our lives. “We want to draw.” Resurrecting Sacramento’s comic-book scene (left to right): Brains co-writer Anthony Leano, Hot Zombie Chicks and Captain Asshole creator Mike Hampton, Brains and this weeks’ SN&R cover illustrator Paul Allen, and Hey Rube! illustrator and local tattoo artist Brandon Bracamonte zombie-ing around Empire’s Comics Vault on Arden Way. PHOTO BY MIKE IREDALE Sacramento back story In the early 1980s, a local comic geek named Sam Kieth would tote a week’s worth of illustrations over to Tim Foster’s house, and they and local artist Dane McCart would evaluate each other’s drawings. Foster remembers that he and McCart usually brought a decent amount of work, but that Kieth would always arrive with a stack of artwork as thick as “a phone book.” “It was just inconceivable that a guy could do so much good work,” Foster says. Some 25 years later, Kieth is Sacramento’s most accomplished and well-known comic-book artist. Foster says parents, and society in general, discouraged their interest in comics. “Being into comic books was like being into really obscure pornography. You didn’t tell anyone. In high school, you’d get no respect,” he says. Teachers would catch his friends reading comics in class and demand, “What’s wrong with you?!” he remembers. There wasn’t much of a comic-book scene in Sacramento at this time, either. Artists like Robert Crumb lived out in Winters, building a comic underground, but Foster, Kieth and McCart wanted to do superhero comics in the city, obsessed with what Foster calls “a weirdo subculture” that was difficult to break into. Enter Kris Silver. Foster says Silver was a “strange, nunchuck-wielding nerd” who owned Alexander’s Comics in south Sacramento on Freeport Boulevard. He published books out of this storefront under the Silver Wolf banner. Foster, McCart, and even local artists like Ron Lim and Tim Vigil ended up doing work for Silver Wolf. Many say these comics were bad; Foster calls them “unreadable” and “poorly drawn,” noting that Silver would employ such slapdash methods as using a typewriter to jot out captions and inelegantly pasting them onto the panels. But collectors during the mid-’80s were eating up black-and-white comic books. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series had brought about a boon, and Silver Wolf rode its coattails. Foster’s first comic sold 35,000 copies. Vigil, a local artist known for the popular horror comic Faust, started off at Silver Wolf on Grips, which essentially was an X-Men knockoff. Most of Silver’s comics, in fact, were rehashes of familiar mainstream brands; Grips was Wolverine, but with only one blade instead of three. But Grips sold like gangbusters and was Silver Wolf’s most popular title. While Foster and McCart were raking in the dough—making upward of $90 a page, a goldmine for two kids fresh out of high school—Kieth had different plans. He wanted to do Marvel and DC comics, so he’d mailed clips to all the major editors across the country and finally landed a gig penciling Sandman. Later, he worked on Wolverine, Marvel Comics Presents’ Alien series, X-Men, The Hulk (with McCart). Big-time gigs. In 1996, his original comic The Maxx became an MTV cartoon. The mid-’90s saw the largest U.S. comic-sales windfall since World War II. Kieth’s issues sold upward of 1 million copies. Other local artists benefited, too, moving hundreds of thousands of books during this time. Lim and Kelley Jones, who’ve worked on Marvel’s Silver Surfer and DC’s Batman & Dracula: Red Rain series, respectively, made good and are two of the more recognizable industry names out of Sacto. Eventually, Kieth got to work on the big ticket: Batman. Twice, in fact: Once in the ’90s and again in 2007’s Batman/Lobo: Deadly Serious graphic novels. Back in the day, Dave Downey, frontman of former local band the Lizards and owner of World’s Best Comics on Watt Avenue, and Foster even posed as the Joker and Batman for Kieth’s photo-reference work. Kieth’s Batman: Secrets series stands out: The Dark Knight’s ears’ and back’s arc are sharp, pointed, but his face is stoic. His Joker is the other extreme: no defined lines, creating a sense of constant motion, with wiry, spinning red eyeballs and a playfully crooked, evil lipsticked smirk. Back during when Kieth first drew Batman, he and Foster would often browse local comic stores. Hundreds upon thousands of issues were at their fingertips—this was the superhero comics’ heyday—but one day Kieth zeroed in on a locally made microcomic called Optic Nerve by a young kid named Adrian Tomine. Zombies take over world, guy locks up zombie girlfriend, guy photographs hot zombie pin-ups, girlfriend zombie gets jealous, girlfriend eats guy—Mike Hampton’s Hot Zombie Chicks comic has tapped into a weird but increasingly all-the-rage demographic: living-dead centerfold fanboys—and girls. Click on the image for a larger version. Indie ink “When I was in high school, I kept my interests in comics totally secret,” says Tomine. “I was actually doing a monthly strip for Tower’s PULSE! magazine, and no one in my school knew about it. When you’re a goofy-looking guy with enormous Ray-Ban glasses who drives a broken-down yellow 1973 Chevy Sportvan, the last thing you need is for your peers to know that you’re a comic-book fan!” Tomine, who told SN&R he had “a lot of free time on his hands” as a teenager, says he was a semi-regular at local comic stores, but was mostly loyal to Beyond the Pale, which shut its brick-and-mortar operation in 2007, and World’s Best Comics. “I also went to a Comics & Comix if I happened to be near one,” Tomine adds of the region’s then-most-popular chain. “The Comics & Comix on K Street actually wouldn’t let me buy an issue of Love and Rockets, so I started taking my business elsewhere.” The comic artist went to high school in Carmichael but eventually left Sacramento for Berkeley, where he roomed with Ghost World scribe Daniel Clowes. His longstanding Optic Nerve series and subsequent books earned Tomine critical praise, likening him to the Eric Rohmer or Woody Allen of comics. But Tomine’s work had strong local ties. In an early Optic Nerve episode, a character ends up working as a manager at Taco Bell; this in fact was well-known local Matt O. Shrugg, who until recently didn’t realize Tomine, a high-school classmate, had put him in a story line some 10 years ago. Tomine says he remembers getting into R. Crumb as a teenager and marveling at all the Sacramento and Davis locations he noticed in his strips. Back at Fox & Goose, Anthony Leano plops his right arm on the table and shows off a triptych comic-strip tattoo; the panel right over Leano’s wrist is a black-and-white rendering from Tomine’s Optic Nerve. Brandon Bracamonte, whose day gig is at Fallen Angel Tattoo on Auburn Boulevard, is the artist to blame. Now, Tomine lives in New York City and often draws covers for The New Yorker. He’s married; he and his wife expect their first child any day. Sam Kieth has left Sacramento proper and lives east of Placerville, and pretty much any comic enthusiast around Sacramento labels Kieth as a “recluse,” noting in particular that he no longer does conventions, or press, and rarely has his photo taken. Foster says this typecast is bogus; Kieth used to sign comics for hours on end at conventions all over the country. Kieth, however, declined to be interviewed for this story. In the end, though, these artists were instrumental in penciling the way for Sacramento’s next comic-artist wave, those who’ll ink the future. Cruising for comics: Dan Bethel, a.k.a. Ninja Dan (left), and Eben Burgoon, a.k.a. Eben07, of local Web comic Eben07, typically brainstorm over burgers and fries—and evidently pass off top-secret comic-book intelligence—at Midtown’s Suzie Burger fast-food joint. PHOTO BY MIKE IREDALE Geek and publisher Tucked away in a salmon-colored strip mall amid such retail antiquity as the locksmith, the watch repairman and the cocktail lounge, is Sacramento comic’s mother lode: Empire’s Comic Vault. Inside, superheroes and single issues live in perfect harmony with indies and trade paperbacks, free from the comic industry’s manacles. Empire’s is here to please only the most discriminating of comic-geek connoisseurs. Ben Schwartz owns this nerd haven, which he took over seven years ago. “The bad economy hasn’t had a huge impact. Comics are only three bucks,” Schwartz explains. “And comic-book fans are die-hards. “They are going to get the next issue of Spider-Man.” What’s interesting about Schwartz, though, isn’t just his popular store; he also runs the area’s only independent comic publisher, ECV Press. ECV put out its first book in 2006, a 48-page, four-story, black-and-white anthology called The Continuum. Schwartz and his crew at Empire’s took the book on the comic-convention circuit and did well, although, he says, “It’s really hard to get attention for these indie books with all the Marvel and DC events.” Schwartz also learned that people weren’t necessarily into big anthologies, so subsequent ECV titles have been in-color singles. Now he has five books in production. The Hunters, a sci-fi military series written by Schwartz’s wife, Jennifer Schwartz, is ECV’s most popular. “The indie market is extremely, extremely hard,” concedes Schwartz, who explains that most independent publishers do all the writing and drawing themselves. But this is not the case with ECV; they’re a bona fide outfit. “We have to pay every single person down the line. We’re happy to break even. This is more a labor of love,” Schwartz says. Diamond Comic Distributors, which has a monopoly on the entire industry, has effectively cut the indies out of the market, according to Schwartz, “so that retailers will buy more DC and Marvel back catalog.” This doesn’t bode well for indie publishers, but Schwartz is optimistic. “Comics are extremely popular right now. Everybody wants to read one. And everybody wants to do one.” The World Wide Web is not enough: Eben07 escapes an exploding St. Basil’s Cathedral (discharging into Tetris pieces, no less) in Eben Burgoon and Dan Bethel’s Eben07 Internet comic. Yes, Burgoon named the hero after himself. Case of the Mondays On Wednesdays at Big Brother Comics in Midtown, the UPS guy shows up with a new shipment around noon. Hopefully. Because soon thereafter, the store’s hundreds of hungry regulars file in to snatch their favorite title’s latest issue. “It’s pretty much all on the UPS guy,” Big Brother owner Kenny Russell jokes. Russell’s shop has been around for four years; Big Brother spent its first year on K Street, near Seventh Street, before the city vacated the block and he relocated to its current J and 17th streets digs. On a recent Monday, the new-releases rack is bare in anticipation of Wednesday’s bum rush. Russell, sporting a gray hoodie and cap with a barracuda bottle-opener keychain dangling from his black pants, says the recent bad economy hasn’t impacted business that much, either. “It makes sense to me. The average customer doesn’t spend too much,” he says. A three dollar comic is a lot less than a $20 DVD. Christopher Alvarez, a thin, bearded guy in his late 20s, works for Russell and has been at Big Brother almost since the beginning and, before that, he worked at the Comics & Comix locations in Folsom and Citrus Heights. Russell and Alvarez currently are working on a post-apocalyptic comic, their first collaboration but not the only comic to emerge from the Big Brother. About a year ago, Alvarez posted a Craigslist ad announcing drawing club on Mondays at Big Brother. Local artists actually started showing up. “Most artists I know are great procrastinators. So buckling down for a night of work for three hours, it’s amazing what you can do,” Alvarez says. Jim Shepherd, a fellow comic-book-store employee in Elk Grove, regularly attended the Monday get-together. And he invited a friend, Hannah Moore. Moore says she got into superhero comics such as X-Men during high school, which led to her getting a comic strip, Gum on Asphalt, in the UC Davis’ California Aggie newspaper while earning a bachelor’s degree in studio art. Big Brother Comics became a hub for artists who wanted to do more than just pound coffee at 3 a.m. while nurturing an unhealthy rapport with their index-finger blisters. And in the end, the Monday crew put out an anthology, aptly titled Mondays, which features short, multipanel stories and full-page illustrations, this time last year. In the end, too, Alvarez and Moore started dating. The Monday group, though, dissolved earlier this year—but not without lessons learned. “I think the local scene could be brilliant if people just start things,” Shepherd explains, praising local efforts like Drink and Draw Sacramento, a club that meets every third Thursday to imbibe and ink. Russell agrees. “Ten years ago, the comic industry was very unknown to people. Now, the indie scene has exponentially grown,” he says. He walks over to a pile of Jeffrey Brown books, a Michigan-based comic artist featured prominently atop a bookshelf in Big Brother’s indie section. “Girls read these books and generally fall in love with this guy. ‘Oh, he knows!’” Russell intones, chuckling. The raunchy—and evidently quite randy—residents of Creepsville have a problem: The cemetery’s dead won’t stay dead. So it goes in Anthony Leano and Paul Allen’s Brains, a local horror comic. Click on the image for a larger version. Soccer dad Folsom’s earthen-toned, stucco shops dot the foothill terrain for miles on end along Bidwell Street, the suburb’s answer to Sin City. And even though consumer spending is down, as it is in Las Vegas, there’s even more big-box bang for your buck under construction for blocks, too. Inside the city’s Borders bookstore, though, you’ll find something unexpected: a local comic-book author, one Matt Maxwell, seated behind a table, graphic novels stacked high, a towering promo banner featuring the crimson, bloodthirsty wolf from his book’s cover that has to scare most of the kids coming in to buy Twilight on DVD. Borders has placed Maxwell just inside the store’s entrance; he gets two hours to move books the new old-fashioned way: DIY, but inside the corporate American bookstore, the proverbial heart of the dragon. For Maxwell, it’s just another weekend at a convention/event/brouhaha/fill in the blank. Another weekend missing his two kids’ soccer games and wife in nearby El Dorado Hills. “If you don’t want to do this, get out,” he deadpans, making light of an indie publisher’s plight. Minutes later, a shaggy-haired 20-something asks Maxwell for his autograph. He obliges, signing a copy of Strangeways, his first graphic novel. This is will be the last book he signs for at least 45 minutes. The idea for Strangeways came to him in the early ’90s. “Why hasn’t anyone done Westerns and monsters?” he wondered—Dances With (Satan’s) Wolves, perhaps? Anyway, in 2003, he finally got around to writing the book; late last year, he hit the circuit with his 133-page comic, which was illustrated by Luis Guaragna. But between carpooling, soccer games and bedtime stories, Maxwell’s only time for working on comics is a few short hours each day, from 8 a.m. to 11. It took four years to finish Strangeways, but the reception has been good, if limited. “When you move away from newsstands and into comic stores, you lose awareness,” Maxwell argues. A weekend at Borders brings comics back to the masses, though, one blissfully oblivious suburban reader at a time. Maxwell’s next comic, however, won’t be signed or sold in stores; he’ll join the thousands of Web comics online, a veritable Costco of geek lit, accessed shame free in the privacy of one’s home and with the simple click of a mouse. Left to right: Jim Shepherd, Hannah Moore and Chris Alvarez and their drugs of choice at Big Brother Comics, where the trio collaborated with a dozen other local comic artists on Mondays, a DIY comic anthology. PHOTO BY MIKE IREDALE Funny (Web) pages Dan Bethel and Eben Burgoon slowly make their way through Suzie Burger’s generous heaps of fries and robust, greasy cheeseburgers—a routine the two comics know well: Suzy is where they convene to brainstorm their successful Web comic, Eben07, which started up in 2007 and updates every Tuesday at www.eben07.com. Yes, that’s right: Bethel and Burgoon named the comic’s characters, Ninja Dan and Eben07, respectively, after themselves. “That’s the rub,” says Bethel, conceding that maybe, if they could go back in time to their days together in high school in San Luis Obispo, they might not have given the protagonists their very nomenclatures. But it’s too late now, at any rate. So the 29-year-olds move forward—and even embrace it. Burgoon, who manages Eben07’s Twitter page, in fact never breaks character, responding to Tweets as the comic hero, an agent for a fake government agency that “cleans” up history’s botched government covert-intelligence operations. The Web site plays straight the concept of U.S. spies and operatives “declassifying” covert ops and features an extensive, fabricated, tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek back story—a sort of Coen brothers meets Howard Zinn approach to comic lineage. Bethel attends grad school at Sacramento State, studying English, and Burgoon works at a local grocery store. They meet over burgers, Burgoon goes home and writes the comic on “his corner of the couch,” then Bethel draws it up at a proper desk. Then it goes live online. Matt Maxwell’s Strangeways: Murder Moon, a self-published, horror Western graphic novel, tells the story of a mysterious wolf tormenting men of the frontier. Find out more about the novel at www.highway-62.com. Click on the image for a larger version. It’s a good system, but monetizing the Web comic and turning a profit, though, is still a mystery. Nevertheless, they make enough to finance their print comics. The next in the series to go tangible, Eben07’s Operation: Mongoose, will be out in early December. Critics say the duo’s comic is too serious, but Eben disagrees. “This is a janitor trying to assassinate Castro: What’s serious about that?” he demands, jokingly, shaking a french fry in the air. Bethel calls the premise “absurdist,” but definitely not pretentious. The Web comic industry, however, is a serious deal. Last year, The Sacramento Bee revamped its comics section, giving the panels seven-days-a-week full color and a bit more prominence. The problem industrywide, though, is that increasingly more comic artists are taking their panels online and giving stories away for free. No joke: There are an estimated 15,000 Web comics on the Internet. Sarah Sawyer lives out in Roseville and commutes sometimes almost an hour to her Rancho Cordova job, but when she writes her twice-a-week Web comic, The God’s Pack, she needs only coffee and her nifty Wacom tablet to print her online strip, a series about talking wolves. “My readership is too young for paper,” Sawyer says—an outlook that’s probably too baffling for anyone inside The McClatchy Co.’s ivory tower. Or anyone over 35. But this is the future: Sawyer explains that God’s Pack’s readers are 12- to 16-year-olds, and they simply don’t read print papers or books. “Newsprint comics are dying, and they’re not dying with grace,” notes Sawyer, 22. “They say ‘It doesn’t make sense; you’re giving away something for free.’” “Yeah, well, your way isn’t working, either.” God’s Pack (www.godspack.com) went live in September 2005. Sawyer says that when she started, there weren’t a whole lot of women doing comics, but now, however, she says that artists like Kate Beaton, Renee Engström and even Citrus Heights Web comic artist Brittany Lore are influential. God’s Pack certainly caught the eye of one reader, in Maryland, who whipped up a YouTube video to show his appreciation. Sawyer saw the clip; “I want to talk to that guy,” she thought. And she did. Sawyer now does another Web comic, called Beyond Rapture, with this video guy, a wildlife biology student. He also became her boyfriend. He writes. She draws. The Web is working out. “You find a lot more humor in Web comics,” she says. There’s no “superhero or nothing” ethos. Just innovation. Dan Bethel of Eben07 agrees. “We do it for fun.” ECV Press is the brainchild of Ben Schwartz, who also own venerable comic-book den Empire’s Comic Vault on Arden Way. This comic, Little Kori in Komaland, was written by Ben’s wife, Jennifer Schwartz. Find out more at www.ecvpress.com. Click on the image for a larger version. I dream of being an artist A gang of zombies and vampires gathers outside the Colonial Theatre on Stockton Boulevard in south Sacramento. It’s the annual Sacramento Horror Film Festival, but the vibe’s not unlike a comic convention. Even Anthony Leano, Mike Hampton and Paul Allen are here, too, shilling wares. It’s a familiar gig: This past January, the trio embarked on an epic road-trip tour, from Arizona and up the West Coast, to get the word out about their comics. Leano and Allen sold out of their comic, Brains, a grisly black-and-white single issue about zombies that rise from the dead and kill—or have sex—with a small burg’s quirky inhabitants. Hampton too moved tons of Hot Zombie Chicks and Captain Asshole books and merch. He also started a national comic-con trend: charging five bucks to draw convention-goers as a zombie. Inside the theater, the crew’s in the dark, watching a tedious B-movie about a girl who cheats death by calling herself in the past with a magical cell phone. When the flick ends, the trio scampers behind merch tables and sells, sells, sells. The horror festival crowd is their bread and butter—gore geeks, women who actually get excited about dressing up as dead people. Hampton tells of the previous evening, where more than a dozen ladies participated in a zombie beauty pageant; the winner will get a full page in his forthcoming Hot Zombie Chicks, volume four, which drops next year. Considering its very Girls Gone Wild subject matter, Hampton’s Hot Zombie Chicks is a pretty decent comic. Touching, even. The story is simple: zombies take over world; guy locks up zombie girlfriend; guy takes pinup photos of girlfriend zombie; guy starts photographing other zombies; girlfriend zombie gets jealous, eats guy. Each issue includes a few full-page pinup illustrations of, you guessed it, hot zombie chicks, some gamely based on iconic pinups of yesterday, including Marilyn Monroe and the Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. Hannah Moore’s Bite Sized comic strip appeared in Mondays, a collaborative comic book created on Monday nights at Big Brother Comics with nearly a dozen others, including her boyfriend, Chris Alvarez, and Jim Shepherd. Click on the image for a larger version. Hot Zombie Chicks seems to be a metaphor for Hampton’s artistic plight. A documentary filmmaker recently followed Hampton for an entire year for the forthcoming I Dream of Being an Artist … And It Makes Me Sick. The film shows Hampton on the aforementioned tour. In one scene, he’s holding a sleeping bag, moving into a new apartment after his marriage has fallen apart. In another, he’s drunk in the middle of the night talking to the camera in the dark. In another, he’s owning the comic-convention floor, signing books and talking game. Back at the Fox & Goose, Leano, Hampton, Allen and Bracamonte pack up their comics and laptop. Leano has to get home; he sold his hearse on Craigslist to pay off an inordinate comic-art debt and has to sign the paperwork. They laugh and stumble off. Hampton reappears minutes later with a copy of his 2007 Do-It-Yourself Award-winning book, How To “Do” Comics!, a snarky treatise on how to make it in the biz. You flip to the last page and it reads: “Wait! It’s not too late to turn back now! Throw away your comic books and art supplies and tell your girlfriend that you love her! Get married, have kids, become something exciting like a plumber, lawyer, pharmacist, doctor, or something else you have no passion for, and live life!” So the story goes: Win, lose or draw.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Optic Nerve #1   CECIL AND JORDAN, 32 STORIES AND GEORGE SPROTT reviewed by the Star Tribune Updated September 1, 2009 Masters of melancholy ; Three new graphic novels to make you laugh, cry and feel everything in between. 23 August 2009 Loneliness, sorrow and sadness never looked this good. In the hands of the comic-book world's top cartoonists, doomed relationships and daily doldrums are a sight to behold. Seth, Adrian Tomine and Gabrielle Bell do not disappoint with their latest collections from powerhouse publisher Drawn & Quarterly. . "George Sprott: (1894-1975)," by Seth. (Drawn & Quarterly, 96 pages, $24.95.) The characters who inhabit Seth's stories are never terribly interesting. Typically, they are aging white guys plagued by nostalgic memories of the good old days. Even so, Seth (the pen name of Gregory Gallant) is one of the medium's best. For him, it's the way you tell the story. And his latest graphic novel might be his most ambitious yet. First off, it's huge. Measuring 12 by 14 inches, the hardcover barely fits in your lap. Over 96 full-color pages, Seth tells the life and death of fictional Canadian TV personality George Sprott, an oaf of a man who once fashioned himself an Arctic explorer. The dimensions of the book are an essential part of telling this story. The traditional comic-book page contains no more than nine panels. Here, Seth sometimes packs in 30 panels to a page. Many of these pages feature interviews with people who loved and loathed George -- echoing "Citizen Kane." Most panels simply capture their changing facial expressions as they ramble on about the George they knew -- lover, cheater, idol, absentee father. "George Sprott" was first serialized in the New York Times magazine. There, Seth's overstuffed panels let him tell a single, contained thread in one page. Now collected (and with added material), Seth's technique feels cinematic -- if at times, overwhelming. At the very least, this is a sad story about a selfish man. At its best, it is a story about how comic-book stories are told. . "32 Stories: The Complete Optic Nerve Mini-Comics," by Adrian Tomine. (Drawn & Quarterly, 104 pages, $19.95.) "The book you hold in your hands would not exist had high school been a pleasant experience for me." So begins Adrian Tomine's introduction -- one of two included in this collection of short stories. Today, Tomine is one of the biggest names in comics. His illustrations regularly appear in the New Yorker, and his 2007 graphic novel, "Shortcomings," solidified his place as one of the medium's most gifted storytellers. That 108-page story -- about a young man struggling with his Asian-American identity -- was a masterpiece of nuanced pacing and clean, realistic pencils. "32 Stories" is a "special edition" of a collection first published in 1995. It collects Tomine's eight "Optic Nerve" mini-comics, which he self-published while still in high school. Drawn & Quarterly has manufactured replicas of those rare mini-comics and packaged them in a fancy box. These old stories are a fascinating look at the roots of Tomine's obsession with everyday dejection. His stories are brief, just two to four pages, and often revolve around the daily miseries of ordinary people. They're also quite funny. For Tomine, even a trip to the barber can go awry. His black ink artwork was messy, but drawn with purpose. These 32 tales are a far cry from the craftsmanship of "Shortcomings," but they give a unique glimpse at the genesis of a major talent. . "Cecil and Jordan in New York: Stories," by Gabrielle Bell. (Drawn & Quarterly, 112 pages, $19.95.) In comics, the best art is sometimes the simplest. Gabrielle Bell's minimalist pencils work wonders in her latest collection of short stories about youthful malaise. Bell rarely frames her characters in close-up. Rather we observe from afar. It's an appropriate distance, because many of the situations Bell creates for her characters sting with the tension and awkwardness of real-life relationships. Emotional truth is her objective. In "One Afternoon," a young woman learns that her husband has died in a plane crash. At first she is sad, but then quietly elated -- she's finally free of a relationship that bottomed out long ago. Days later her husband returns very much alive. He says he was bumped to another flight, when in fact he hadn't flown anywhere -- he was with his mistress. The two are once again stuck together, lying to each other. These stories are all slices of life, but a couple wander off course into surrealism. Cecil (of the title) feels unappreciated by her boyfriend. Out on the street she transforms into a chair. She's picked up and brought into a stranger's apartment, where she concludes, "I've never felt so useful." These dreamy pieces seem out of place among the rest of Bell's stories. But they still illustrate what is most interesting to her -- that we either triumph over daily rejection, or we allow it to consume us. Tom Horgen Featured artists Seth Adrian Tomine Gabrielle Bell            Featured products Cecil and Jordan in New York: Stories by Gabrielle Bell George Sprott: (1894-1975) 32 Stories: Special Edition Box Set 32 STORIES reviewed by PopMatters Updated August 12, 2009 32 Stories: The Complete Optic Nerve Mini-Comics Writer: Adrian Tomine Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly May 2009, 104 pages, $19.95 By Erik Hinton One night, my roommates and I settled down to a lazy evening browsing HBO’s decades-old on-demand catalogue of “Real Sex”. It became obvious that the ‘90s were categorically unattractive. Similarly—although unaided by frizzed up-dos and genitally inspired facial hair—independent comics from the same era suggest that the decade was ridden by ugliness. Replete with sloppy art, a zine (read: lazy) mentality, and fragile, memoir narratives, the legacy of ‘90s comics is one of slipshod vanity. Panel after panel is scrawled with weepy girls in their bedrooms and brooding boys with comical glasses, suggesting that the broken family stories and social disquiet almost everyone endures is terribly interesting if illustrated as quickly as possible. Even now, as young hipsters of tomorrow buy Ghost World graphic tees—What hath Clowes wrought?—comics have struggled to recover from the confessional sloth and egoism of the ‘90s. In many ways, Adrian Tomine’s Optic Nerve mini-comics, now collected in Drawn and Quarterly’s box set 32 Stories is no different. The art is imprecise, the author features himself prominently, they are printed on copy paper, and there is no shortage of panels of downtrodden suburbanite youth. Throughout the minis, Tomine insists on the truth of these personal stories, even devoting an entire piece to the issue of his biographic accuracy—as if to suggest the reader might miss how very open the author was being. However related to the deluge of ‘90s trash Tomine’s work may seem, the likeness ends at the superficial. 32 Stories effectively demonstrates how the dolorous ‘90s diary comic might pull itself out of the mire of its similar contemporary pieces. It is Tomine’s command of form that ultimately redeems the genre. The 20th century hemeneutician Paul Ricouer once wrote that the meaning of the Bible doesn’t occur in any of its stories of in any one of its narrative forms, but, rather, emerges from the subtle interstice of all the stories and forms. Tomine’s 32 Stories work in much the same way and its is this narrative holism that prevents them from ever feeling like they are weighted down by authorial self-obsession. Tomine never directly comes out and says, “I felt lonely”, or “ Modern life is hell”. Rather, he presents the reader with many snippets of stories—some only a few panels long—that express Tomine instead of drawing him out. Tomine’s portrait becomes a wonderfully indirect one, in which, for the most part, the author is inferred as simply the central point around which all the fragments revolve. It is an incredibly rewarding activity to try to construct the author in this way and one that avoids all the pitfalls less discreet memoir. 32 Stories takes on a life of its own as well, maturing from its half-baked first issue into the masterpiece issues five and six and finishing with the awkward #7, seated on the cusp of being picked up by Drawn and Quarterly (the mini-comics were self-published). Much of this vitality, may be attributed to the admirable way in which Drawn and Quarterly has chosen to treat this reissue. Rather, simply stamp the Optic Nerve mini-comics in a trade—cf. Sleepwalk, Summer Blonde, Shortcomings—Drawn and Quarterly has gone the facsimile approach and recreated them exactly as Tomine originally published them. The change in the stock as the mini-comics go on, as well as the introduction of spot and color and treats such as stickers, allow the reader to experience the evolution of Optic Nerve. Although now eclipsed by his later work which secured Tomine a spot in modern comics indie pantheon, the Optic Nerve mini-comics are an endearing and eminently readable glimpse into the author’s earlier life and career. Easily appreciable by both Tomine fans and newcomers alike, 32 Stories is a successful reminder of what the ‘90s should have shaped up to be.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product 32 Stories: Special Edition Box Set   D+Q artists in San Diego Tribune Updated July 27, 2009 Robert L. Pincus | Creative Reading Treasures lying in wait to be discovered By Robert Pincus Union-Tribune Staff Writer 2:00 a.m. July 26, 2009 As Comic-Con has evolved into a juggernaut for the promotion of everything pop culture, it's easy to overlook one of the event's prime pleasures: the chance to learn about lesser-known writers and artists and often meet them, too. My prime example: Adrian Tomine, who has developed into a gifted creator of sophisticated comics and graphic novels. If you don't know him for Optic Nerve, his series of urbane comics, you may have seen one or more of his illustrations for The New Yorker, Time and many other publications. They have a crisp, linear style thick with atmosphere. Like Daniel Clowes, who also does covers for The New Yorker as well as his own acclaimed comics and books, Tomine has an understated visual style that combines wit, social commentary, psychological insights and elegant drawing. And like Clowes, he can write, too. The year I met Tomine, in 2002, he had just come out with “Summer Blonde,” which assembled stories from issues of Optic Nerve into a book with a particularly stylish cover. Its four stories featured typical Tomine protagonists: sensitive malcontents in their 20s and early 30s who struggle to figure out what to do with their lives. Tomine, born in 1974, concentrates on his own generation, though you never get the feeling that he is trying to make any sort of grandiose statement about people in their 20s and early 30s. He's intrigued by their singularity: a writer who succeeds with his first novel but develops a creative block for his second and becomes obsessed with a girl he adored in high school; a Chinese-American woman who loses her job, loses her bearings in her life and, then, as the story ends, begins a new romance and tries to face up to a death in her family. He was something of a comics prodigy, too, self-publishing the first seven issues of Optic Nerve before signing on with the now well-established publisher of comics and graphic novels Drawn and Quarterly. These early comics are now reissued in facsimiles of the originals, as “32 Stories: The Complete Optic Nerve Mini-Comics.” And while this is apprentice work, it's awfully good in that respect. Tomine would refine out his drawing style markedly, but early on, he could convey a lot about a face and he offered moments of keen insights about the marginal and the disaffected. In high school, he counted himself among them. And he contributes a new charming self-deprecating introduction for this “box set” of the original comics, which appeared in book form a few years ago. (They are packaged in a nifty cardboard case.) “If you're a 'glass half full' kind of person,” Tomine writes, “you might say that these comics are youthful, energetic and even enlightening in terms of the evolution they chart. If you're feeling less charitable, you'd probably describe them as amateurish, scattershot, affected and deeply derivative.” Both views are true. And seeing them helps someone to understand how far he had traveled. In fact, his best book to date, “Shortcomings,” the story of a sarcastic, sensitive and troubled Ben Tanaka, has recently come out in paperback. Reading “Thirty Two Stories” and “Shortcomings” side by side bookends his evolution. Tomine isn't appearing at Drawn and Quarterly's booth this year. But notable peers are. Today, from noon to 3 p.m., Jason Lutes will be signing the second book in his evocative saga of 1930s Germany, “Berlin, City of Smoke,” and Bob Sikoryak will be joining him during those hours to promote his new “Masterpiece Comics” book, which blurs the line between classic literary tales and vintage comics. (For example, Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray is recast as a dandyish Little Nemo.) Check out the publisher's blog for updates: drawnandquarterly.com/blog/index.php. Fantagraphics (fantagraphics.com), another leading graphic novel publisher, has a significant list of writer-artists making appearances today, including Gilbert, Jaime, Mario and Natalia Hernandez (“Love and Rockets #2”) and Monte Schulz (son of Charles M., with his new novel, “This Side of Jordan”). But leave time to seek out smaller presses like San Diego's Murphy Art Books (murphydesign1.blogspot.com), and you'll find publications that merge the image and the word in myriad other ways. And as was the case with my introduction to Tomine at Comic-Con, you are likely to come across the work of someone you'll want to follow in the years to come. click here to read more Featured artists Jason Lutes Adrian Tomine R. Sikoryak            Featured products Berlin, Book One: City of Stones 32 Stories: Special Edition Box Set 32 Stories, Cecil and Jordan in New York and George Sprott reviewed by The Montreal Gazette Updated July 27, 2009 Graphic Lit: Get Used To It By Ian McGillis 07-19-2009 COMMENTS(1) Narratives Filed under: Pavement, George Sprott, Adrian Tomine, comics, graphic novels, Chris Ware, Clyde Fans, comix, Kaya Oakes, Seth, Gabrielle Bell, Quarterly, Drawn & I was drawn to Kaya Oakes’s Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture because of the title’s shout-out to Pavement’s debut album, a work that hogged my Walkman circa 1992-93 to the point where I’ll probably never need to listen to those songs again. (And I mean that in the kindest of possible ways.) But I’m glad Oakes pulled me in, because among her book’s many astringent perspectives on all things indie is a chapter that helped me crystallize why I’ve been feeling so evangelical about the increasingly ubiquitous but still frequently misunderstood corner of the literary marketplace tagged variously as comics/comix/graphic literature. Tracing the form from its early-20th-century stirrings, Oakes eventually identifies the point where comics publishers (Fantagraphics being at the forefront) twigged that a whole new market could be opened up with a simple repackaging expedient: gathering serial comics into single-volume collections “that could be sold in any respectable bookstore.” That use of “respectable” is of course laced with deliberate irony on Oakes’s part, acknowledging as it does the long and tangled history of the form’s stepchild status within the wider literary world. Sometimes, as Oakes astutely points out, it’s a mere matter of labeling: “Calling comics ‘graphic novels’ also opened them up to an audience that accepted the idea of comics as ‘real’ literature more easily than it swallowed the concept of a comic book, which can carry an air of disposability except for an audience of collectors.” Confession time: I was, from a very early age, one of those “real literature” high-and-mighty types. I didn’t grow up with comics. As a child I looked askance at my peers with their Archies and Green Lantern and Mad obsessions, occupied as I was with weightier tomes like Stan Mikita’s I Play To Win, Harry Sinden’s Hockey Showdown and Farley Mowat’s The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be. (Mowat was a near neighbor of my grandmother in Port Hope, Ontario; as a young boy I once espied him on the street and was convinced for years afterward that all writers had to smoke pipes and have big bushy beards and that therefore I would never be a writer. But that’s a whole other story, I guess.) It was only shamefully recently, with exposure to Chris Ware’s mind-bogglingly complex and beautiful Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, that the richness of which this form is capable was made manifest to me. Suitably humbled, I worked my way back through Art Spiegelman and R. Crumb and forward to their inheritors. And discovered that one of the two or three most prominent proponents of this culture was Montreal’s own Drawn & Quarterly, who—wouldn’t you just know it?—have a varied line of spring and summer titles for our consideration. 32 Stories: The Complete Optic Nerve Mini-Comics by Adrian Tomine is the publishing equivalent of one of those finely curated demos-and-outtakes collections beloved of indie music labels. If you love the band, you need to have it; if you just like the band, you’ll be curious to check it out but will probably find you can live without it. Tomine’s Summer Blonde and Shortcomings are note-perfect portrayals of young educated urbans adrift: shitty service industry jobs, romantic disaffection, identity confusion, all depicted with crisp visual line, deadpan dialogue, and a willingness to look closely into seamy corners of life many would be content to leave private. Fans of those perpetually popular titles now have the chance to see Tomine working toward his mature style in 32 Stories’ seven facsimile editions, gathered into an attractive box, of the Optic Nerve mini-comics that originally drew him to D & Q’s attention. For review purposes, well, I couldn’t really put it any better than the author does himself, in his introduction: “If you’re a ‘glass half full’ kind of person, you might say that these comics are youthful, energetic, and even enlightening in terms of the evolution they chart. If you’re feeling less charitable, you’d probably describe them as amateurish, scatter-shot, affected, and deeply derivative.” I’m glass half full guy myself, but there you have it. Working similar thematic and stylistic terrain to Tomine is Gabrielle Bell. Cecil and Jordan in New York: Stories divides roughly in two. The first half’s stories are set among the New York art world, where the struggling often rub up against the fabulously rich. In “Felix” a middling art student finds herself in the home of a famous sculptor, hired to give drawing lessons to the artist’s alienated adolescent son. Teacher and student form a touchingly awkward bond while the father develops a suspiciously noblesse oblige attraction to the young woman. Multiple layers of emotion and psychology are implied with minimal dialogue and spare visuals: the settings are almost exclusively interior, the characters defined and confined by their environment. Bell can convey all we need to know about a relationship by how far apart or how close she places two people on a couch. The second half, more autobiographical if Bell’s available bio is anything to go by, focuses on a teenage misfit in rural Northern California. Here Bell allows herself a more relaxed line and a broader emotional palette, even venturing, in the remarkable “My Affliction,” into the realm of full-blown surrealism. Readers may well be reminded of The Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, and will feel an agreeable frisson on learning that Bell is now indeed collaborating with Michel Gondry. Seth first came to my attention with his stunning design of Aimee Mann’s Lost In Space CD, a package that very nearly single-handedly redeemed the visual limitations of a format soon to pass away unmourned. Born in Clinton, Ontario in 1962, Seth is the established master of a subject he has made his own: the stultifying melancholy of past-their-prime small towns and the thwarted lives therein. It’s a world he’s able to depict so well because of his own clearly conflicted relationship with his subject matter. Here is a man not at home in the modern world, drawn instinctively to the mood and aesthetic of a fading place and time even as he puts that bygone world’s pathos under an unsparing spotlight. If you’re looking for a cinematic equivalent, think David Lynch, but without the gratuitous unpleasantness. The title character of the magnificent new picture novella George Sprott: 1894-1975 is of a type that will ring bells with readers of Clyde Fans, It’s A Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken and Wimbledon Green. Emotionally repressed, a distant ineffectual father, a serial philanderer, small-town TV host Sprott nonetheless manages for decades to pass himself off as a cuddly avuncular minor celebrity. That he’s an unknowing figure of fun to anyone with experience beyond his constricted world—that he is in many ways a deeply unlovable man—doesn’t compromise the sympathy with which Seth draws him. Another favoured Seth theme, the unreliability and subjectivity of memory, gets a good airing here, as figures from Sprott’s life recall events in a contradictory tangle of accounts that only serves to underline the ultimate futility of any attempt to “sum up” a life. Visually George Sprott takes all Seth’s customary strengths—subtle shifts in framing, a limited colour palette that can render the slightest variation powerful in impact, dialogue and text-heavy pages melded seamlessly with wordless passages—and by dint of the book’s lavish outsized format, brings it all to a whole new level. Quite aside from its undeniable literary and artistic merits, George Sprott is a downright beautiful thing, an artifact you’ll like holding in your hands and having in your home. Which brings me to an x-factor about graphic literature, something I think of whenever I hear non-converts complain that graphic novels can appear a bit pricey. At their best, these books provide the strongest possible bulwark against the feared death of the book-as-object: they give us something that Kindle will never be able to duplicate. In a near-future posting on this very blog, I’ll explore in some detail the world of the late Tove Jansson, the sui generis Swedish/Finnish writer-cartoonist whose complete Moomin comic strips are being gathered by Drawn & Quarterly in a sumptuous series that is now at four volumes and counting. Meanwhile I urge all good people to at least dip their toes into the pool of graphic literature—the water may feel cold at first but that never stopped you from learning to swim, did it?--and leave you, for old times’ sake, with something from a band who knew a thing or two about the bittersweet task of taking the underground to the masses.   click here to read more Featured artists Seth Adrian Tomine Gabrielle Bell            Featured products Cecil and Jordan in New York: Stories by Gabrielle Bell George Sprott: (1894-1975) 32 Stories: Special Edition Box Set   ADRIAN TOMINE in the SF Chronicle Updated July 23, 2009 In the right hands, comics are an excellent medium for revealing character with a few concise words and lines. Former Berkeley resident Adrian Tomine made a name for himself with his self-published "Optic Nerve" mini comic, now reprinted and collected as a boxed set, 32 Stories (Drawn & Quarterly; 104 pages; $19.95). His black-and-white graphic novel, "Shortcomings" (Drawn & Quarterly; 112 pages; $14.95; trade), dissects the dissolution of a modern-day romance. Young slacker Ben Tanaka resents his girlfriend for heading off to New York for a film internship, but he doesn't mind being left to his own devices on the West Coast to date a bisexual blonde. With a clear eye, a steady hand and a mordant wit, Tomine spins a low-key story energized by astute observations about race and gender. Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/10/RVEV18I6JF.DTL&type=books#ixzz0M5nTw9S9 click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured products Shortcomings (PB) 32 Stories: Special Edition Box Set SHORTCOMINGS, 32 STORIES reviewed by PopMatters Updated July 14, 2009 Truth Against Truth: The Work of Adrian Tomine [7 July 2009] Tomine has a gift for capturing body language and facial expressions -- his characters often say more in a silent panel than most say with an entire word balloon. By Monte WilliamsAdrian Tomine has gotten so good at what he does that I’m starting to take him for granted. Reading Shortcomings, his latest graphic novel from Drawn and Quarterly, I kept thinking of “Business”, wherein Eminem sings, “You ain’t even impressed no more; you’re used to it.” That said, while I’m perhaps not as grateful for Tomine as I should be, I am plenty impressed. Tomine’s illustrations are as seductive as ever, and Shortcomings boasts plot developments that are not predictable, but inevitable; we roll our eyes at each character’s mistakes, not because we recognize tired tropes, but because we recognize human nature. Adrian Tomine has a gift for capturing body language and facial expressions, with the result that his characters often say more in a silent panel than most comic book characters say with an entire bloated word balloon. And oh, the things they say; characters in Tomine’s comics share a trait with characters in the films of Todd Solondz, meaning they’re some of the most authentic, believable assholes and screw-ups in modern fiction. That may not sound particularly appealing in light of the fact that popular culture in the US is filled to bursting with assholes both fictional and non-fictional, but whereas the men and women in US reality television shows and brain-dead Hollywood comedies tend to be brash, cartoony assholes, I want to emphasize again that the people who populate Tomine’s pages are uncannily believable. And again like Solondz, Tomine crafts stories that are uncomfortably intimate and brutally honest. Shortcomings in particular is so convincing that it hits too close to home at times, only its protagonist is presented in such an unflattering light that you won’t likely admit to polite company that you can relate to him. I knew Shortcomings would be provocative and perhaps a bit unsettling when I read its back-cover synopsis: Ben Tanaka has problems. In addition to being rampantly critical, sarcastic, and insensitive, his long-term relationship is awash in turmoil. His girlfriend, Miko Hayashi, suspects that Ben has a wandering eye, and more to the point, it’s wandering in the direction of white women. Coinciding with the publication of Shortcomings is a re-release, in a new format, of 32 Stories, collecting Tomine’s early work in the Optic Nerve periodical. Though nothing in 32 Stories can hope to match Tomine’s current work, students of the comic book medium will delight in the opportunity to trace Tomine’s development as a storyteller, and even novices will find his early tales endearing and entertaining. Happily, the standard graphic novel format has been abandoned in favor of reprinting each issue of Optic Nerve in its original mini-comic format, all collected in an attractive but humble cardboard box. Tomine explains in a hilarious introduction that he was so taken with the idea of being published as a proper graphic novelist that he got a bit carried away when it came to design the first 32 Stories collection, and so he wrapped his clumsier, humbler early efforts in a comically pretentious, overwrought package. Indeed, while I don’t want to take away from the artist’s early work, I might go so far as to suggest that Tomine’s self-conscious introduction is the highlight of this new edition of 32 Stories; it is so lovably embarrassed, self-effacing and apologetic that it comes across like a less gimmicky version of the 60 or so pages of disclaimers and footnotes and parenthetical asides that precede the narrative proper in Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Still, Adrian Tomine is clearly an artist who is always looking forward, and so should we; 32 Stories is a worthwhile collection, but it merely has something to prove, whereas Shortcomings has something to say.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured products Shortcomings (PB) 32 Stories: Special Edition Box Set   Adrian Tomine in the Hour Updated July 13, 2009 Adult contemporary Roseanne Harvey Adrian Tomine's '90s teenage wasteland, newly replicated for authentic nostalgia 32 Stories: The Complete Optic Nerve Mini-Comics and Shortcomings show us how much Adrian Tomine has grown "If you're a 'glass half full' kind of person, you might say that these comics are youthful, energetic and even enlightening in terms of the evolution they chart," writes Adrian Tomine in his introduction to the special-edition box set of 32 Stories: The Complete Optic Nerve Mini-Comics. "If you're feeling less charitable, you'd probably describe them as amateurish, scatter-shot, affected and deeply derivative." Realistically, 32 Stories falls somewhere in between. At times, the adolescent awkwardness is cringeworthy, and at other times Tomine brilliantly captures the universal experience of high-school alienation. It's like reading an artist's sketchbook, and we can see Tomine experimenting with the comic form and emulating his idols. We can also watch him mature, as an artist and as a person. The boxed set compiles Tomine's first seven issues of Optic Nerve, a comic pamphlet he published while still a high school student in Berkeley, California, in the early '90s. After being printed as a bound book in 1995 and reprinted several times, this time around the original comics have been completely replicated, including cover stock, letters, an out-of-date Berkeley PO address and stickers (seemingly as a way to keep the comics in print - the reluctant Tomine simply intended for this box set to be viewed as "an artifact from my teenaged years"). Tomine made a name for himself in the American underground comics community because of his prodigious talent and his support for DIY culture. At the age of 20, he was signed to Montreal-based press Drawn & Quarterly, and went on to produce another 11 issues of Optic Nerve. We see his talent in full bloom in 2007's full-length graphic novel Shortcomings (a serialization of Optic Nerve issues 9-11), made available in compact paperback this spring as a way to introduce even more readers to Tomine's work. Here, Tomine has mastered not only comic timing, but the arts of storytelling and character development. He's found a style that suits him - minimalist, stark, brilliant use of darkness and light - and a story that he wants to tell. Shortcomings focuses on Ben Tanaka, a sarcastic, self-deprecating Japanese-American guy in his late-20s, as he deals with relationships, race and place. The witty dialogue is impeccable and the story moves along at a pleasurable pace, with tightly woven images and text that never give way to comic stand-bys such as thought bubbles or internal narration - Tomine wanted the story to be as readable as possible and accessible to the non-comics reader. 32 Stories and Shortcomings are like bookends in Tomine's illustrious and continually ascending career. Recently, the 35-year-old Tomine moved on from comics and graphic novels to producing distinctive covers for The New Yorker and publishing in Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Giant Robot and Rolling Stone. He is currently working on a collection of interconnected short graphic stories. Adrian Tomine's 32 Stories: The Complete Optic Nerve Mini-Comics (Drawn & Quarterly), 96 pp. and Shortcomings (Drawn & Quarterly), 112 pp. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured products Shortcomings (PB) 32 Stories: Special Edition Box Set Adrian and Seth in SF Weekly Updated June 16, 2009 Adrian Tomine and Seth Date/Time:Thu., June 18, 7:30pm Price: Free Contact Info: | Event Website From Sacto, Northern Cal By Michael Leaverton Most writers hate their juvenilia: Adrian Tomine spends nearly the whole introduction of 32 Stories, a rerelease of his collected early work, slamming it. He uses the words “amateurish, scattershot, affected, and deeply derivative.” The title he picked “kills” him, because he put himself in the company of J.D. Salinger (Nine Stories) and Donald Barthelme (Forty and Sixty Stories). So, why is he putting it all out there again? Because he has a smart, persuasive publisher, Chris Oliveros of Drawn & Quarterly, and both of them had a great idea: Release the seven issues of Optic Nerve, which Tomine started self-publishing during high school in Sacramento, in the original Kinko’d, pamphleted form, then ship them out in a box. It’s like opening a time capsule from the early '90s, when Pavement ruled and everyone was tired. The copies, going from raw and dark to slick and clean as Tomine's stature rose, are faithful to the original works, right down to the letters, notes, ads, and Berkeley mailing address (which you should not use; God knows who owns it now). Today, at In Conversation: Adrian Tomine and Seth, he trades stories and pictures with a fellow now-aboveground hero (and fellow New Yorker illustrator) Gregory Gallant, to celebrate the release of five books between them.   click here to read more Featured artists Seth Adrian Tomine            Featured products George Sprott: (1894-1975) 32 Stories: Special Edition Box Set   Seth and Adrian Tomine in The Chicago Reader Updated June 4, 2009 Antiques Road Show Young fogey cartoonists Adrian Tomine and Seth discuss their own work and some neglected masters at Quimby’s. Seth George Sprott (1894-1975) Doug Wright The Collected Doug Wright: Canada's Master Cartoonist (1949-1962) John Stanley Melvin Monster, Volume 1 Adrian Tomine 32 Stories, Shortcomings Yoshihiro Tatsumi A Drifting Life (Drawn & Quarterly) By Ben Schwartz t the height of his fame as America’s “happy hippy cartoonist,” Robert Crumb turned down an offer to do an album cover for the Rolling Stones. Though his artwork graced the sleeve of Big Brother & the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills, Crumb had no interest in the Summer of Love, and especially not in its music. Janis Joplin was a personal friend and a comics fan, and anyway he needed the $600. But he considered the Stones insufferable posers—like Blueshammer in Ghost World—and found it lamentable that women preferred Mick Jagger to, say, your average underground cartoonist. A few years later he even formed his own band to play more authentic roots blues and country. Not that it slowed the Stones down any. Crumb might’ve been the first cartoonist to wear his anachronism on his sleeve, but he won’t be the last: that gamut runs from Kim Deitch to Drew Friedman to Chris Ware to Jason. Two members in good standing of this society, Seth and Adrian Tomine appear this week at Quimby’s to discuss their most recent projects, all of which are backward-looking in one way or another. The two have six “new” products between them. Seth’s plugging an expanded version of his serial for the New York Times, George Sprott (1894-1975), as well as the first volumes of The Collected Doug Wright, which he conceived, edited, and designed, and The John Stanley Library, which he designed. Tomine’s got reissues of his own Shortcomings and 32 Stories and a new autobiographical work from Japan’s Yoshihiro Tatsumi, A Drifting Life, that he edited, designed, and lettered. Seth’s George Sprott is the “biography” of a fictional Canadian TV personality. “Arctic explorer, television host, raconteur, beloved uncle or opportunist, philanderer, deadbeat father, self-centered bore?” asks the jacket copy; it’s no spoiler to say the title character is all of the above. Sprott, inspired by an actual Detroit talk show host who had a habit of falling asleep as his guests droned on, dreams of his past as he dozes. The defining episode is an affair he had with an Inuit woman during his travels; though he fathers a child with her, he never sees her again. Framing his own memories is a Citizen Kane-style reconstruction of his life as retold by friends, family, and coworkers. For the book version, Seth grew the story by half and even included photographs of Dominion, a fictional midcentury Canadian city he’s been building out of cardboard for the past decade that serves as the setting for Sprott’s life. He has a real gift for creating comforting locales and exteriors populated by emotionally collapsed (if well-attired) figures. Tomine may not have built himself a 1950s city out of cardboard, but he’s immersed himself in the mid-20th century as seen through the eyes of pioneering Japanese cartoonist Yoshihiro Tatsumi. Readers know Tomine best from his New Yorker fiction-issue covers and his autobiographical Optic Nerve, which he began in high school as a series of minicomics xeroxed at a Kinko’s in Sacramento and from which both 32 Stories and Shortcomings were culled, but he’s also been editing and designing Tatsumi’s North American releases since 2005. On the surface, there probably couldn’t be bigger gap between Tomine’s coming of age in sleepy Sacto and Tatsumi’s during the American occupation of Japan. Then again, the struggle to put out independent, literary comics in the North American market of the late 80s and early 90s—dominated as it was by direct sales superhero shops—has its parallels in Tatsumi’s story. Tatsumi more or less invented literary comics in Japan, a style he called gekiga (which translates as “dramatic pictures”) and in A Drifting Life sets his own struggle to break free of the boys’ world of manga comics against Japan’s struggle to redefine its identity after the war. He opens the story on the day of the emperor’s surrender in 1945, with his countrymen literally on their knees, and ends it in 1960, during the riots over the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, which trigger in the cartoonist an epiphany about the nature of his own work. To begin one’s career in literary comics when Seth and Tomine did also meant breaking your own ground. A young Jonathan Lethem or Rick Moody could read any number of new novels by his peers. But for an aspiring graphic novelist, there was Art Spiegelman, Will Eisner, the Hernandez brothers, Harvey Pekar . . . after that, the list got thin. If you wanted more, pre-eBay, you started scouring used bookstores and the dime bin at the comics shop. And once you’d done all that legwork, of course, you wanted to share. Seth, for instance, ran across John Stanley’s mid-1960s work in the dime bins. Best known for scripting Little Lulu (currently in reprints from Dark Horse), Stanley quit comics, reportedly with some animosity, in the early 70s. But before he did he created several titles of his own, including Melvin Monster, Kookie, and Thirteen Going on Eighteen. Seth would eventually write a piece on this later work for the Comics Journal, under editor Tom Devlin. It was Devlin, now at Drawn & Quarterly, who contacted Seth about designing the new Stanley series. An idiosyncratic humorist, Stanley often opened with a simple premise that he’d extend far beyond a one-dimensional joke. With Melvin Monster, publisher Dell surely hoped to cash in on the mid-1960s craze for sitcoms like The Munsters and The Addams Family: Melvin, the good little monster, is a huge disappointment to his evil parents, Mummy and Baddy. But Stanley pushes beyond the obvious gags, and Melvin becomes a somewhat disturbing mix of child abuse and slapstick, set in monster suburbia—a Monsters, Inc. without the Pixar sugar. In one story Baddy sends sissy Melvin to their horrific basement to make a real monster out of him, forgetting about the caged-up beasts that will surely devour his son—not that he tries to save him once he remembers. Melvin survives, then tricks his dad into going down into the basement himself. Seth also designed The Collected Doug Wright: Canada’s Master Cartoonist, Volume 1. Wright (1917-1983) drew the perennially popular Doug Wright’s Family, aka Nipper— the name of the monkey wrench of a toddler thrown into the family’s postwar largesse. Nipper’s sole focus appears to be destroying family property—toys, cars, clothes, food—at maximum inconvenience to his father. Wright drew the strips vertically, to be read from top to bottom, and without dialogue, and made trademark use of a single spot color, bright red, to compose panels, emphasize emotion, or simply identify the main character to the reader. One strip might have a red coat or hat, another red shadows, another a single red z over a snoozing baby. Wright’s appeal to Seth is obvious—there’s his perfectly executed, light design and line, and then there’s the simple central conflict of a family just trying to do anything peaceably—picnic, shop, fish, eat dinner. The anachronists only wish life could be so simple. That’s the difference between them and the nostalgists, who believe it was. In the introductions to both the 1995 and the new edition of 32 Stories, Tomine admits that many of his early minicomics still send a chill of embarrassment up his spine. For the ’95 edition, they were edited into a single slender volume, with “patterned endpapers, metallic Pantone ink, and what’s referred to in the book business as ‘French flaps,’” as if to give them more collective weight—which he now thinks just made things worse. When he reluctantly agreed to a reprint, Tomine made a compromise with his publisher, who wanted the book expanded: he would include everything, but in the original format—a box set of xeroxed pamphlets and minicomics. Nostalgic on the face of it—but from Tomine’s point of view, more honest. One thing it undeniably shows—this generation of literary cartoonists finally has a past of its own. click here to read more Featured artists Seth Adrian Tomine            Featured products George Sprott: (1894-1975) 32 Stories: Special Edition Box Set Adrian Tomine interview on Gothamist Updated June 3, 2009 Adrian Tomine, Graphic Novelist It's been a while since we last checked in with Brooklynite, cartoonist, illustrator and graphic novelist Adrian Tomine (who you may know best for his ongoing comic series Optic Nerve, or his New Yorker covers). In fact, at the time his new book Shortcomings had just come out, and now it's hitting paperback. He's currently on a book tour with Seth, stopping by the Strand tomorrow night, and the MoCCA festival this weekend. Recently he told us about living in Chris Rock's former apartment and, for you graphic novel newbies, where to start if you're intrigued by the illustrated world. What influences your illustrations and novels? I was talking to someone recently who announced that they were thinking of trying their hand at fiction writing. I asked, somewhat incredulously, if this was something they knew how to do. And this person responded by saying, "Well, all you do is take a bunch of stuff from your life and change a few names, right?" I do draw on my own experiences and observations for inspiration, but I'd like to think this person was simplifying my creative process quite a bit. How do you feel about comics and graphic novels becoming feature films—would you ever experiment with that medium? I know there's a lot of comics fans out there who get a big thrill simply from the fact that a comic they love was very faithfully translated into a movie, and I don't quite understand that. I feel like it's a little bit insulting to the comics medium when a film adaptation is viewed as like the ultimate form of validation. I think comics can be the basis for great films, but I think the focus of such a project should be on making the film as good as possible, not on painstakingly replicating the comic. What are you working on for the future—what's next? I'm working on a new, as-yet-untitled book, which is a collection of inter-related short stories. I can't say much about it at this point, other than that it will be in color, and that it's pretty different from my last book. Are there any up and coming graphic novelists whose work you're excited about right now? It really is an amazingly great time in terms of emerging talent in the world of comics. It's very humbling and inspiring to see this influx of talent, especially as so much of it seems to be coming from a very diverse range of backgrounds and influences. There's a lot of people in anthologies like Kramers Ergot, Drawn & Quarterly Showcase, and Mome that really impress me. I don't know when it's coming out, but I can't wait for Vanessa Davis' new book. And Jonathan Bennett, who's published some short stories in Mome, is one of the most naturally gifted cartoonists to arrive in awhile. If someone is just starting to get into the world of comics and graphic novels, which ones would you suggest they start with? It depends on the person, but I'd feel pretty comfortable putting Ghost World, Maus, I Never Liked You, or The Complete Peanuts in someone's hands. Not only are they all classics of the medium, they all have that power to instantly draw you right into their world. What was it like when you first saw your work in, and on the cover of The New Yorker? Is there anywhere your illustrations haven't been yet that you'd like to see them? I feel like I've been pretty lucky in terms of where my illustrations have appeared, so to be honest, there isn't one particular call I'm waiting around for. There have been a handful of assignments over the years that I've had to turn down due to time constraints, and I was fairly envious when I saw the finished product, beautifully illustrated by someone else. But don't ask me to elaborate, as that would probably be poor form. In Shortcomings Ben is living in California and seems to have a thing against NYC, did you have any of these feelings before moving here? No, I'm actually quite different from Ben in that regard. I grew up with a very romantic, idealized vision of New York, probably because of all the books I read and the movies I watched. I still have those moments where I come upon some New York landmark or some great view of the city, and I feel like an awestruck tourist, and I don't think that Ben allows himself that experience. Please share your strangest "only in New York" story. I used to live in Chris Rock's former apartment. I've got some junk mail for him, if he wants it. Also, I recently was waiting at the Broadway/Lafayette station when I saw an inebriated gentleman lose his balance and fall onto the tracks. Two other guys instantly jumped down after him and pulled him back up onto the platform. When the first fellow stood up, he looked down at his filthy t-shirt and began angrily berating his rescuers for ripping it in the process. Under what circumstance have you thought about leaving New York? When I've been dragged to an over-priced, watered-down Mexican restaurant in Manhattan. Do you have a favorite New York celebrity sighting or encounter? I recently saw the singer Seal in the Apple store dressed in a black ankle-length trench coat, garish scarf, and huge sunglasses—singing along dramatically with the music coming out of a nearby computer while his assistant talked to an employee about setting up Seal's new iPhone. A good example, I suppose, of how celebrities are just normal people who don't want to be noticed... In a typical, cheap uptown diner, I found myself sitting in a booth adjacent to Liza Minelli, who sang a part of her order ("chicken and avocado wraaaaap") and then erupted in laughter. Years ago, I sat next to Woody Allen in a bar. He shot me a totally expressionless glance, then proceeded to assemble his clarinet. Okay, I admit it: It was at the Carlyle, and I had paid the exorbitant cover charge just for that experience. What's your current soundtrack? Right now I'm listening to an abbreviated, out-of-tune version of the "William Tell Overture," which emanates from one of those coin-operated kids' rides in front of the restaurant across the street from our new apartment. Best cheap eat in the city. Nicky's Vietnamese Sandwiches. Soup dumplings at Shanghai Cafe. Onigiri at Cafe Zaiya. Knishes at Yonah Shimmel. Best venue to hear music. Well, if you're into abbreviated, out-of-tune versions of the "William Tell Overture," our living room.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product 32 Stories: Special Edition Box Set   Seth and Adrian Tomine interveiwed by Newcity Lit Updated June 3, 2009 click here to read more Featured artists Seth Adrian Tomine            Featured products George Sprott: (1894-1975) A Drifting Life 32 Stories: Special Edition Box Set SHORTCOMINGS and 32 STORIES reviewed by The Houston Chronicle Updated June 1, 2009 Collection of comics shows Adrian Tomine's growth as an artist By ANDREW DANSBY Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle May 29, 2009 Hand Adrian Tomine a business card and a pen, and he can sketch out a fully realized narrative on the back. The young artist is as deft as anyone working in comics today at creating efficient but arcing narratives full of zippy dialogue that rings true and simple panels infused with information. The most recent case in point is the excellent Shortcomings, new in paperback. What could’ve been a simple event (just a breakup, really) ends up being a sullen musing on race, region and inadequacy. Tomine is also daring enough to create characters like protagonist Ben Takaka, who are more relatable than likable. Even more intriguing is a new edition of 32 Stories, Tomine’s previously anthologized Optic Nerve mini-comics, which he began inking as a teen. Though they’d been collected in a single book edition, this slip-cased set breaks them back up into seven separately bound volumes complete with price tags and original reader letters. Tomine’s original introduction from 1995 is included with its fantastic opening sentence: “The book you hold in your hands would not exist had high school been a pleasant experience for me.” A new short introduction written more recently finds Tomine still a little uneasy about putting this early work out for consumption. Must be like looking at a yearbook photo, right? In a cheeky turn, he’s put his own yearbook photo — awkward smile and all — on the front of the introduction with a story about how another cartoonist put it on the Web against his wishes. He’s grown less protective about his past now. And as for the minis themselves, they remain a document of a developing artist. Even the earliest and roughest of them (such as “Adrian Tomine’s 10,553rd Dream: Steph the Lure!”) features the mix of wit and bullied awkwardness that would inform his subsequent work. Some of the obvious touchstones are here: “Back Break: A True Story of Pain” includes a couple of Ralph Steadman-y frames. But Tomine isn’t above calling himself out. In the intro he mocks Optic Nerve No. 7 for its obvious debt to Daniel Clowes, whose moody bluntness remains an influence, albeit one Tomine has absorbed and learned from in developing his own style and voice. And even that Clowes-heavy No. 7 includes the brutally concise introvert’s nightmare “Stammer,” which crams a lifetime of social awkwardness into just nine drawings, several painful thought bubbles and a short, icy exchange of words. Andrew Dansby is an entertainment columnist for the Chronicle.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured products Shortcomings (PB) 32 Stories: Special Edition Box Set   TCAF event coverage in Now Magazine Updated May 28, 2009 An impressive trio at TCAF Seth, Adrian Tomine and Yoshihiro Tatsumi at Toronto Comic Arts Festival Jay Dart To kick off the 2009 Toronto Comic Arts Festival, the Authors at Harbourfront Centre series played host to a presentation by three renowned comic book artists, aka cartoonists, aka graphic novelists, aka graphic artists, aka artists. While it may not be clear what they prefer to be called, one thing that can definitely be said about Adrian Tomine, Seth and Yoshihiro Tatsumi: their collections of bound visual narratives near perfect examples of this popular medium. drian Tomine (above) began the evening by reading the self-deprecating introduction included in the 10th Anniversary edition of 32 Stories, a compilation of his early work that is being re-released, much to his chagrin, by Drawn & Quarterly after the first printing recently sold out. Although Tomine explained that he would rather these "quaint artifacts" from his past just disappear, they will continue to be available alongside Optic Nerve, a popular alternative comic series, and his most current novel, Shortcomings. Guelph-based comic artist, Seth, then took the stage and treated the standing room only crowd to 12 of his own stories relating the life of one humble cartoonist. Seth's unconnected tales took us back to his formative years when he would rush home from school for Charlie Brown, and then eventually Marvel Comics. Looking back now, he realizes that when he did his own comics featuring the heroes from Marvel, he bridged the gap between his inner and outer realities by drawing his thoughts out in a tangible form, and thus paving the way for his own unique style of biographical tales such George Sprott (1894-1975) which, in 2007, was serialized in New York Times Magazine in 25 installments and is now being released as a stand alone book this Spring. The rest of his presentation was also filled with more insightful ‘wisbits’ as he shared his experiences writing his weekly comic strips, his thoughts on the poetry of comics, and his days spent isolated in his basement, dedicated to this artform. Tomine then returned to the stage to interview Yoshihiro Tatsumi (pictured above), one of Japan's most influential comic artists. Most of the audience were only introduced to his works in 2006 when Drawn & Quaterly, and specifically Tomine, first brought his collections to the West. During the interview, Tatsumi shared partial stories of how friends and family reacted to being featured in his recent auto-biographical masterpiece, A Drifting Life, and what it was like when he first met his idol. Tatsumi also related stories of his upbringing in the slums of Osaka and rising to the forefront of the "Gekiga" style of comics – a term that he coined to describe a new style of Japanese comics meaning "dramatic pictures" which opened the medium up to more mature audiences and was adopted by cartoonists who did not want their art being called manga or "irresponsible pictures." In the end, he also imparted some wisdom for maintaining a long and successful career: take care of the body first, then the mind. So, aspiring graphic artists take note: do some push-ups and run a few laps before inking in those panels! This event also marked the opening of the exhibition Graphic Novels: The Creation of Art and Narrative which runs until June 21st in Harbourfront Centre’s York Quay Centre and features Canada's Jeff Lemire, Kagan McLeod, Jillian Tamaki & Mariko Tamaki, Doug Wright (by Seth) as well as Anke Feuchtenberger (Germany), Emmanuel Guibert (France), Yoshihiro Tatsumi (Japan) and Adrian Tomine (USA). All pictures by Jay Dart. click here to read more Featured artists Seth Adrian Tomine Yoshihiro Tatsumi            Featured products George Sprott: (1894-1975) A Drifting Life 32 Stories: Special Edition Box Set TCAF event writeup in The National Post Updated May 28, 2009 Tomine, Seth, and Tatsumi talk shop at TCAF Posted: May 09, 2009, 6:18 PM by Lia Grainger The 4th annual Toronto Comic Arts Festival opened with a bang last night at Harbourfront Centre, as three legends of the genre captivated a packed house with stories and art. Adrian Tomine spoke about a new edition of his collection 32 Stories, Seth told twelve tales plucked from his long career as a comic book artist, and Yoshihiro Tatsumi discussed his seminal new autobiographical graphic novel A Drifting Life. It was an inspiring evening. Christopher Butcher, founder and director of TCAF, and owner of The Beguiling – one of the most valuable comic art and graphic novel resources in the country – introduced the evening’s speakers to an enthusiastic audience. Adrian Tomine, best known for the ongoing comic series Optic Nerve and his recent graphic novel Shortcomings, humbly presented the repackaged version of his first collection 32 Stories. Tomine was painfully self-deprecating, recounting that when his publisher initially told him it was going out of print, his response was “Thank God, finally.” He quickly learned it would be reprinted, and with the aid of a slideshow, Tomine walked the audience through the story of its original creation, painstakingly pointing out what he perceived to be the many ways in which the collection was naďve and amateurish. At one point, after agonizing over the hideousness of the book’s original dust jacket, Tomine described a dream in which Raymond Carver’s widow comes across the collection in a second-hand bookstore and is horrified. Tomine also noted that actor Keanu Reeves' band Dogstar released a song in the '90s with the unfortunate title, "32 Stories", and proceeded to play the song, accompanied by images of Keanu rocking out. The presentation was understated and hilarious, and though Tomine seemed intent on tearing down his early work, I was left with a strong desire to run to the sales table down the hall and buy a copy of the new edition. It includes several bonuses, including angry letters from now-famous cartoonists and the rejection letter he received upon his first submission of the piece to Drawn & Quarterly, way back in 1993. Next to take the stage, dressed in an impeccable 1940s pea-green suit and looking very much like one of his characters, was Seth. With work characterized by clean, delicately tapered lines and a deep, muted palette, Seth is best known for his comic Palookaville and graphic novels (though he hates the term) like Wimbledon Green and Clyde Fans. A legend in his own right, Seth’s presentation reaffirmed the reputation he has earned over his long and groundbreaking career. With elegance and panache, Seth told twelve deliberately random stories from his life, and noted the beginning of each new tale with the ringing of a small gold bell. His points, in brief, were: 1. Comics provide a concrete link to a vivid inner reality. 2. Cartooning is a solitary pursuit. 3. Times have changed: in the beginning, it was difficult to be serious in comics. 4. Seth resists technology. When he learned he could Google himself, it was not a good thing. 5. Comics have the rhythm, and require the deliberate decision-making, of poetry. 6. Peanuts comics are haikus. 7. Seth is pretty sure someone stole his theory that “Peanuts comics are haikus.” 8. Seth’s college 3D art teacher was an angry, talented man, and Seth is glad for it. 9. No matter how hard you work, you can’t change your intelligence or your talent; Chris Ware disagrees. 10. Style in comic book art is extremely deliberate, like a pompadour. 11. Comics appear to be silent and still, but they’re not. 12. According to Crumb, “There’s nothing wrong with repeating yourself, so long as you dig a little deeper each time.” While he spoke, images of his work flashed on the screen behind him. He assured the audience that they were entirely unrelated to what he was saying, and yet at many points the art seemed to unintentionally fit with the words, giving the speech a calming rhythmical cadence that was a pleasure to hear and observe. The main event was Japanese manga legend Yoshihiro Tatsumi. Tatsumi is credited with inventing gekiga, a form of manga with complex mature themes designed for adult readers. In a Godzilla t-shirt, blazer and brown driver’s cap, Tatsumi looked cool and relaxed. With the help of a translator, Adrian Tomine interviewed Tatsumi about his new book, A Drifting Life. Tatsumi was animated and forthcoming about his early years, explaining that, “The country was getting rich, but for me and the people in my life, nothing was changing, and I wanted to make work about that, as a form of protest.” Tomine asked several questions about Tatsumi’s relationship with Osamu Tazuka, best known for Astroboy. Tatsumi discussed how their careers had diverged, as Tatsumi tackled darker themes and Tezuka continued with fantasy. When asked if he had any advice for artists, Tatsumi cheekily replied, “I agree with what Seth said. In fact, I really learned a lot from him.” The Toronto Comic Arts Festival runs until Sunday. For more information visit www.torontocomics.com.   click here to read more Featured artists Seth Adrian Tomine Yoshihiro Tatsumi            Featured products George Sprott: (1894-1975) A Drifting Life 32 Stories: Special Edition Box Set   Adrian Tomine and Seth Tour Updated May 27, 2009 05/8-10 TCAF Toronto, ON 06/02, 6:00 Brattle Theater Cambridge, MA 06/04, 7:00 The Strand New York, NY 06/06-7 MoCCA Fest New York, NY 06/09 Free Library Philadelphia, PA 06/10, 7:00 Quimbys Chicago, IL 06/17, 7:30 Skylight Books Los Angeles, CA 06/18, 7:30 Booksmith San Francisco, CA Featured artists Seth Adrian Tomine            32 STORIES reviewed by LA Times Updated May 25, 2009 Adrian Tomine: "32 Stories" (Drawn & Quarterly) Here, to conclude, is an absolute treat, a boxed set of the complete set of mini-comics that Adrian Tomine originally self-published back in the early 1990s. Tomine, who was then in his late teens and early 20s, wrote and drew these things, got to work with glue and scissors, then hauled himself off to Kinko's. This new edition reproduces the originals in all their downbeat glory, slices of small-time California life, telling tales about adults, kids, dogs, Kerouac, etc. Loneliness is a theme, inevitably, but the work resounds with passion and wit, growing more and more polished as Tomine ages and matures. The art is great, and the tone somehow mingles Raymond Carver with that of the Japanese manga maestro Yoshihiro Tatsumi.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product 32 Stories: Special Edition Box Set   32 STORIES BOX SET reviewed by Georgia Straight Updated May 19, 2009 A pair of Adrian Tomine reissues to tickle your Optic Nerve By Amanda Growe At the recent Toronto Comic Arts Festival, Montreal’s Drawn & Quarterly released two publications by one of its best-loved authors. Shortcomings , which collects issues 9 through 11 of Adrian Tomine's Optic Nerve comics, was released in paperback. (The hardcover came out in September 2007.) The more notable, and unusual, release was a boxed-set version of 32 Stories: The Complete Optic Nerve Mini-Comics. The original 32 Stories came out as a regular old paperback book in 1995. While both versions collect the seven Optic Nerve mini comics and chart Tomine's rise to the upper ranks of the comics world (and from print runs of 25 to sales of 6,000), the great thing about the boxed set is that it reproduces the mini comics exactly as they first appeared: folded and stapled, low-tech, comfortable. It's really something to hold (exact reproductions of) self-published comics in your hands after a long time away from them. Much more than the 32 Stories book, it gives you an appreciation of just how amazing it is that an untrained high-school kid created these things. And you can observe how, in a short space of time, Tomine's talent progressed. The art in Issue 1 is pretty rough around the edges, but by Issue 2, there's beauty in a number of the panels in each story. If you read 32 Stories or the original self-published mini comics ages ago, going through the boxed set will feel like visiting an old friend. There are any number of losers and outcasts, vignettes and dreams from Tomine's life, as well as stories starring the nocturnal Amy. Amy, the girl we'd all like to hang out with, the one who says of a friend she's drifted away from, "But every once in a while, I miss that bitter reject I used to hang out with." One great extra you get with the boxed set is the letters page of each mini comic. The Optic Nerve letters page has long been a source of amusement, and these early letters don't disappoint: writes fellow comics artist Megan Kelso, "Please God, let Adrian continue to have no life so he will finish [ Optic Nerve ] #6 extra fast." There's even a bonus sticker included in one of the issues, as there was in the original. Besides the seven issues of the mini comic in the boxed set, you get an introductory "issue". This includes Tomine's introduction to the original 32 Stories book, annotated with self-deprecating footnotes, as well as a new introduction, replete with extensive self-examination. There's also a piece by Drawn & Quarterly publisher Chris Oliveros and a letter Oliveros sent to Tomine about his work, which take you back to the beginnings of their relationship. This boxed set, with its slip-on case and loose contents, isn't for reading on the bus; it's for enjoying in the comfort of your own home, again or for the first time. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured products Shortcomings (PB) 32 Stories: Special Edition Box Set Adrian Tomine intervewied by Guttersnipe Updated April 30, 2009 Tomine’s Shortcomings out in trade paperback By Shawn Conner Montreal publisher Drawn & Quarterly has just reissued Shortcomings, Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel first published in 2007, in trade paperback. We retrieved an interview with Tomine written around that time, in which he sheds some light on the controversy around the book. After years of writing and drawing short but elegant snapshots of relationship angst, the cartoonist decided he wanted to stretch his storytelling ability and reach a broader audience, while still maintaining fans of his comic Optic Nerve. But maybe things didn’t turned out exactly as planned. “I don’t know if I was choosing one audience over the other, or specifically trying to reach out to one,” Tomine said at the time, reached at home in Brooklyn, where he was working on a New Yorker cover. “I just wanted to create a book where the focus is primarily on the content…and to make the language of the comic storytelling more invisible.” With its emphasis on precise facial expressions and body language, Tomine’s clean, realistic style has become one of the most recognizable in alternative comics. Signed to Montreal publisher Drawn & Quarterly, he produces an issue of Optic Nerve once or twice a year and does frequent commercial illustrations. But it was Summer Blonde, a 2003 collection of short pieces gleaned from Optic Nerve, that introduced him to the mainstream press, with critics likening his minimal storytelling style to that of short story champ Raymond Carver. In its subject matter, Shortcomings—freshly squeezed into a trade paperback edition—is familiar Tomine territory, as characters struggle with their own worst enemy–themselves. In this case, Ben is a dude with a perennial chip on his shoulder, and his disposition doesn’t improve as life throws a series of obstacles in his way. What isn’t said is as significant as the carefully selected information in the panels. This is sophisticated, adult work. And so, in the world of alternative comics, it’s suspect. Since the 35-year-old began publishing mini comics in his teens, his pieces have struck some of the medium’s watchdogs as the epitome of hipster navel gazing. Shortcomings, which took him five years to complete, has stirred controversy as well, partly because of the protagonist’s ambivalence about his Asian heritage. “For the number of new Asian readers I’ve gotten, I’ve probably turned away an equal number,” said the artist, whose parents spent time in American Japanese-internment camps during World War II. “I’ve learned long ago that when it comes time to do the work, it’s best to try and shut out thoughts about how people are going to react to it.” Some readers seem to have assumed Shortcomings is autobiographical, including its rather unsympathetic protagonist. “That misunderstanding has been at least one component in some readers’ less-than-enthusiastic response,” said Tomine. “It’s almost like they had some illusion of who I was, and by confusing me with this character some of those notions had been [further] confused.…It’s certainly not by accident–there are a lot of things thrown in there for no other reason than to create that confusion.”   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (PB)   Adrian Tomine interviewed in Words Without Borders Updated April 6, 2009 Dot Lin An Interview with Adrian Tomine Over 800 pages and eleven years in the making, A Drifting Life is a monumental achievement and the long-waited autobiography of legendary Japanese cartoonist Yoshihiro Tatsumi. Called the father of gekiga—realistic or mature-themed manga that predated the literary graphic novel movement in the U.S. by decades—Tatsumi was formally introduced to English-language readers with the acclaimed Drawn & Quarterly publications of his short stories: The Push Man and Other Stories, Abandon the Old in Tokyo, and Good-Bye. These stories ranged from dark and haunting depictions of mundane and urban Japanese life to bleak insights into a conflicted nation struggling with post-war recovery and identity. A Drifting Life encompasses the years from August 1945 to June 1960 and features entirely new work from Tatsumi. The sprawling narrative covers his young adult years in Osaka, his family life, and his beginnings as a manga artist—including the oft mentioned meeting with manga idol and future mentor Tezuka Osamu (Astro Boy). The story also unfolds against a detailed background of social and cultural history, much of it dealing with the years after World War II and the evolution of the Japanese manga industry. In the 1980s, while still a teenager, American comics artist Adrian Tomine discovered Tatsumi through an unauthorized U.S. release. Tomine had been looking for comics other than the traditional superhero ones, and in the process, found Tatsumi and American figures in the underground comics scene such as Jaime Hernandez and Dan Clowes. Tatsumi and Tomine are very different artists from different generations, but critics have drawn a few similarities between the two: both started drawing comics professionally as teenagers; both have been known to create character-driven stories of relatively ordinary people; and both received some critical recognition at a young age—Tatsumi with his groundbreaking gekiga (he even coined the term) and Tomine with his popular Optic Nerve comics. Many years after discovering Tatsumi's comics, Tomine now plays a role in helping to bring Tatsumi's work to English-speaking readers, as he serves as editor and designer for the previously published short-story collections and the new autobiography. Below, Tomine speaks on Tatsumi's A Drifting Life and his own work in comics: Dot Lin: How was working with Tatsumi on A Drifting Life different from that with his past works, given its longer length and autobiographical nature? Adrian Tomine: It was a much more ambitious undertaking, not only because of the sheer length of the book, but also because of the numerous references to actual events, people, places, etc. The book is also something of a cultural history of post-war Japan, and we wanted to be as accurate as possible. DL: What can readers expect from A Drifting Life? AT: I think people who are familiar with Tatsumi's earlier work will see A Drifting Life as very much the work of the same artist, but an artist who has matured, progressed, and set new challenges for himself. I was surprised by how he melded his own personal history with that of the manga industry, as well as that of Japan in general. DL: A Drifting Life incorporates newer work for the first time and it's not necessarily a straight-up autobiography with the stand-in protagonist of Hiroshi—were you and Tatsumi looking to push the boundaries of storytelling or the traditional autobiography in any way? AT: Well, just to clarify, A Drifting Life is comprised of entirely new work. It's been Tatsumi's main artistic focus for the past eleven years. And as to whether it could be described as "straight-up autobiography," I think the answer is yes. It may be different from some of the autobiographical comics that North American readers have grown accustomed to, but I don't see any aspects of the book that move it out of the realm of autobiography. DL: Though you've known Tatsumi for a few years, was there a particular part in A Drifting Life that you found especially entertaining or interesting? AT: I liked seeing that at least at one point in his life, Tatsumi was just as fanatical about comics as I was. And I may be coming at this from a particular angle, but I was interested in any of the specific details about either creating comics or getting them published. On a broader scale, I was just awed by the scope of Tatsumi's story … the way it focuses on the intimate details of his personal life, then pulls back to depict the dynamics of his family, then pulls back to show what the comics industry was like, and then pulls back to talk about larger cultural and historic events in Japan. At least in terms of what's been done in North American autobiographical comics, this is a fairly innovative and novel approach. DL: Tatsumi has talked about the mentor relationship with Tezuka. What is your working relationship with Tatsumi like? AT: My working relationship with Tatsumi is friendly and respectful, but there is an inherent distance, both literally and due to the language barrier. I've very much enjoyed the handful of occasions on which we've been able to meet. It is sort of amazing that I've ended up in this position to help expose his work to a broader audience, but I don't see it as any kind of collaboration. At most, I'm merely a very lucky fan, and my contributions to the series are negligible. DL: You certainly worked hard on Shortcomings, which received critical praise and sparked discussions on race and identity. It came out two years ago and releases in paperback this April 2009. Are you still hearing from readers who agreed or disagreed with the views expressed in it? Have any of the initially strong responses settled down into some sort of consensus of opinion? AT: Oh sure. I got some of my most polarized responses when Shortcomings first came out, and I'm sure that will continue when I go out into the world again to promote the softcover edition. I don't think there has been any consensus. I'm glad that most of the criticism has to do with the content of the work, not the quality. I sort of expected this kind of response, though. I think that the most frustrating aspect of the book for some people is the lack of clarity in terms of what are the views of the fictional characters, and what are the views of the author. DL: The new 32 Stories Box Set, also set for April 2009, looks great. Does it bring back memories to see the Optic Nerve minis back in their original form? And what is the story behind that high school photo of you … AT: Thanks. I think in some ways, maybe out of self-preservation, I've had to distance myself from the contents of those old comics a bit. When I was going over the proofs, I really felt like I was looking at someone else's work. And the story behind the picture? People will have to read my introduction to find out. DL: Does working with a variety of publication formats—from comics to CD/ book covers to New Yorker illustrations—make the creative process more interesting? Do you actively pursue a variety of projects? AT: The only two work-related things I've ever actively pursued were getting my comics published by Drawn & Quarterly, and getting my illustrations into the New Yorker. And yes, I think it's useful for me to have a variety of projects going on at once. There are certain jobs that I feel are opportunities to try something new, and other ones where I know I have to give the client exactly what they expect. DL: Critical acclaim found you at an early age, and in some ways, you have grown up in the public eye as a comics artist. Are you glad things happened the way they did? Any advantages or disadvantages? And given how the comics landscape has changed or stayed the same, do you have any advice for artists starting out today? AT: I'm very grateful for the way things have worked out for me, and I know a lot it has to do with good luck and good timing. I'm sure that if I'd started out either ten years earlier or ten years later, things would've been much tougher for me. But I do think I was given too much praise too early. It had more to do with the landscape of the industry at the time, and maybe the novelty of my age, too. But trying to develop as an artist is a tough process, and to do it more or less in print has been kind of strange for me. The two bits of advice I have for an artist starting out today are almost pointless to bring up because no one would ever heed them. But the first is: Start out small. I know it's tempting to take that big book contract the first time it's offered to you, but it might be better to hone your skills in a less ostentatious venue for a bit, then move up to something more ambitious. If you're really good, this route will only make you better, and the opportunities to be published on a bigger scale will still be around. The other bit of advice that comes to mind, which I wish someone had given me when I was younger, is to resist the urge to talk into every microphone that's put in front of you. Say no to as many interviews as you can. Nothing is more important than the quality of the work, and you run a very high risk of saying something that you'll regret for a long time. As I said, I really wish someone had given me this advice! DL: As teenagers, you discovered Tatsumi when looking for more than traditional superhero comics and Tatsumi started his own work out of the desire for more realistic comics. Have you seen any changes in the comics landscape since then that you like? AT: That's a huge question! I'm very happy to see comics finally garnering a little bit more respect as an art form in America, and I think it's terrific that as the business has picked up a bit, a wider range of talent is being attracted. It's very inspiring to see the work of new cartoonists and not be able to recognize any of their influences. DL: Thank you for your time, Adrian. Best of luck to you and Tatsumi, as you both continue to contribute great work to the comics scene. click here to read more Featured artists Adrian Tomine Yoshihiro Tatsumi            Featured product A Drifting Life Exit Wounds, Burma Chronicles and Sleepwalk in Telegraph's Top Ten Updated April 6, 2009 The Top Ten Comic Books Understanding Comics: the Invisible Art by Scott McCloud (HarperCollins, Ł14.99) Peerless comic-about-comics, the medium’s first serious example of literary criticism and a valuable and often very funny work of popular aesthetic philosophy. Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan (Jonathan Cape, Ł14.99) This tremendous work of fiction perfectly captures the gloss and grime of Israel in peace and war. It has a dark wit and a distinctive look. Burma Chronicles by Guy Delisle (Jonathan Cape, Ł14.99) A personal chronicle of Delisle’s time under the Burmese dictatorship with his wife (an aid worker) and young son. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (Vintage, Ł7.99) A mordantly funny chronicle of the author’s childhood in pre- and post-revolutionary Iran. Promethea by Alan Moore (Titan Books, various volumes) A beginner’s guide to the history of occultism in the form of a feminist superhero epic, incorporating some of the most adventurous narrative and didactic techniques in contemporary comics. Sleepwalk by Adrian Tomine (Faber & Faber, Ł9.99) Ice-cool vignettes of disenchanted urban life, some with memorable stings in the tail, by one of comics’ most exciting young creators. Achewood by Chris Onstad (www.achewood.com) Hands down the funniest web comic, an extravagant tale of oversexed cats, retarded otters, robots and the like, with dialogue that rarely ventures far from comic genius. Updated twice weekly, and free to read online, it has people cackling and rolling in their office chairs. The Invisibles by Grant Morrison (Titan Books, Ł17.99) A full-time mental series about a band of time-travelling British anarchists seeking to avert the annihilation of world consciousness. Incredibly clever, totally barking. Krazy and Ignatz by George Herriman (Fantagraphics, various volumes, Ł13.99 each) The inimitable ancestor of contemporary alternative comics: the perennial love quadrilateral between a cat, a mouse, a dog and a brick. One of the most good-hearted and amusing works of mortal man. Alice in Sunderland by Bryan Talbot (Jonathan Cape, Ł18.99) Centuries of local history, John Lennon, Alice in Wonderland, George Formby and the Empire Theatre in Sunderland. Glorious, panoptic and precise; one of the oddest and cleverest comics there is.   click here to read more Featured artists Adrian Tomine Guy Delisle Rutu Modan            Featured products Sleepwalk and Other Stories Burma Chronicles Exit Wounds   SHORTCOMINGS reviewed in the Philadelphia City Paper Updated March 25, 2009 Shortcomings By Adrian Tomine Drawn and Quarterly, 104 pp., $14.95 Adrian Tomine’s tongue-in-cheek graphic-novel romance reads like a revamped Annie Hall, but with a soft spot for California instead of New York. Would-be hero Ben Tanaka is a pretentious, cynical pessimist stuck in a dying relationship with pretty-but-too-PC Miko. Between arguments over films about the Asian-American experience and Ben’s taste for white girls in porn and real life, Miko and Ben’s relationship suffers long until her exit to NYC. With his girlfriend gone, Ben turns to his outspoken lesbian best friend, Alice, for solace, falls for his exhibitionist co-worker and a blonde at a party. Between collisions with the fairer sex and an unshakable loneliness, Tanaka’s shortcomings begin to surface — and the self-loathing begins. —Dianca Potts click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (PB) Summer Blonde, Good Life and Pyongyang in GQ Updated March 19, 2009 THE 20 GRAPHIC NOVELS YOU SHOULD READ (AFTER ‘WATCHMEN’) Yes, they’re comic books, but these are not for kids By Alex Pappademas and Kevin Sintumuang They finally made a movie out of Watchmen, God bless ’em. Perhaps you’ve heard about it. Maybe you’ve also heard that before it was un film de Zack Snyder, Watchmen was a comic book, one that, despite being made of humble ink and staples and panels and word balloons, represented as giant a leap for its medium as Citizen Kane or Easy Rider did for theirs, and though it didn’t put an end to dumb comics any more than those films put an end to dumb movies, it established a climate in which it was possible to do something grown-up, to aim over the heads of the guys in the Cheetos-dusted Punisher T-shirts once in a while. But if we can add one thing to the conventional wisdom about comics, it’s this: Those giant leaps may not happen every day, but every week a whole crapload of new comics hits the shelves (every Wednesday, to be specific—between that and Lost it’s basically the Nerd Sabbath). And while they’re not all gems, plenty of them are moving the ball forward, boldly, in terms of what kinds of stories the medium can tell. If you used to read comics but drifted away, there’s never been a better time to drift back; if you’ve never read them, there’s never been a better time to start. You can’t go wrong with the books in this slideshow. They’re risky, inventive, boundary-pushing—and (we promise) you can appreciate all of ’em whether or not you have forty-five tangled years of X-Men backstory committed to memory. And if you do have a backstory question, try the guy in the Punisher shirt. He’s there every Wednesday. So are we. Here’s why. Summer Blonde By Adrian Tomine These four Salingeresque short stories are dark, tragicomic portraits of social awkwardness. A washed-up novelist dates a teenage girl for new material, the high school nerd gets his sexual initiation from a girl who recently pooped her pants, and a stalker has nothing but the best intentions for the girl he’s…stalking. Pyongyang By Guy Delisle Proof that totalitarian regimes are comedy gold. Delisle’s collection of anecdotes, drawn from the time he spent in the capital of North Korea as an animator, is a witty, appropriately cynical look into the land of mandatory volunteers and institutionalized paranoia. But for all of his observations of the surreal and odd, he’s never the white guy peering into a North Korean freak show. You leave Pyongyang as Delisle did: with empathy. It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken By Seth Ignore the title—this is not the indie mope-fest you’d expect. Seth’s quixotic, nostalgia-fueled quest to track the life and career of Kalo, an obscure Canadian illustrator he discovers while rummaging through old magazines, leads to some truly poetic observations and ruminations on the fading, dusty world of the ’40s and ’50s.   click here to read more Featured artists Seth Adrian Tomine Guy Delisle            Featured products It's A Good Life If You Don't Weaken (HC) Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea (hardcover)   SLEEPWALK and JAR OF FOOLS reviewed by The Times of London Updated February 27, 2009 The Times Christmas Books 2008: Graphic Novels Neel Mukherjee NOVEMBER 30, 2008 TIMES OF LONDON Another such retrospective collection of early work is Sleepwalk and Other Stories (Faber & Faber, Ł9.99/ Ł9.49) by the great Adrian Tomine. Tomine can not only draw, he can also write eloquent, penetrating prose that catches the slippery essence of the drift and alienation of lonely lives: an old woman revisits a café where she used to have lunch with a lover decades ago, a young man misses his flight and becomes a secret observer of his own life with him missing from it, a young woman pores over the personals in a local paper and confuses the imagined and the real, another young woman slips in and out of the role of friendly helper of a blind man with disturbing ease. Extraordinary. Like Tomine's, Jason Lutes' artwork is also beautifully realistic. His Jar of Fools (Faber & Faber, Ł12.99/ Ł11.69) tells the story of Ernie Weiss, an alcoholic, washed-up magician trying to cope with the inexplicable suicide of his brother and the end of a romance, when his senile mentor, Al Flosso, reappears in his ruin of a life. Faber's UK issue of this heartbreaking, deep and emotionally vast novel, first published in book form in the US more than a decade ago, marks the introduction to a new readership of a book that will come to be seen as a turning point in mature psychological realism in the graphic novel genre. Featured artists Jason Lutes Adrian Tomine            Featured products Jar of Fools Sleepwalk and Other Stories ADRIAN TOMINE panel reviewed by Kristy Valenti Updated October 10, 2008 Bumbershoot 2008: Comix Sub-Heroes By Kristy Valenti Tuesday September 9, 2008 Bumbershoot is an all-ages, music/arts festival held at the Seattle Center (where the Space Needle and the Experience Music Project are located) every Labor Day Weekend. While waiting in line to enter the Comix Sub-Heroes panel, Sunday, Aug. 31, which featured Ivan Brunetti (Misery Loves Comedy, editor of An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories) interviewing Adrian Tomine (Shortcomings, The New Yorker) and Dan Clowes (Eightball, Ghost World)[1], I noticed the tenor of the crowd was quite different from what I'm used to from other readings, signings and conventions. For Bumbershoot attendees, this panel was just one stop, from 3:45-5:00, during an open-air day where they could have watched a comedy skit just before, and then right after grabbed an elephant ear and eaten it in line while waiting to see a band: after the intensity of the packed Dan Clowes signing at the Fantagraphics store the Friday night previous, the curious-but-not-fanatical vibe was tranquil.[2] Brunetti, Clowes and Tomine were relaxed too: they've all known each other for years — Clowes was a mentor to both Brunetti and Tomine — and it showed in their quick-witted banter. Brunetti, who, by virtue of his teaching experience, moderated and kicked off the panel with introductions, did a good job of keeping the proceedings accessible (perhaps his interjections of the word "tits" as a punch line helped with that): the panel seemed suitable for an audience whose interest in the cartoonists and their thoughts on the medium ranged from casual to serious. During the intros, which were accompanied by a short slide presentation, Brunetti and Clowes revealed that they both initially thought, upon seeing his work, that Tomine was older than they were, and were shocked to find out that in reality he's younger by 7 and 13 years, respectively (Tomine started his cartooning career while in high school). The discussion then segued into how Brunetti and Tomine had met Clowes and why it's important to develop relationships with other cartoonists (to paraphrase Brunetti: "You have to be a loner to do comics, but you also need someone to commiserate with"; to paraphrase Clowes: "It's not like Chasing Amy, where he and I [Tomine] sat back to back with our drawing boards and gave each other high fives"; to paraphrase Tomine: "I got some feedback [from Clowes], but it was more important to vent"). Brunetti then inquired as to the differences in the ways in which Clowes and Tomine depict places in their comics. Clowes said his approach was more internal, while in comparison, Tomine mentioned his was more specific: the cartoonists agreed that this gave Clowes's work a more timeless quality, while Tomine's comics are more like period pieces. Brunetti asked for Clowes' and Tomine's thoughts on those comics inspired by Gary Panter's work [i.e., like that produced by Paper Rad], who leave evidence of their mark-makings such as erasures, etc., and Clowes admitted that he has tried those techniques, but was unable to communicate that way: he had to work on Bristol. Brunetti declared that it made him feel old, which led him to observe that as you get older, your art changes: Clowes accepted that, noting that Brunetti's art has changed completely. Clowes then explained that he doesn't do character sheets, but tries to find out who his characters are as he draws, which sometimes causes him to have to go back and redraw characters in the beginning of the comic, such as Tina from Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. Tomine said it was difficult when he was working on Shortcomings, because he was trying to do a story about characters that don't grow, while he was going through some of the most dramatic changes of his life. Clowes and Tomine then related a few funny bits of trivia: Ghost World was conceived of as a sci-fi with two girls in togas, while Shortcomings was originally supposed to end with the main character dying of a peanut allergy. (Not-so-funny was an anecdote that Tomine shared about some previous interest in a Shortcomings film: someone said to him that the film about a Japanese-American man facing identity issues would have to be "castable," which is apparently code for with white actors.[3]) The panelists then tackled the topic of autobiography: Brunetti said that everything he's done is autobio, he can't do fiction, and wondered how Clowes and Tomine went about it. Clowes said that, in regards to characters, he picks someone he doesn't like, and then tries to learn to like them; later on, Tomine confessed that, as his creator, he probably liked Ben Tanaka from Shortcomings more than anybody else did in the whole world: he got defensive when Tanaka was criticized. Brunetti said that Joe Matt was happiest when he didn't have to draw for two years, and Clowes said that he feels weird if he doesn't draw for a few days. Brunetti doesn't keep a sketchbook, and Clowes informed the audience that Robert Crumb does months of touch-up before he publishes his. Clowes said that he, personally, wouldn't want other people to see his sketchbook. Kramers Ergot 7 was mentioned: all three artists found working in the format challenging. Clowes was particularly enthusiastic and had turned in his piece before the book was even official; Tomine changed his art supplies. Brunetti asked Clowes about the ways in which the drawing of Natalie, the female lead in Mr. Wonderful, the comic which ran in The New York Times, changed depending on how the main character viewed her: Clowes observed that that was an interesting thing about comics, that you can change the drawing to help the reader empathize with the character's point of view. Eventually the panel opened itself up to questions from the audience: someone asked what their advice would be for someone who was interested in getting into comics. "Don't do it,' joked Brunetti, and then the panel meditated on how it was an entirely different world from when they had started out, and they wouldn't even know how one would go about it these days. Clowes summed it up by saying something to the effect of: only do it if you can't not. One audience member asked about cartooning as it related to the disciplines of literature and art, and Brunetti stated that he liked paper, and composing in a static space. He didn't like the "infinite canvas":"it's finite. Like life." Clowes said that he liked to pare things down as simply as possible. He wanted limits. Tomine said it might not even necessarily be those two disciplines. Brunetti agreed, noting that it's not like writing, but more like editing, or collage, or sculpture, and that ultimately there was nothing like it, it was subliminal. He then remarked on the pleasure of mark-making and likened it to calligraphy, citing something that Charles Schulz had once said about drawing Linus in support. Jason Miles from Fantagraphics asked if the panelists made a distinction between drawing and cartooning, and Tomine said that he's trying to make one, and that he's now trying to do more cartooning. Clowes replied that he's trying to put as little as possible into each panel to make the biggest impact, and it's the difference between visuals versus storytelling. Tomine and Clowes established that, in cartooning, if something is too well drawn or over-rendered, it can kill it. When an audience member made an inquiry into the trios' future projects, Brunetti revealed that his next project was a longer work that would probably have a different title than Schizo. Clowes said that he had only just reread Ghost World for the first time in 10 years, and, while he tries not to over-think things when he's cartooning, he saw that it was deeply personal although he thought it was externalized. Tomine commented that when he looks back on his work, he sees a pathetic need to be liked by an audience, and he tried to get away from that in his last book. The panel also summed up their thoughts on the trend to make the term "graphic novel" distinct from comics: Clowes used to hate it, but he's given up fighting it: Brunetti said pretty much the same, although he added that it made his anus clench. The panel wrapped up by saying that they have nothing against superhero comics, and that [they] were not trying to stop them: Clowes concluded, "They win! We lie down in submission."   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   DRAWN AND QUARTERLY mentioned by The Washington Post Updated October 10, 2008 Drawing Power The Adventures of Prose Guy Prose Guy can no longer ignore a growing force in the publishing universe. It's his day of reckoning with graphic novels' ... drawing power! By Bob Thompson Sunday, August 24, 2008 WASHINGTON POST ..."I hear you're interviewing Adrian Tomine! You're so lucky!" a younger colleague burst out one day. Lucky indeed. I'd never heard of the guy 24 hours before. Tomine turns out to be a gracious, articulate 30-something who has been drawing comics in some form or other since he was 4 or 5 years old. He offers himself as an example of the personality type drawn to "alternative" cartooning -- i.e., work outside the superhero or funny pages mainstream -- before there was money in it. This Story "If you talk to a lot of cartoonists," he says, you'll find "some sort of chaos or unsettled nature to their childhood," be it divorce (as in his case) or just "moving around a lot." Drawing comics "is so clearly some psychological way of taking life and ordering it into little squares that you can control." His latest collection of little squares, "Shortcomings," carries a blurb from novelist Jonathan Lethem that compares Tomine's "mastery of narrative time" to that of short-story goddess Alice Munro. It's a complex fictional stew of relationships and ethnicity, and while I don't quite buy the Munro comparison, I'm captivated nonetheless. Tomine is published by a small but highly regarded Canadian outfit called Drawn & Quarterly, and I soon find myself bingeing on some of their other authors. I find a lot to like. When I ask myself why, however, it's not easy to put the answer into words. Take "Exit Wounds" by Israeli cartoonist Rutu Modan. An improbable love story built around a man's disappearance after a terrorist bombing, its "spare, affecting lines and charged dialogue add up to a tragicomic take on family and identity," according to The Post's reviewer. Fair enough, but most of that description could serve a prose novel just as well. What haunts me is the way Modan's lonely, angry lovers lock gazes across empty distance. Or take Guy Delisle's "Pyongyang," a graphic memoir of his stint as an animator in totalitarian North Korea, and Joe Sacco's "The Fixer," a journalistic portrait of war-traumatized Sarajevo. As best I can tell, what elevates these very different nonfiction accounts are the same things that work in good, first-person prose: sharp-eyed observation, strong storytelling and a narrator who functions as the reader's guide. What seems different is the literal immediacy of the graphic versions. Within seconds, they can pull you into strange worlds. ad_icon At Tomine's suggestion, I read a graphic novel on another subject that I'd never, ever have expected to be addressed in this medium. Chester Brown's "Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography" is a painstaking retelling, complete with footnotes, of the life of a "charismatic, and perhaps mad" 19th-century rebel against the Canadian government. Talk about strange worlds! I'd never encountered Riel before. Brown makes him unforgettable. Mid-binge, I realize that I should be setting aside my Drawn & Quarterly stack in order to prepare for an interview at Pantheon, the mainstream publisher most closely associated with quality graphic novels. My Pantheon to-read pile includes David B.'s "Epileptic," Charles Burns's "Black Hole" and -- on the very top -- Chris Ware's "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth." click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) D+Q At San Diego Comic-con Lynda! Adrian! Rutu! Updated July 7, 2008 Don't miss D+Q at the San Diego Comic-con with 3 special guests! Adrian Tomine, Lynda Barry and Rutu Modan! Oh Yes!   click here to read more Featured artists Adrian Tomine Rutu Modan Lynda Barry            Featured products Exit Wounds Shortcomings (HC) What It Is   ADRIAN TOMINE interviewed about GOODBYE by Newsarama Updated June 11, 2008 Comics Adrian Tomine - Editing and Presenting Tatsumi's Goodbye By Michael C. Lorah NEWSARAMA 2008-06-10 Just as the American comic market is sometimes thought to be strictly a repository of high adventure, pulp-inspired tales of the fantastic, the Japanese manga industry is often thought to be limited to teen-focused shojo or shonen fantasy. Both sides of the Pacific rim, however, shattered this precept in the late 60s with challenging, socially-aware cartoonists who came to make their market on their country's idea of what comics are capable of accomplishing. Yoshihiro Tatsumi coined the phrase gekiga - literally "dramatic pictures" - to describe the revolutionary comics he created at the time. Focused on the social messiness of post-World War II Japan, Tatsumi dug into the scarred national identity of a society that was consumed with pulling itself to the level of an international economic power, regardless of the individual cost paid by its citizens. Good-Bye is the third collection of Tatsumi's early 70s comics, edited and designed by acclaimed cartoonist Adrian Tomine (Shortcomings) and published by Montreal-based Drawn and Quarterly. Adrian Tomine took time to answer questions about Tatsumi's work and impact on the manga field. Newsarama: Adrian, when did you discover Yoshihiro Tatsumi's work? Adrian Tomine: I discovered Tatsumi's work when I was a teenager. It was right around the time that I was losing interest in the comics that I'd grown up reading, and was actively seeking out new things. And Tatsumi's comics were unlike any I'd ever seen before. NRAMA: Good-Bye is the third collection of his work that you've edited. How do you approach that job? Are you selecting which stories to include in the book? AT: Even though I'm billed as the editor, the process is really a collaborative one, involving Mr. Tatsumi himself, his representatives in Japan, and D+Q publisher Chris Oliveros. I think we all have a hand in the process of selecting stories. The most time-consuming part of my contribution is probably the stage at which I sit down with Yuji Oniki's translation and the original Japanese pages, and make panel-by-panel decisions about everything from how the sound effects should be translated to whether or not a panel needs to be "flopped." Finally, I design and lay out the book, which also presents its own set of challenges. I think the ultimate goal is to arrive at a design which is attractive and eye-catching, but also one in which the emphasis is placed squarely on Mr. Tatsumi's work. NRAMA: Do you talk to Mr. Tatsumi about which stories will be in each book? How involved is he in the production of each collection? AT: I think he's involved quite a bit in that he's the one who initially sends us the stories to pick from. I don't know for sure, but I'd imagine that this is like a first round of elimination. NRAMA: In this book, I expect "Hell" and "Good-bye" to garner the most reaction from American audiences, given their focus, respectively, on the aftermath of Hiroshima's bombing and the presence of Ameican G.I.s in Japan, yet I found the somber daily toil of the other stories more moving in some ways. If a curious reader picks up the book and skims a single story for a first impression, which story captures the tenor of Tatsumi's work best in your opinion? AT: The story entitled "Good-Bye" is probably Tatsumi's most well-known work, and I think it's a good representation of many of Tatsumi's skills and stylistic tendencies. Considering how short it is, I think it does a number of amazing balancing acts between quotidian details and larger political issues, sympathy and misanthropy, heart-breaking realism and shocking audacity. He certainly has many stories that lean more heavily in a given direction, and I'm sure there will be readers who will gravitate towards those more pure, concentrated examples, but if I wanted to quickly give someone an overview of Tatsumi's work, "Good-Bye" seems like a good place to start. NRAMA: Adrian, the popular notion of manga in the U.S. seems to be shonen or shojo, with a healthy dollop of fantasy and/or samurai. Do you think that bringing Mr. Tatsumi's work to America is helping to change to the perception of manga, or is it simply a case of bringing good comics to an audience, regardless of their national origin? AT: I think the last part of your question there is a good way of looking at it. Prior to Tatsumi, D+Q hadn't published any Japanese cartooning, and it wasn't like Chris Oliveros called me up and said, "Hey, I want to try to get in on this whole manga trend. Who do you recommend?" I think we both just have an interest in good comics, regardless of their particular style or origin. But that also doesn't negate the first part of your question. I do think that many Americans have a limited view of what constitutes Japanese cartooning based on what gets translated, so it's great to see an increase in diversity. There seems to be a bunch of upcoming projects that will go even further in terms of this, and I couldn't be happier. NRAMA: Yeah, I've been loving some of the recent Osamu Tezuka books. These stories in Good-Bye reflect a very desolate time in Japan's history. Reading them is like voyeuring into a very confused, very conflicted time in history, isn't it? AT: I get the impression that this very quality of Tatsumi's work is what, in many ways, kept the stories from being more widely embraced at the time they were created. He spares no one really, and goes right into some of the darkest areas of the post-War period. And while I think that's a big part of what makes his work so fascinating, it was hard for people to take initially. NRAMA: What feedback have you received on the last two Tatsumi books you edited, The Push Man and Other Stories and Abandon the Old in Tokyo? AT: We were sort of testing the waters with the first book, so the fact that the series has continued is indicative of its success. I was very gratified to see that the books were selling, and to meet people who had enjoyed them. It was particularly heartening to sit beside Mr. Tatsumi at the San Diego Comic-Con and watch his fans line up, ask for sketches, and bow with respect. NRAMA: How has Mr. Tatsumi responded to the feedback from American audiences? AT: We talk about that a little bit in our Q+A at the end of Good-Bye. I think he was honestly surprised and grateful for the warm reception he's received. NRAMA: Are you still expecting to put out another volume of Mr. Tatsumi's work each year? AT: The next project that we're working on now is Mr. Tatsumi's massive autobiography-almost a thousand pages of comics-entitled A Drifting Life. Unlike the three books we've published so far, this is current work, and I think fans and cartoonists alike will be awed by the level of ambition and skill with which Mr. Tatsumi is working, this far into his career. Good-Bye ships in early July, 2008. For more information, visit www.drawnandquarterly.com. click here to read more Featured artists Adrian Tomine Yoshihiro Tatsumi            Featured product Good-Bye SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by World Literature Today Updated May 15, 2008 Shortcomings Shook, David 1 May 2008 World Literature Today Shortcomings, the only graphic novel to have cracked the New York Times Top 100 Books of 2007, is at its core a story that explores the balance-or perhaps the struggle-between individual and collective identity, as its development is challenged by personal failure, the demise of relationships, and the short-lived hope of romance. Tomine's protagonist, Ben Tanaka, is a thirty-year-old Asian American movie theater manager in northern California who, through the course of the story, experiences a series of romantic crises, beginning with his "taking some time off" with long-term girlfriend Miko. Lately, their bickering has increased, and Miko has accused Ben of feeling shame for being Asian. She's also concerned with his affinity for white women, his obsession with "the typical Western media beauty ideal." Miko leaves for New York City, where she tells Ben she has been offered an internship with the Asian-American Independent Film Council. Ben frequently recounts his romantic failures to his best friend, Korean American Alice Kirn, a Ph.D. candidate at Mills College with identity issues of her own. Kim goes to great lengths to hide her otherwise open homosexuality from her parents, even taking Ben on a date to church. When she is later expelled from Mills, she too heads to New York City. After two brief and unsuccessful relationships with white womenthe first challenging the boundaries of personal compatibility and the second highlighting his own insecurities-and with his job temporarily on hold, Ben travels to New York at the behest of Alice, who tells him she's found something that he needs to see. Miko is living with a Japanese-speaking white man (who apparently also studies martial arts), dubbed "rice king" by Ben, who is confused by her double standards. Tomine's drawing is characteristically clean and succinct. His primary characters begin as contemporary stereotypes and evolve toward contemporary humans. Their dialogue is fresh; their banter-especially that between Ben and Alice-is believable and witty: "What if I told you I've already gone out with Autumn twice?" "That girl from the theater? Hello, Mr. Humbert!" "She's twentytwo okay? That's at least as old as your little waitress." Shortcomings asks more questions than it answers, ending without having resolved Ben's problems, but the questions Adrian Tomine asks are important enough to make raising them a noteworthy effort in itself.   Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by London Review of Books Updated April 3, 2008 Into the Eisenshpritz Elif Batuman Life, in Pictures: Autobiographical Stories by Will Eisner Epileptic by David B. Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine Misery Loves Comedy by Ivan Brunetti LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS April 10, 2008 In recent years, the theme of Jewishness has been interestingly appropriated by a new group of graphic novelists: Asian Americans, most notably Gene Luen Yang and Adrian Tomine. For Yang and Tomine, the canonical writer of Jewish assimilation is Babel’s American heir, Philip Roth, who transplanted the sphere of action from war to dating. Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006) relates the adventures of a Chinese boy called Jin Wang who so longs to be attractive to white girls that he manages to sublimate himself into a blond all-American boy called Danny, who is, however, pursued by a monstrous double called ‘cousin Chin-Kee’, a bucktoothed, pigtailed personification of yellow peril stereotypes. Tomine’s Shortcomings, which explores similar issues in a more realistic mode, opens with the protagonist, Ben Tanaka, watching a movie about a Chinese American girl’s evolving relationship with her grandfather: ‘As I stood beside him in his ageing fortune cookie factory . . . I realised that he was very much like the thing he’d spent his life making: a hard, protective shell containing haiku-like wisdom.’ Ben takes no pains to hide his low opinion of both the film and the festival presenting it, which was organised by his girlfriend, Miko, to showcase San Francisco Bay Area Asian American digital filmmakers (‘Didn’t they also have to be left-handed or something?’). Miko accuses Ben of being ‘ashamed to be Asian’; ‘after a movie like that,’ he retorts, ‘I’m ashamed to be human.’ These first pages display Tomine’s strengths: exquisite draftsmanship, witty repartee and a pitch-perfect ear for the well-intentioned nonsense produced by youthful idealism; it is hard not to admire that ‘ageing fortune cookie factory’. Also in evidence, however, is the profound unlikeability of all Tomine’s characters, who are distributed between two unappealing camps: sarcastic misanthropes (Ben) and humourless cliché-mongers (Miko). In the next pages, Miko, exasperated by Ben’s anti-Asianness (at one point she finds a DVD in his desk called Sapphic Sorority and is appalled that it features only white women), decides to spend the summer in New York. Alone in Berkeley, Ben embarks on the time-honoured Rothian quest of bedding the shiksa. Step one: the oversexed intellectual must mock the shiksa for some manifestation of Wasp frivolity. It isn’t long before Ben finds himself in the apartment of a blonde ‘performance artist’, whose walls are covered by Polaroids of her urine-filled toilet bowl. ‘I wake up every morning, go pee, then take a picture . . . Patterns start to emerge . . . like when I’m dehydrated, or when I get my period . . . it’ll be a huge installation someday.’ ‘That’s pretty amazing,’ Ben says. The pee-installation is, presumably, evidence of Tomine’s deft comic touch. But the only humour Ben draws from the situation is the mordant recognition of his own shallowness: for a chance to score with a white girl, he really was willing to feign interest in this vulgar pseudo-art: ‘My superficiality could’ve overpowered my snobbery.’ Step two: self-congratulation. ‘The eagle has landed,’ Ben announces, with the deed accomplished. Like a Roth protagonist, Ben does not hesitate to communicate to the shiksa how pleased he is with himself, as one of his kind, to be dating one of her kind. When Ben and the white girlfriend pass some Asian teenagers in the street, Ben insists that one of the boys was staring at them in ‘white-girl envy’. ‘Now if he had been with a white girl too,’ Ben continues, ‘we would’ve given each other the sign . . . kind of like a covert “high five”.’ Tomine doesn’t leave out the penis envy, either. Where Portnoy’s ‘circumcised little dong . . . shrivels up in veneration’ when confronted with an actual shiksa, Ben suffers the even worse plight of being an Asian man and thus having an irremediably small penis. This is the subject of three pages of sporadically entertaining back talk between Ben and his best friend, Alice (‘How small are we talking here? Like, in inches? . . . Your refusal to answer only damns you further!’). Meanwhile in New York, the hypocritical Miko turns out to have been having a fling with a white guy, whom she perversely defends against charges of whiteness: ‘He’s half Jewish, half Native American.’ Ben scoffs at this – ‘That’s hilarious! Is that what he put on his college application?’ – and indeed Shortcomings works in part by deflating American Jews’ continued status as cultural outsiders. From Ben’s perspective, Jews, half-Jews and half-Native Americans are all just white people. Where David B. makes sense of his own feelings of alienation by ‘becoming Jewish’, Tomine’s characters set out to knock Jewishness off its pedestal. In the four decades since Portnoy’s Complaint, Tomine implies, the battleground of erotic assimilation has been relocated. Nowhere is this clearer than when Ben and Alice, having arrived in New York to spy on Miko, take the subway to Brooklyn. Alice points elatedly at the Brooklyn Bridge: ‘Doesn’t it make you feel like you’re in some nostalgic movie about being Jewish or something?’ Alice is happy to feel her life intersecting with the set of a ‘nostalgic’ Woody Allen movie, because the American Jewish narrative offers a chance to fit her own idiosyncratic and often uncomfortable personal experience into an already meaningful story – one which, moreover, has a built-in happy ending. From the perspective of Ben or Alice, the Jewish assimilation narrative is especially powerful because its practitioners have by now been so seamlessly integrated into mainstream American culture. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by The Japan Times Updated March 20, 2008 SHORTCOMINGS by Adrian Tomine DAVID COZY THE JAPAN TIMES Sunday, Dec. 30, 2007 JAPANESE ENOUGH? Certain 'connotations' of Asian Americans Comic books are respectable enough now that it is no longer necessary to attempt to burnish their image by renaming them "graphic novels." Neither is it necessary to remind readers that comics can be art and, as such, can be as rewarding (or dull) as paintings, novels and songs. We can move beyond such fretting to consider more interesting questions such as one that is sure to arise for those readers who purged illustrated books from their libraries at about the same time they boxed up their baseball cards and Barbie dolls. The question that will nag at those who have spent the bulk of their lives deciphering unadorned text is: How does one read a comic book? Clearly, racing through the words does not do justice to the pictures, and just as clearly, focusing overmuch on the illustrations can hobble the narrative's momentum. Adrian Tomine's excellent "Shortcomings" gives us an opportunity to consider how text and visuals work together, and how we might best process the two components of this, and other, comics. The story Tomine tells in "Shortcomings" is one that could be (and has been) told in other forms. A precis of the narrative — depressed and cynical sad sack loses his love interest and ends up with nothing — could, one is certain, fit any number of the short stories churned out by graduates of America's better writing programs. For two reasons, however, Tomine's tale does not read like a rehash of something we have paged through several times before. The first is that, into the sexual politics at which his young Berkeley Bohemians play, Tomine injects the issue of race. The depressed and cynical protagonist is a Japanese-American, Ben Tanaka, with a Japanese-American girlfriend, Miko Hayashi. Their relationship is disintegrating, in part because of Ben's relentless negativity, but also because of his attraction to white women and his ambivalence about being Asian. As one enjoys Tomine's unflinching examination of this disintegration one begins to see that it is not only the racial politics that makes his work new; it is the manner in which he illustrates — literally — his take on how those racial politics affect Asian-Americans. We read, for example, Tomine's spot on rendering of the sort of argument lovers falling out of love are apt to have. Leaving a film festival that Miko has helped to organize, the "Asian-American Digi-Fest," she and Ben move out of the dark theater and into the light of the lobby, light rendered as the white that comes to dominate the panels. Moving into the black of the night, they argue about the film that took first prize, and soon the quarrel turns personal. "Why does everything have to be some 'big statement' about race? Don't any of these people just want to make a movie that's good?" Ben wonders. Miko responds: "God, you drive me crazy sometimes. It's almost like you're ashamed to be Asian." "After a movie like that," Ben answers, "I'm ashamed to be human!" What we may not notice on our first pass through "Shortcomings," but will certainly feel, is that the darkness — the percentage of each frame given over to black — increases with the bitterness of the words. Though the dialogue is well written, the content of the scene borders on the banal: who hasn't read accounts of, or been involved in, similar spats? It is Tomine's skill in combining the words with differing quantities of light and dark that revivifies what could, in less capable hands, be a tired situation. Also impressive is the manner in which Tomine brings us to understand who his characters are entirely through their words, their actions, and the way in which they are drawn. In dispensing with explanatory panels hovering at the edges of his frames, Tomine makes his readers do some work, but those willing to fill in gaps for themselves will soon understand that Ben, though we may agree with him about the badness of a certain strain of overly earnest filmmaking, is, in his lack of self-awareness, a far from attractive figure. Though Miko may have her own problems, we don't, in the end, blame her for leaving him. That she does so for a white man is, of course, too much for Ben to take. "When you see a white guy with an Asian girl, it has certain . . . connotations," he believes, and the connotations are not, for him, positive ones. We recall his lament early in the book about people turning everything into "some big statement about race," and understand that he is as guilty of this as anyone, unable, as he is, to see people as individuals rather than representatives of their races. In his narrow-mindedness he brings to mind those benighted folks who won't read comic books because doing so, they worry, might have . . . certain connotations.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   ADRIAN TOMINE event mentioned by blog Updated February 28, 2008 MONDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2008 It's a Small World Department: Adrian Tomine in Mile End Mary Soderstorm RECREATING EDEN I thought the name was familiar when I checked the masthead in The New Yorker to see who had done the brilliant cover, Shelf Life. “Adrian Tomine” said something to me, as the saying around here goes. And then when I was running errands on the weekend I saw the posters again. The neighborhood is plastered for his reading and appearance tonight (Tuesday, February 25) at the Drawn and Quarterly Bookstore, 211 Bernard West (two blocks east of Park Avenue.) What I hadn’t put together is that Tomine is published by Drawn and Quarterly Press, an edgy and quite successful graphica publisher based in Montreal. It opened the bookstore about 18 months on the edge of Mile End. (There are now three independent bookstore in a two block area: besides D + Q, the excellent used bookstore S.W. Welch and the delightful French librairie L’Écume des jours are on the street south, Saint-Viateur.) Tomine will be at D + Q at 7 p.m. tonight. Thursday February 28, he’ll be in Cambridge, MA at 6 p.m. in the Brattle Theater, an event co-sponsored with Harvard Bookstore. Then it’s on to Providence, RI on Friday, February 29, at 7:00 PM. in the Rhode Island School of Design auditorium . The week following he’ll be in Washington, D.C, on Wednesday, March 5, at 7:00 PM. at Politics & Prose. That's terrific. With that kind of interest his books are likely to have a good, long shelf life, and are unlikely to end up being burned as in his New Yorker cover, or at S.W. Welch. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) ADRIAN TOMINE interviewed by Bostonist Updated February 28, 2008 FEBRUARY 28, 2008 Adrian Tomine has no "Short(er)comings" Adrian Tomine, 6pm ($5) Killer of Sheep, 8pm ($12, $10 Brattle members) Brattle Theatre Special $15 ticket gets you into both events! BOSTONIST.COM Perhaps best known for his graphic series Optic Nerve, some of which was collected in the book Summer Blonde, artist Adrian Tomine recently came out with a full-length graphic novel called Shortcomings--and even more recently drew a rad cover for the New Yorker (pictured right). The longer novel format gave Tomine more room to explore important issues like race, relationships, East Coast vs. West Coast, film festival pretensions, and personal insecurities. While main character Ben is insufferable at times, his relationship issues will ring true to, well, pretty much anyone who's ever been in a relationship. Tomine will talk about Shortcomings at the Brattle tonight, and his talk will be followed by a screening of the acclaimed film Killer of Sheep. Shot on location in Watts, Killer of Sheep was an authentic low-budget film that's acquired quite a reputation over the years and was even selected as one of the 100 essential films of all time by the National Society of Film Critics. Like Tomine's work, the movie makes few proclamations, just depicts the world as it is--good and bad. We asked Adrian Tomine a couple of questions about himself and his work in Shortcomings. Read his answers after the jump. Do you see yourself as having many similarities to Ben, the main male character in Shortcomings? How so? We have the same glasses, and some of the same food allergies, but that's it. Absolutely no other similarities. None at all. (Especially since most reviews of the book point out how extremely unlikeable Ben is!) Do you view relationships in a racialized way as Ben does? Some of his comments about white women are pretty intense. Do you think his perspective is common? When I set out to write this book, it was important to me that I try my best to avoid anything that seemed like me, as a person, getting up on my soapbox and pontificating. I didn't set out to affect people's views in any specific way, other than, perhaps, to bring a variety of points of view to light, and do it in a somewhat entertaining way. And when I get asked questions like this, I'm afraid it runs the risk of obliterating my goals with the book. But suffice to say, I don't think any of Ben's views, regardless of one's opinion of them, are uncommmon or unheard of. Geography plays a major role in Shortcomings, with two characters giving up San Francisco for New York and one returning to SF alone. Was this intentional and/or reflective of your personal situation? I'm sorry if I sound like a broken record here, but my own personality and my own personal circumstances aren't really that important to one's reading of the book. I think it would be great if people could just approach this book as a straight work of fiction, without any real consideration of the person who created it. Maybe that's asking the impossible, I don't know. How much of a role do you think place plays in your narratives? The "settings" feature on the Drawn & Quarterly site is great. Does place play a significantly larger role in graphic novels because of the visual element? There were certain stylistic rules that imposed on myself for this book, and that included the rules of "no narration" and "no thought balloons" (both of which, I think, I'd relied on too heavily in the past). And to make a corny analogy here, I found that by taking away some of my tools, I had to make the remaining ones work that much harder. So what ended up happening is I drew this story in a fairly precise, detailed, and realistic style, which allowed me to convey things like characters' emotions and scene settings without words. The use of specific settings also helped me in the writing of the book. It was somehow easier to envision the scenes if I had an actual location in mind. In terms of comics or "graphic novels" in general, I wouldn't say there's any hard and fast rules about the significance of setting. Some of my favorite comics (like "Peanuts," for example) use setting very minimally, and obviously I wouldn't have it any other way. The end of Shortcomings seems to leave the book open to a sequel--is that a possibility? What are some positive and negative aspects of working with the same characters again and again? Yeah, everyone should keep an eye out for the sequel, "Shortercomings." And then if there's enough "consumer demand," I'll make it a trilogy with a third book entitled "Shortestcomings." In all seriousness...no, I don't think it's a story that needs to be continued. I know a lot of people find it kind of inconclusive, but I don't know if more of it would satisfy those people. I spent about five years working in a very prescribed, consistent manner on this book, so I'm really enjoying doing other things now. Ben works in a movie theatre and seems to think this is just as legitimate a way to be involved in movies as making them would be. What's your perspective on the role of the critics vs. the creator? Oh, that's a big can of worms, and obviously I'm approaching it from a fairly partisan angle. I guess in an ideal world, the term "critic" might refer more exclusively to someone like Lawrence Wechsler or Greil Marcus...extremely smart, erudite, and obsessive writers who spend more time illuminating and explicating works of art that they find interesting. I think in general people tend to take critics too seriously, give them too much credit. Especially in the internet era. Too much credence is given to people who, without this technology, would have no platform for their opinions, except for maybe carrying around a sandwich board on the street. And I should make it clear that I'm not trying to tear down the critics themselves...obviously everyone should be entitled to express their opinions, but like I said, I think the general public, and artists themselves, should take a lot of that with a bigger grain of salt. I always think it's funny when people say, "But I like reading reviews so I don't waste my money on a bad movie" or book or whatever. But then if you compare the reviews for a movie like "Jumper" with it's opening weekend box office, then it's pretty clear that most people either ignore reviews or even actively disobey them. On a related note, would you like to adapt any of your work into a movie? Have you seen Persepolis? Any thoughts? I'm not opposed to the idea of adapting my work to film, but it's not the reason why I made the comic, nor was it really on my mind at all during the process. Beyond that, I should probably remain tight-lipped on the topic. There you have it, folks--Adrian and Ben are basically the same dude, Shortcomings will someday be a trilogy, and you can expect a movie this Christmas season. In all seriousness, though, expect some entertaining, incisive commentary and a brilliant movie at the Brattle tonight, if you go.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   ADRIAN TOMINE EVENT mentioned by The Weekly Dig Updated February 28, 2008 [words] SHORTCOMINGS A graphic mystery of human desire By Cara Bayles THE WEEKLY DIG Adrian Tomine (of Optic Nerve fame) makes gestures to graphic novels' origins. Like his predecessors Will Eisner and Frank Miller, he borrows from the film noir tradition with his stark black and white illustrations, his choice of settings (bars, empty apartments, movie theaters, and alleys in New York and San Francisco), and his miserable antihero, Ben Tanaka. But the mystery of Shortcomings isn't a murder or a jewel heist; it's what makes Ben tick. Ben, a 30-year-old theater manager of Japanese heritage constantly quarrels with his girlfriend, Miko, about pretty much everything. He's snarky and unsupportive, and Miko suspects he has a thing for white women. The more we watch Ben stumble through romantic relationships, the uglier attraction becomes. The comic drops a heap of political identity buzzwords—assimilation, fetishization, white-washing, coming-out—but manages to do so in ways that are intrinsic to the plot, so it never reaches the level of polemic. Rather than telling you that the personal and the political are inextricably linked, Tomine shows it through raw character action that explores the strings that tie people together, and how fragile those knots are. ADRIAN TOMINE THU. 2.28.08 THE BRATTLE THEATRE 40 BRATTLE ST. CAMBRIDGE HARVARD SQ. 617.876.6837 6PM/$5 BRATTLEFILM.ORG click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) ADRIAN TOMINE EVENT mentioned by the Hour Updated February 22, 2008 February 21st, 2008 Adrian Tomine inspires comics overview Shortcomings and long views Isa Tousignant THE HOUR Comic star Adrian Tomine comes to town to talk, and inspires an overview of recent local comic production Guess who's coming to town? It's our favourite self-hating hipster! Or at least that's what critics would have us believe. As soon as I got comic artist Adrian Tomine on the phone from Brooklyn, I had to ask the author of the recently released, incredibly popular and critically acclaimed graphic novel Shortcomings about this line in the press release for his upcoming talk at the Drawn & Quarterly Bookstore: "He'll be presenting a slide show that confronts his critics who accused him of 'hiding' his racial identity behind his glasses." Huh? "Ha ha! It's because for a long time when I used to draw autobiographical stories and I used to draw myself as a character, I'd draw myself with glasses that were just sort of opaque, empty and white", he says. "There was a lot of silly conjecture that I was maybe trying to disguise my own features. So in the slide show I go through a history of that in cartooning, going all the way back to Robert Crumb and even Charles Schultz - when he drew this character Marcie she just had these opaque little round glasses. That's just a starting point." Tomine - who's Japanese American, by the way - has made work intertwined with autobiography since the start of his equally famous Optic Nerve series. With Shortcomings, though, his first long-format work, he tried to move away from the genre - a bit. "It's probably the least directly autobiographical thing that I've done, though it's such a slippery term. It doesn't directly transcribe events or characters or dialogue from my real life in the way that other stories I've done have. But it's hard for me to think of any sort of fiction that isn't somehow personal, or somehow autobiographical. Though Shortcomings may seem like the most autobiographical, to people who know a bit about me. But that's a sleight of hand." What else can we expect from the event? General info about how Shortcomings came about, as well as more technical details about Tomine's working process, the process of laying out the pages and designing the book, as well as a Q&A period and a signing. Don't miss it. DRAWING DEEPER Speaking of recent comic production, you should check these out too, most (if not all) of which are purchasable at D+Q: Fire Away, by Chris von Szombathy The latest in D+Q's delightful Petits Livres series, this page-popping colour minibook reveals a Vancouver artist whose goofy, pop aesthetic is a pleasure to discover, here for the first time in print. Though transporting in a creatively populated, anthropomorphic, Bell-ish way, I was left searching for content that was more than simply aesthetic. Milk Teeth, by Julie Morstad Another Vancouverite's Petit Livre, this delicate book by Morstad is like a lesson in fine etching. The sophistication and refinement of her style are undoubtedly what have made her a popular commercial illustrator around the country. As a book, it's a little jewel that would make the perfect gift to someone with heightened sensibilities. Paul Goes Fishing, by Michel Rabagliati This latest translation by D+Q of one of Quebec's top-selling artists is a guaranteed good read, in classic Rabagliati fashion - there's a signature Frenchness and a calming familiarity about all of Paul's Montreal-based adventures that make them a distinct pleasure to consume. They don't reinvent the wheel, but who needs to drive anywhere when life's about fishing? Albert and the Others, by Guy Delisle Delisle has created politically charged work in the past, which may be what gives this, and its predecessor Aline and the Others, its incomparable bite. These 30-panel, wordless comics about the trials and tribulations of being a man (Aline was about women) are sharper and funnier than you'd imagine possible.   click here to read more Featured artists Adrian Tomine Julie Morstad Chris von Szombathy            Featured products Shortcomings (HC) Milk Teeth Fire Away   SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by The McGill Daily Updated February 21, 2008 The end of something Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel Shortcomings offers a quirky, stylized portrait of a relationship in disrepair By Simon Lewsen The McGill Daily Thursday, February 21st, 2008 Ben Tanaka is the ultimate killjoy. He ruins heartfelt goodbyes. He laughs out loud in movie theaters during sappy moments. He interrupts casual conversations at parties with angry, irrelevant tirades. He’s not emotional enough when emotion is warranted and too emotional when it isn’t. It’s no wonder that his girlfriend Miko has doubts about their future together. Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel Shortcomings chronicles the final days of Ben and Miko’s relationship. The characters undergo the worst kind of break up – that is, the prolonged, awkward, reluctant kind. Miko is confused. She is conciliatory at times and despondent at others. Ben responds to her pessimism with characteristic anger, but he is impervious to her attempts at reconciliation. Were Ben a more sensitive, accomodating character he might be able to save the relationship. He doesn’t. The story follows a narrative trajectory that anybody familiar with Tennessee Williams will recognize. It begins badly and gets progressively worse. The final chapter is quietly devastating. But for all of its bleakness, Shortcomings is a remarkably pleasing read. It is similar, in this sense, to Noah Baumbach’s 2005 film The Squid and the Whale. Baumbach provides a swift, brutal depiction of a family in the process of falling apart. Scenes of harsh realism are punctuated, however, with quirky one-liners, comically awkward conversations, and beautiful super-8 montages of the brownstone houses in Brooklyn. The film’s charm successfully outweighs, or at least dilutes, its sadness. The same can be said for Shortcomings. Tomine works well with day-to-day banter. He has a sharp ear for dialogue and a penchant for humour. His drawings are compelling and precise. To call him a realist, however, would be to undermine the subtle magic of his work. Tomine’s subjects are far from being caricatures, but they are depicted with a slightly overstated, cartoonist’s touch. Tomine aims to capitalize on the strengths of the graphic novel form, while also adhering to its limitations. “I think a lot of cartoonists are trying hard to replicate the feeling of sensory overload one gets at the movies” he says. “It is more useful to focus on the qualities that are inherent to the comic book medium.” Tomine contends that, while movies immerse the viewer in a fictional world, graphic novels offer a more restrained, participatory form of storytelling. Comics operate on a strange time scheme. Individual frames appear as frozen snapshots, but they are not. Narrative time actually passes within the space of a single image: one character speaks, and then another responds. It is testament to Tomine’s brilliance that, when reading his book, one finds oneself envisioning the characters’ movements with a remarkable degree of specificity and assurance. Filling in the pictorial gaps is part of what makes Shortcomings fun. However, grappling with the work’s thematic omissions can be a bit more frustrating. For instance, the book takes a notably distanced stance on racial issues. Tomine, who is a fourth-generation Japanese-American, has faced pressure from journalists to comment on race in his work. “For a long time, critics have wanted me to get on a soapbox and say things that we can all agree on” says Tomine. “I wanted a story that would satisfy that desire to a certain degree, but also frustrate it.” When dealing with race, Shortcomings is more faltering than declamatory. Issues are broached, only to be sidestepped with cute one-liners or overshadowed by more immediate narrative concerns. Tomine isn’t concerned with grandiose analytical statements; rather, he’s interested in the messy, convoluted role that race plays in his character’s daily interactions. In one particularly memorable scene, Miko discovers Ben’s hidden porn stash. She is upset because “all of the girls are white.” Ben defends himself, with characteristic insensitivity, by appealing to the facts: “That’s not true. Look…there’s a, uh, Latina girl in this one.” The conversation that follows is so patently childish that it would be absurd to read it as social criticism. The real issue at hand is Ben and Miko, and their seemingly endless ability to talk on without ever reaching resolutions. In fact, resolutions are persistently absent in Shortcomings. The book’s first two chapters are set in The Bay Area, while the third and final act takes place in New York. I won’t reveal exactly what happens there, but I will say that the book ends with the image of Ben on a lonely return flight across the continent. He stares apprehensively out of the window as the airport control tower recedes into the distance. The scene calls to mind a similar East-West sojourn at the opening of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. In the novel, Hollywood producer Monroe Stahr travels across the southwestern desert towards Los Angeles, and experiences a similar combination of insecurity and expectancy. One never finds out precisely what happens to Stahr since Fitzgerald died before completing the novel. Shortcomings is similarly incomplete; however, unlike Fitzgerald, Tomine’s omission is deliberate. “I was consciously avoiding a typical resolution,” says Tomine. “We don’t know what will happen to Ben beyond this, we just know that this chapter in Ben’s life is over. We know that life will go on, but we’re not quite sure how.” This is, undoubtably, a fitting ending. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) ADRIAN TOMINE interviewed by The Phoenix Updated February 21, 2008 RACE AND ROMANCE Adrian Tomine’s graphic identity By KRISTINA WONG February 20, 2008 THE PHOENIX Show and tell: Adrian Tomine gets it together. By Mike Miliard Ben Tanaka is a pessimistic Japanese-American slacker with a penchant for blond Caucasian women and a deteriorating relationship with his Asian-American activist girlfriend, Miko. The ensuing identity crisis is played out in Shortcomings (Drawn & Quarterly, 104 pages, $19.95), a refreshing graphic-novel take on racial relationships and failed expectations by highly regarded cartoonist/artist Adrian Tomine. You may recognize Tomine’s clean yet highly stylistic illustrations from the New Yorker or Rolling Stone, but this is his first attempt — and a successful one — at long-form narrative. We caught up with Tomine and picked his brain about Shortcomings as he prepared for an upcoming appearance at the Brattle Theatre. Why did you choose to write and illustrate this race-related story? What gave you the idea? For years, since I’ve been professionally doing comics, I’ve received a lot of questions and criticism about the avoidance of doing these topics. I found the implication disconcerting that if you belong to any minority group, that should be your focus. I resisted that expectation and tried to establish myself as a Japanese cartoonist, but the queries planted the idea of the book. I’m not on a soapbox and launching into affirming people’s beliefs, so it’s sort of a balancing act of handling the topical issue without interfering with the flow. The emphasis is on the storytelling. What would you say about yourself and your work for those readers who have never heard of you or Shortcomings? When working on this book, I wanted the story to reach readers not intimately familiar with the conventions and intricacies of reading comic books. I grew up reading comic books. I wanted to be a minimalist in terms of style, and want the focus to rest on content, the way someone would see a movie and not remark about the camera angles. I had in mind this was the reader’s first time reading a graphic novel. What can readers expect from you at your Cambridge appearance? Fun. I have a PowerPoint slide show about the genesis of this book and how I constructed the pages. Then a bit of a Q&A, book signing, and to liven things up, the theater will be screening Killer of Sheep, directed by Charles Burnett, afterward. Can you tell me who influenced you most artistically? I have many, but one lifelong influence would have to be Charles Schulz and Peanuts. . . . There’s nothing, culturally speaking, I can enjoy the same way.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by The Phoenix Updated February 21, 2008 SHOW AND TELL Adrian Tomine gets it together By MIKE MILIARD February 20, 2008 3:50:02 PM THE PHOENIX I’d never really had a crush on a drawing before. But when I began reading Adrian Tomine several years ago, I started falling for ’em left and right. The sure hand with which he drafts his female characters —limpid, kohl-smudged eyes, button noses, wisps of hair — makes them hard to resist. His black-and-white world is populated by a plethora of indie kids and hipsters: svelte girls with short bobs and barrettes, sensitive guys in Dickies and V-neck sweaters. They’re all rendered in a crisp, clean line style — influenced by predecessors like Daniel Clowes and Los Bros Hernandez and the spare, precise, and dynamic elegance of Japanese manga. As illustrations, they’re gorgeous. But in Shortcomings (Drawn & Quarterly) — his first long-form graphic novel, collected from three recent installments of his long-running comic Optic Nerve — Tomine parlays his skills as a draftsman into fleshed-out characters. Ben Tanaka, a 30-year-old Bay Area movie-theater manager, sort of looks like Tomine. It’s doubtful that the artist himself is as crabby, cynical, and hyper-critical as his pen-and-ink protagonist. But the two do share some traits. Both have peanut allergies. Both (to judge by Ben’s ceaseless pining and the reams of drawings in Tomine’s 2004 Scrapbook) are rather girl-besotted. And both are Japanese-American men sussing out the tricky emotional and psychosexual undercurrents of that identity. Ben’s raven-haired girlfriend, Miko, is a stunner: smart and sexy. But while she’s busy programming Asian-American digital-film festivals, he’s distant and aloof, his eye drawn to Autumn, his blonde, tomboyish performance-artist co-worker. This doesn’t escape Miko’s notice — and neither does the fact that the porn actresses in the Sapphic Sorority DVD she confiscates from Ben are all white. When Miko jets off to an internship in New York City, Ben is to left to his own devices in Berkeley. And things get complicated quick. (As they do, his funny, revealing heart-to-hearts with Alice, his lesbian Korean-American friend, are especially rewarding.) As Ben’s sense of self is thrown into turmoil, Tomine handles the personal-political push-pull with funny, self-depreciating honesty. He also deals smartly with Asian stereotypes. When Ben pretends to be Alice’s date as they visit a gathering of her Korean kin, she snaps: “All Asians might look the same to you, but my family would spot your Japanese ass a mile away.” In another scene (presaging a brutal break-up after a brief fling), Ben, admitting that “stereotypes don’t just materialize out of thin air,” repeats a bad joke: “What’s the main difference between Asian and Caucasian men? The cauc.” In his early comics (he started drawing Optic Nerve as a teenager in high school), Tomine didn’t draw eyes on his obviously autobiographical character, just a pair of empty-framed glasses. But as he insisted to the Believer this past fall, “I certainly wasn’t consciously hiding my identity.” He did feel faced with a false choice, however, either “to make race a non-issue and deny its impact on life” or “to be like some politically active guy carrying big placards, making giant pronouncements about political issues and injustice.” Lucky for us, he realized there was a more subtle gray territory to be explored on his black-and-white pages. “At a certain point, I realized that it’s not some binary set of options. There’s a lot of area in between to be mined.” click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by Epoch Times Updated January 31, 2008 Tomine's Latest is No Shortcoming Book review: Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine By Mitchell Jordan Special to the Epoch Times Jan 31, 2008 There's a world of difference between a comic book and a novel, but Adrian Tomine has managed to blend both mediums together in his latest work, Shortcomings. Tomine is best-known for his comic book series, Optic Nerve, though he has also been published in The New Yorker and Esquire . Shortcomings is no less thought-provoking than these efforts; but it does differ in that it is his longest narrative to date. It tells the story of Ben, a 30-year-old theatre manager and his disintegrating relationship with partner, Miko, as she leaves Brooklyn to pursue a career in the bright lights of New York. Exploring issues of race and ethnic heritage along with the vicissitudes of being in love, it is a work that will resonate with people of most ages and backgrounds. Cinematic and voyeuristic, Tomine's stills are, quite literally, picture perfect and completely absorbing. What is perhaps most remarkable is that someone so gifted at drawing should be likewise talented with words. Moving between acerbic and satirical, emotive and honest, the dialogue exchanged between characters flows freely and effortlessly. As characters, both Ben and Miko can be a little hedonistic, and the way they treat one another is often less than amorous; but it is, however, an accurate reflection of the pains of relationships. And because Tomine's narrative is so firmly grounded in reality, readers would be foolish to wish for happy endings – which is not to say that this book is depressing or dispiriting to read. Rather than being didactic or moralistic, Tomine has instead created a unique framework by which to see ourselves. He is truly a talent to keep an eye on.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   ADRIAN TOMINE interviewed by Mother Jones Updated January 17, 2008 Adrian Tomine Interviewed By Kiera Butler January 11, 2008 MOTHER JONES The Real Adrian Tomine ARTS: The Optic Nerve cartoonist talks about his new graphic novel, his nosy fans, and the joys of not having to draw posters for horrible bands. Adrian Tomine is not Ben Tanaka. There. I've cleared up the confusion once and for all. Adrian Tomine is a cartoonist and illustrator, and Ben Tanaka is the protagonist of Tomine's acclaimed comic book series, Optic Nerve. Now don't get me wrong—the two have a few things in common: Tanaka and Tomine are in their 30s (Tanaka is 30, and Tomine is 33, to be precise), and they're both Japanese American men. Tanaka and his friends live in Berkeley; Tomine lived in there for 15 years before moving to New York last year. But that's pretty much where the similarities end. While Tanaka is cantankerous, Tomine comes off as upbeat and friendly. Tanaka suffers from major career inertia, but Tomine—with 11 issues of Optic Nerve, three other collections, a recently published graphic novel called Shortcomings, and a good number of New Yorker covers and illustrations under his belt—is ambitious and prolific, to say the least. Yet some fans still have a hard time distinguishing fact from fiction. "There's this whole notion of people wanting me to be a lifelong depressive loner or something," says Tomine. The probable cause for their confusion: The world he's created in Shortcomings (which is actually issues 8-11 of Optic Nerve) just seems so real. And in many cases, that's because it is: The restaurants, bars, and cafés where the action takes place are mostly based on real places. And the characters—confused Ben Tanaka, his identity-politics-obsessed girlfriend Miko Hayashi, and his sassy best friend Alice Kim—seem like people you know, too. Tomine works hard to make it that way. "I think there are a lot of things that if my neighbors had any interest in peering into my studio window they would be shocked to see," he says. "I'm just sitting here alone all day, but my lips are moving because I'm saying dialogue out loud, and I'm making poses and expressions in mirrors and stuff to get those things worked out." I talked to Tomine about the pros and cons of drawing super-realistic comics, his confused fans, and the real-life inspiration for a recent New Yorker cover. Mother Jones: How are you liking New York? Adrian Tomine: I like it. I was in the same area of Berkeley for about 15 years, so I was sort of happy to have some change in my life for sure. I feel like an outsider here, and I'm always pointing things out to native New Yorkers that I think are weird about this place and their culture and all that. But I feel like my friends and family from California feel like I've totally "become a New Yorker." MJ: I think there are some real cultural differences between New York and California. AT: The West Coast seems so much more sensitive and politically correct. Not in a bad way, just attuned to that kind of thing. These words are so dangerous, but I see ignorance out here. I don't mean that they're morons, but they just don't realize certain words are offensive to people. MJ: Like what? AT: In California, you would get into a lot of trouble if you referred to a person as Oriental. MJ: Have you really heard that in New York? AT: Oh yeah. MJ: What about your work? Optic Nerve is pretty deeply rooted in Berkeley. Can we expect to see more New York? Or are you going to have to take research trips back to Berkeley? AT: I'm not exactly sure. There's a part of me that feels like it gets really frustrating to keep working in the manner that I made the book Shortcomings, where everything is pretty accurate to the real world. It gets kind of obsessive, and there's a part of me that's like, gosh, it must be really fun for these guys who just draw wizards and trolls running around forests, where it's all made up and nothing matters. MJ: The locations aren't the only thing that seems super-realistic about Optic Nerve. The dialogue does, too. I wondered whether you take it from real life—whether it's part of conversations you've had with your friends. AT: In my earlier work, which was a lot more autobiographical, it was a lot easier for me to do that. I could just build a story around transcribing an actual dialogue or experience. With this book, which is a lot more fictional, I didn't have that luxury, to sort of fall back on all real conversations and experiences. But I still have to be able to hear it or envision it in a real setting. MJ: A lot of people have said that Optic Nerve is about racial and ethnic identity, but it seems to me that it's more about identity politics, specifically the fact that identity politics are interesting and important to some people and totally annoying to others. AT: I think you're onto something there. There's a lot of Asian stuff and the convergence between white and Asian cultures, but that specificity comes from my own experience, and I could have plugged different details into the story had I come from a different background, and I think it still would have worked. It has more to do with identity in general, and also not the specific ethnicities or the politics, but the ways in which people tend to confuse those with their more base desires or their own selfish needs, and how sometimes you can dress them up in fancier political terms to justify it. MJ: It also seems to be about how people connect with each other and what sorts of issues people connect on. Ben Tanaka has a really tough time with that. He's not the only comic book hero who's that way—isolationist protagonists who have a hard time connecting are sort of a tradition. Why do you think that is? AT: There's a pretty common character trait, and it's really well documented in the documentary Crumb, of using the act of drawing as a shield against the real world and a substitution for social interaction. I'm not quite as bitten by that bug as some of these other guys are because I am actually gripped even more by self-consciousness than by the need to draw or the fear of interacting with people. I look at some of these people's sketchbooks like R. Crumb or Chris Ware, and these guys are in a different world from me. I draw kind of more as a means to an end, whereas R. Crumb has thousands of pages of place-mat drawings. He goes out to restaurants and draws on place mats, while I'm just focused on the food. MJ: The comics world has definitely shifted toward graphic novels. Why do you think that is? AT: A lot of it has to do with the physical mechanics of getting this material into people's hands. There was a long time when comic book publishers, including my own, were trying to set up racks for comic books, but it just was not going to happen. I think that even if it's taking a bunch of issues of a superhero comic and reprinting them with a spine, you're going to sell a lot more copies. That sort of clicked in the minds of the public. The weird made-up marketing term of "graphic novel" suddenly seemed to make more sense, like, "Oh, they're like books, but they're in comic form." As a result, that way of selling comics packaged as books has really taken off, and the old way, selling them as saddle-stitched magazines, has taken a hit. I can't complain too much because I've definitely benefited from that change, so overall it was a positive thing, but I do feel bad for comic book shop owners, and it's sad to see that old format pretty much disappear. MJ: You started out just doing comics, but recently I've seen more and more of your stuff in The New Yorker. Was it hard to go from comics to illustrations? AT: Initially I got into the whole world of illustration more out of financial need than anything else. I was always very torn when there was a lot of money being offered to promote something like a band or a movie that I didn't care for. I felt like for most people, they don't pay illustrations any mind, but if there's just one fan of my comic who sees it and thinks, "Oh, well he must really like this band," and then sees that it's horrible, it's sort of embarrassing. I've been able to cut out the horribly mercenary jobs and focus on things that are enjoyable to me. I'm an unabashed fan of The New Yorker. I do feel proud when I see my artwork in there. MJ: You did a cover for The New Yorker where a girl is reading what is obviously a J.D. Salinger book. Is Salinger an influence? AT: There were a lot of personal elements that were tied into that image that don't really mean anything for someone to enjoy it. At the time, my wife was working at Little, Brown and Company, who publishes those Salinger books, those white-covered books. Her office was right where you'd be standing if you saw that view that's on the cover of that New Yorker. The girl in that image is modeled on my wife's young sister. So there were a lot of things that were thrown into that one image that don't mean anything to anyone else. So I think it wasn't so much that I was saying, "I want the world to know I'm a big Salinger fan!" When you're doing these covers you're working in symbols and archetypes. I had to sort of quickly telegraph the idea that she might be a little hipper than her tourist parents. MJ: I told some of my friends that I was going to interview you and asked them whether they had any questions for you. One said, "Yeah, will he marry me?" So do you find that there's kind of a disconnect between your lonely and isolated characters and your status as an indie heartthrob? AT: I didn't know I had ever attained that status! The natural answer to all that is that I did get married a few months ago, and it's been a source of curiosity for a lot of people. There's also this whole notion of people wanting me to be a lifelong depressive loner or something. And I always feel like if that's something that's going to turn someone off to my work then my happiness is more important than theirs, to me at least. I went out on this promotional tour for the book right after I got married, and I tried not to talk about getting married that much, but somehow word got out and there were a lot of awkward interactions with readers at book signings. People would say, "Is your wife here?" She wasn't with me; she didn't go on the tour. So then they'd say, "Is she…white? Or Asian?" There's this certain level of intimacy that some of my readers seem to feel comfortable with. I think there's just something about the nature of the medium. It creates this illusion of intimacy just because it's a work that's created completely by one person, and it's digested or read in isolation. It's not like sitting in a movie theater with a hundred other people and all laughing at the same moments. Kiera Butler is an associate editor at Mother Jones. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) EXIT WOUNDS, SHORTCOMINGS on The Oklahoman's top ten list Updated January 10, 2008 WORD BALLOONS WEEKEND LOOK I 2007's Top 10 graphic novels present wide array of characters Matthew Price 4 January 2008 THE OKLAHOMAN Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan (Drawn and Quarterly) Israeli cab driver Koby Franco is drawn into a mystery when his father's ex-girlfriend Nuni contacts him. She wants to search for Koby's father, who she says may have been killed in a terrorist attack. Koby's search for his father becomes a search for himself, as Motan examines modern Israel in this graphic novel. Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine (Drawn and Quarterly) Ben Tanaka is an abrasive San Francisco theater owner who obsesses over white girls; this doesn't help his relationship with his Asian-American activist girlfriend Miko. An interesting look at race and sex through the lens of an intimate graphic novel.   Featured artists Adrian Tomine Rutu Modan            Featured products Exit Wounds Shortcomings (HC)   SHORTCOMINGS mentioned by la Queue de la poire on CISM 89.3 FM Updated January 10, 2008 Shortcomings LA QUEUE DE LA POIRE CISM 89.3 FM December 31st click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by Two.One.Five Updated January 10, 2008 Shortcomings Piers Marchant TWO.ONE.FIVE Adrian Tomine found his niche a long time ago and has mined it to great effect over the years. His characters tend towards the moody and introspective, living vaguely hipsterish lives, but rootless, depressed and often alienated from everyone else -- family, friends, roommates and especially romantic partners. There's more there, too, of course. Tomine is very good at getting to the heart of his character's plaintive inner selves, revealing against their will, their hidden, miserable and often capricious qualities. Reading a piece by Tomine always comes with a exciting twinge of unease, a sense that we're witnessing the character's secret lives. His latest graphic novel takes these themes and adds an element of social politics -- his protagonist, Ben Tanaka lives a middling life, managing a movie theater in Oakland and living with his pretty Japanese girlfriend, Miko. Only, despite Ben's hostile protestations, Miko senses his desire for white, blond girls, wanting to date outside his own racial element. Eventually, she leaves for New York for a four-month internship, leaving bitter Ben to deal with being alone all over again. Fluctuating between anger, loneliness and unmet desire, Ben forages out on a quest to date one of the elusive white women to whom he gets so attracted. In this latest work, there is certainly a more mature edge to Tomine's writing, his characters are more fleshed out and real -- if not any less self-absorbed -- and the book as a whole strives for something a bit deeper and more complex than his usual mantel of genial, understated misery. One senses, reading the last angry scene between Ben and Miko the emergence of a whole new range of emotion and (dis)connection Tomine now feels comfortable depicting -- just don't expect to be any less depressed about it.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   SHORTCOMINGS on Sacramento News and Reviews best of list Updated January 10, 2008 Agree, or don't. 12.06.07 SACRAMENTO NEWS AND REVIEWS And from Jonathan Kiefer, not a list, but a rant (because he's the kind of guy who just can't be saddled with a silly old format): In making favorites lists, it's kind of a no-brainer to single out Sacramento native Adrian Tomine's Shortcomings (Drawn and Quarterly), the graphic-novel compilation of three issues of his comic Optic Nerve. But hey, you could stack a dozen "indie" films on top of each other and still not equal Tomine's keen observation, epigrammatic characterization, rhythmic storytelling, elegant imagery and dark, rueful humor. It's about young, selfish urbanites screwing up their own and each other's lives. What's not to love? click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS on the CBC's best of list Updated January 10, 2008 The top 100 We list our favourite pop culture moments of 2007 By CBCNews.ca staff December 28, 2007 Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine. “Cinematic” may be an overused adjective, but Adrian Tomine’s comics play out like beautifully restrained movies. That’s particularly true of his first expanded work, the graphic novel Shortcomings. Like Douglas Coupland, Tomine skewers sentimentality as he sketches out neurotic slackers paralysed by the weight of personal crises. Shortcomings explores the psychic struggles of misanthropic Ben Tanaka, whose aimlessness and penchant for white porn stars leads to the collapse of his relationship with his Asian-American girlfriend.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   SHORTCOMINGS on Geeknerd's best of list Updated January 10, 2008 SUNDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2007 Geekanerd's Top Ten Video Games, Comics and Movies of 2007 If you haven't already OD'ed on year end Top Ten lists, here for your categorizing pleasure are your Geekanerd Editor's picks for the Top Ten Video Games, Comics, and Movies of 2007. AHR's Top Ten Comics 1. Shortcomings - Funny, true, and exceedingly painful. It's been obvious for years that Adrian Tomine is a talented writer and artist, but this is his first masterpiece. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS on PLAYBACK:stl's best of list Updated January 10, 2008 Steve Higgins Monday, 31 December 2007 PLAYBACK:stl 1. Adrian Tomine | Shortcomings (Drawn and Quarterly) Simply put, Adrian Tomine is one of the best storytellers working in comics today. Previously known only for his short stories, Shortcomings is his first graphic-novel length tale, proving his versatility as a writer and artist. Also, it is the first work in which he addresses issues of race, creating a genuinely despicable protagonist in Ben Tanaka whose hang-ups about the racial relations between Asian-Americans and Caucasians guide us through the novel.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   SHORTCOMINGS on the National Post's Best of list Updated January 10, 2008 The Ampersand's books of the year January 02, 2008 Mark Medley NATIONAL POST Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine (2007) "The New York-based cartoonist's first full-length graphic novel is a heartbreaking look at love. This is a smart, bleak, funny, and honest book. I can't wait to see where he goes from here." click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) EXIT WOUNDS, SHORTCOMINGS, SPENT, AYA on Panels and Pixels Best of list Updated January 10, 2008 Overall, 2007 could be called a banner year for comics as the medium continued to garner mainstream traction. The death of Captain America won major newspaper headlines, Naruto dominated the best-seller landscape, and Stephen King and Buffy the Vampire Slayer attracted scores of people who had never set foot in a comic shop before. It was also a great year for high-quality books. Here’s a list of some of my own personal favorites: Best Graphic Novel of the Year: “Exit Wounds” by Rutu Modan. Few books this year had the emotional heft and warmth that Modan’s story of romance and estranged family set in Israel did. Runners Up: “Shortcomings” by Adrian Tomine; “Laika” by Nick Abadazis; “Alias the Cat” by Kim Deitch. Best Nonfiction Comic: A tie between Bryan Talbot’s “Alice in Sunderland” and Larry Gonick’s “The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part One.” Runners-up: “Red Eye, Black Eye” by K. Thor Jensen; “Spent” by Joe Matt; “American Elf Book Two” by James Kochalka. Best European book: “Aya” by Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie. An African expatriate and a Parisian artist tell charming slice-of-life story set in the Ivory Coast.   click here to read more Featured artists Adrian Tomine Rutu Modan Abouet & Oubrerie            Featured products Aya Exit Wounds Shortcomings (HC)   SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by The Japan Times Updated January 10, 2008 Shortcomings Certain `connotations' of Asian Americans 30 December 2007 The Japan Times DAVID COZY Comic books are respectable enough now that it is no longer necessary to attempt to burnish their image by renaming them ``graphic novels.'' Neither is it necessary to remind readers that comics can be art and, as such, can be as rewarding (or dull) as paintings, novels and songs. We can move beyond such fretting to consider more interesting questions such as one that is sure to arise for those readers who purged illustrated books from their libraries at about the same time they boxed up their baseball cards and Barbie dolls. The question that will nag at those who have spent the bulk of their lives deciphering unadorned text is: How does one read a comic book? Clearly, racing through the words does not do justice to the pictures, and just as clearly, focusing overmuch on the illustrations can hobble the narrative's momentum. Adrian Tomine's excellent ``Shortcomings'' gives us an opportunity to consider how text and visuals work together, and how we might best process the two components of this, and other, comics. The story Tomine tells in ``Shortcomings'' is one that could be (and has been) told in other forms. A precis of the narrative _ depressed and cynical sad sack loses his love interest and ends up with nothing _ could, one is certain, fit any number of the short stories churned out by graduates of America's better writing programs. For two reasons, however, Tomine's tale does not read like a rehash of something we have paged through several times before. The first is that, into the sexual politics at which his young Berkeley Bohemians play, Tomine injects the issue of race. The depressed and cynical protagonist is a Japanese-American, Ben Tanaka, with a Japanese-American girlfriend, Miko Hayashi. Their relationship is disintegrating, in part because of Ben's relentless negativity, but also because of his attraction to white women and his ambivalence about being Asian. As one enjoys Tomine's unflinching examination of this disintegration one begins to see that it is not only the racial politics that makes his work new; it is the manner in which he illustrates _ literally _ his take on how those racial politics affect Asian-Americans. We read, for example, Tomine's spot on rendering of the sort of argument lovers falling out of love are apt to have. Leaving a film festival that Miko has helped to organize, the ``Asian-American Digi-Fest,'' she and Ben move out of the dark theater and into the light of the lobby, light rendered as the white that comes to dominate the panels. Moving into the black of the night, they argue about the film that took first prize, and soon the quarrel turns personal. ``Why does everything have to be some `big statement' about race? Don't any of these people just want to make a movie that's good?'' Ben wonders. Miko responds: ``God, you drive me crazy sometimes. It's almost like you're ashamed to be Asian.'' ``After a movie like that,'' Ben answers, ``I'm ashamed to be human!'' What we may not notice on our first pass through ``Shortcomings,'' but will certainly feel, is that the darkness _ the percentage of each frame given over to black _ increases with the bitterness of the words. Though the dialogue is well written, the content of the scene borders on the banal: who hasn't read accounts of, or been involved in, similar spats? It is Tomine's skill in combining the words with differing quantities of light and dark that revivifies what could, in less capable hands, be a tired situation. Also impressive is the manner in which Tomine brings us to understand who his characters are entirely through their words, their actions, and the way in which they are drawn. In dispensing with explanatory panels hovering at the edges of his frames, Tomine makes his readers do some work, but those willing to fill in gaps for themselves will soon understand that Ben, though we may agree with him about the badness of a certain strain of overly earnest filmmaking, is, in his lack of self-awareness, a far from attractive figure. Though Miko may have her own problems, we don't, in the end, blame her for leaving him. That she does so for a white man is, of course, too much for Ben to take. ``When you see a white guy with an Asian girl, it has certain ... connotations,'' he believes, and the connotations are not, for him, positive ones. We recall his lament early in the book about people turning everything into ``some big statement about race,'' and understand that he is as guilty of this as anyone, unable, as he is, to see people as individuals rather than representatives of their races. In his narrow-mindedness he brings to mind those benighted folks who won't read comic books because doing so, they worry, might have ... certain connotations. David Cozy, a writer and critic, teaches at Showa Women's University. Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS named in Tampa Tribune's best of list Updated January 10, 2008 The Best, In Our Book By KEVIN WALKER and KAREN HAYMON LONG, The Tampa Tribune December 30, 2007 "Shortcomings" by Adrian Tomine is a great comedy about young love, with dialogue and insight into current youth culture that makes most filmmakers seem hopelessly behind. Ben has no equal in the department of negative, self-obsessed slackers, and, among literature's "best friend" characters, Korean lesbian Alice is a classic.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   DOGS AND WATER, SHORTCOMINGS, EXIT WOUNDS in Mercury top 10 Updated January 10, 2008 RANDY MYERS: GRAPHICS DETAIL Best of 2007: Graphic novels Contra Costa Times MERCURY NEWS 12/23/2007 If you wanted to be cool in 2007, you wrote a graphic novel. If you wanted to make a hit film, you bought the rights to a comic and made a movie out of it. Publishers caught on to this trend and started releasing lines of graphic novels. But did this sudden comics explosion result in quality, not just quantity? Surprisingly, yes. For that reason, keeping a list of the best graphic novels of the year to a mere 10 was a tough task. Here, then, are my favorite graphic novels from 2007. 4. "Dogs & Water," by Anders Nilsen (Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95): A nameless man embarks on a lonely odyssey through a desolate, temperamental world. This haunting and episodic story has been permanently lodged in my psyche since I read it last spring. Nilsen is a comics poet, writing a story that perfectly captures moods, feelings and metaphors. Do read this man. 2. "Shortcomings," by Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95): Say you've created a mini-comic and framed it around a cantankerous lead character who is not only smug, but a bit unlikable. How in the heck, then, do you make readers care? For the answer, dive into Tomine's "Shortcomings," an on-target look at the disintegration of a oxygen-deprived relationship. The lead -- Ben Tanaka -- deserves to go down as one of the most intriguing and well-written characters encountered in literature. But other supporting characters are equally unforgettable. Made me dying to seek out Tomine's "Optic Nerve" minicomics. 1. "Exit Wounds," by Rutu Modan (Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95): Darn that "Persepolis." Nearly every publisher scurried around in 2007, trying to mirror the success of Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical work. Appearances would seem to suggest that "Exit Wounds" would be a sort-of Israeli version of Satrapi's book That would be wrong. Modan defies those expectations with an elegant -- and fictional - story that rotates around a Tel Aviv taxi cab driver trying to find out if his dad was killed in a suicide bombing. Beckoning him to uncover the truth is his father's complex younger lover, Numi. You assume you know where Modan is headed with the story -- which vividly depicts everyday life in Israel. But you will be wrong. This is an assured book that speaks quietly whenever you expect it to shout its demands. You'll instantly want to reread it, not only to better appreciate its grace, but to see how effortlessly Modan pulls off such a delicately balanced story arc. click here to read more Featured artists Adrian Tomine Anders Nilsen Rutu Modan            Featured products Exit Wounds Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS, EXIT WOUNDS and SPENT in The Star Tribune Updated December 21, 2007 STAR TRIBUNE December 10, 2007 Drawing outside the box Standouts among this year's graphic novels -- starting with Adrian Tomine's "Shortcomings" -- nicely depart from the autobiographical themes that have overtaken the genre. By ERIC M. HANSON, Star Tribune Last update: December 21, 2007 - 10:41 AM Writing recently in this year's edition of the "Best American Comics" anthology, cartooning cult god Chris Ware noted that there has been a backlash against the navel-gazing and self-indulgence that, some people say, rule comics today. "Admittedly," he wrote politely, "a preponderance of autobiographical work has accrued" lately, as a legacy of such indie pioneers as Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar. In general, I'd agree, but it's not the case when looking at the best of what's published, at least this year. Leading that pack is Adrian Tomine's "Shortcomings" (Drawn & Quarterly, 108 pages, $19.95), probably the best work of this great writer/artist's career. With the feel of a particularly good talky dramedy, the book tells the story of a Japanese-American couple in their early 30s whose relationship has hit a post-collegiate milestone: live together and idle, evolve or die on the vine. Lead character Ben Tanaka is one of the year's great literary creations: negative and perpetually unsatisfied, cynical and not overly ambitious, too soft for real work and too smart to commit to a career, and too real to be wholly unsympathetic. He's adrift and stiflingly critical of everyone around him, including his lovely girlfriend, Miko, whose tolerance for Ben's b.s. is mysteriously long-lasting and might have reached its limit as she prepares to leave California for an internship in New York City. Ben has a thing for blond white girls, which Miko discovers when she finds a porn stash in a desk drawer. It's one of many ways Tomine uses the book's spare plot to explore racial and sexual dynamics subtly without breaking narrative stride. "Look," Ben says. "Let's not make a big deal out of this. If it bothers you, I'll throw [the movies] out. I got them a long time ago, and. ... " "Well, the thing that kind of bothers me is that all the girls are white," Miko says. "That's not true," Ben says. "Look ... there's a, uh, Latina girl in this one ..." Says Miko: "How would you like it if I was obsessed with pictures of big, muscular African-American men?" "Yeah, right. ... " Ben says. "You reach for your pepper-spray the minute you see a black guy walking towards you on the street!" Ben's friend, Alice Kim, provides a measure of caustic comedic relief to his soul-numbing ennui. Born in Korea, a lesbian and the daughter of conservative immigrants, Alice brings Ben to a wedding even though his ancestry is Japanese and her family despises Japanese people because of World War II. "Still," she says, "I'm sure my family would rather see me with a Japanese boy than a Korean girl." "So rapists and pillagers are preferable to homos," he says dryly. "Everything is preferable to homos," she says. Plotwise, not much happens in "Shortcomings," beyond people moving in and out of each other's lives, which in the end is what defines a lot of single people's lives in their 20s and 30s: just so many people come and gone, each day a door opening slowly on change. "Shortcomings" is Tomine's richest and most rewarding read, packed with the most human characters he has ever created. The art is spare and meticulous, more refined than ever. Some might find it a little too stiff, the compositions of each panel too much the same from one to the next. But I think it's the perfect, uncluttered complement to the fine writing it illustrates. War and beasts • Also terrific this year from Canadian comics publisher Drawn & Quarterly is Israeli writer/artist Rutu Modan's "Exit Wounds" (172 pages, $19.95). It's the story of two people drawn together in contemporary Tel Aviv to check into the disappearance of a man who led separate identities as a father, ex-husband and lover. • This summer, D&Q published Joe Matt's brave and weird book, "Spent" (124 pages, $19.95). It's the story of a porn-addicted chronic masturbator and misanthrope (named Joe Matt) who lives in a rooming house and is so lazy he chooses to pee into empty bottles rather than making the trip down the hall. I can't say I really liked "Spent," but (considering the author is known for doing brutally autobiographical work) I admired its naked honesty.   click here to read more Featured artists Adrian Tomine Joe Matt Rutu Modan            Featured products Exit Wounds Spent Shortcomings (HC)   SHORTCOMINGS on Modern Tonic's Best Of List Updated December 21, 2007 MODERN TONIC BOOKS | December 19, 2007 Shortcomings, Adrian Tomine No one does disenchanted Asian-American hipster like Tomine. With sharp dialogue and graceful, dark illustrations, Shortcomings sets a new standard for graphic storytelling. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) ADRIAN TOMINE art show mentioned by TWI-NY Updated December 21, 2007 SHORTCOMINGS AND GOINGS Giant Robot Gallery 437 East Ninth St. between First Ave. & Ave. A Through January 9 Admission: free 212-674-GRNY http://www.grny.net In 1991, teenager Adrian Tomine began Optic Nerve, a semi-autobiographical comic book series that looks at everyday life for Asian Americans with humor and poignancy. Drawn & Quarterly has compiled the story of Ben Tanaka, which was told across three issues of Optic Nerve, into Tomine’s first hardcover, the marvelous SHORTCOMINGS (Drawn & Quarterly, October 2007, $19.95). Ben is a cynical thirty-year-old movie-theater manager who whines and complains about everything. When his girlfriend, Miko Hayashi, goes off to New York for an internship with the Asian-American Independent Film Institute, Ben, whose family is from Japan, starts reexamining his pitiful life, deciding whether to act on his desire to date younger Caucasian women and getting into heavy philosophical discussions with his best friend, Alice Kim, the Korean king of the lesbos at Mills College. Tomine is a master of the genre, employing a careful mix of art and dialogue that blends seamlessly, never overlapping needlessly or repetitively. In one scene, when Ben goes to church with Alice and meets her parents, Tomine shifts between English and Korean, cleverly displaying the subtle racism that exists not only between Caucasians and Asians but between Korean, Chinese, and Japanese Americans. In another, after Ben drives Miko to the airport, his impending loneliness is shown in a dozen dark, wordless panels filled with emotion. In celebration of the book, Giant Robot is hosting an exhibition of Tomine’s work through January 9. "Shortcomings and Goings" consists of more than two dozen pieces, about half of which are panels from SHORTCOMINGS accompanied by Tomine’s original pencil studies. It’s a revealing look into Tomine’s method, especially a few fascinating changes that occurred between drawing and inking. For example, in one study, a couple is shown lying naked in bed together. However, in the final published panel, four bare feet peek out from under the covers at the end of the bed, a much more powerful and understated way to make a critical point in the story. The show is supplemented with other works from the New Yorker, Optic Nerve, Luna, Private Stash, and Giant Robot magazine, including the riotous "The Donger and Me," about actor Gedde Watanabe playing the Asian fool in such movies as SIXTEEN CANDLES.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   EXIT WOUNDS, SHORTCOMINGS make Entertainment Weekly's Best Of list Updated December 21, 2007 KEN TUCKER'S TOP 5 Entertainment Weekly 1. Exit Wounds Rutu Modan (Drawn & Quarterly) The Tel Aviv-based artist and writer Modan tells a tale of contemporary Israel through two characters: Koby, a young taxi driver, and Numi, an Israeli soldier. They are linked by the fact that Koby's father, presumed dead in a suicide-bomb attack, was romantically involved with Numi. There is no heavy-handed dissection of the Israel-Palestine conflict here; rather, Modan is interested in crafting a short story about the everyday possibilities of violence, and about the way terror becomes a grinding, constant presence of its own. Her figures are pasty, often pudgy people — intentionally non-comic-strip-heroic-looking — and humans and their background settings (the inside of a cab, small shops, and cramped living quarters) are rendered with minimal lines, inked with pale, fading tints. The result is a triumphant book about not-so-quiet desperation. 4. Shortcomings Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly) Maybe it's because I enjoyed writer-artist Tomine's critique of a certain kind of contemporary personality — so much clever sarcasm, so much self-absorption, so little engagement with the workaday world — that I was immediately taken with his portrait of Ben Tanaka. Tomine draws Ben the way he does most of his protagonists, with a serenely smooth line and delicate worry lines. Ben is smart, he's a horndog, and he's lonely, which makes him a quietly formidable man. Tomine raises questions of race by having others suggest that his Asian protagonist is more interested in dating non-Asian women, which proves a novel (for a graphic novel, at least) way to provide conflict. But this is not, ultimately, what Shortcomings is about. Look at the title: This is a poignant, dryly funny story of people grappling with their flaws, bending them into strengths, with occasional outbursts of emotions all the more effective for the contrast they offer to the artist's tidy drawings. click here to read more Featured artists Adrian Tomine Rutu Modan            Featured products Exit Wounds Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS, WHITE RAPIDS in Eugene Weekly Updated December 21, 2007 DECEMBER 13, 2007 EUGENE WEEKLY Growing, Inch by Inch SHORTCOMINGS by Adrian Tomine. DRAWN & QUARTERLY, 2007. HARDCOVER, $19.95. A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2007. Adrian Tomine’s stories about ordinary, flawed, lovely, insecure people are intimate and familiar, full of heartbreaks, what-ifs and should-haves, all rendered in rounded, elegant black and white. Shortcomings, a hardcover that collects three issues of Tomine’s Optic Nerve series, is an arresting image of a relationship caught in the act of dissolving amid disagreements about ideas and identity and how people define themselves, together or apart. Ben Tanaka’s girlfriend Miko has been getting more interested in her Japanese heritage, to Ben’s disinterest; in the face of his dismissal of what matters to her, Miko accuses Ben of having a thing for white girls (“It’s like you’re obsessed with the typical Western media ideal, but you’re settling for me,” she says, heartbreakingly, when she confronts him about his porn collection). Ben vents about Miko — and everything else — to his friend Alice, a Korean lesbian whose pointed observations and willingness to accept her friends’ choices about how they define themselves make her a gentle, if sassy, counter to Ben, whose stubborn refusal to consider race as a central part of a person’s identity is tested again and again. Neither Miko nor Ben is blameless in the dissolution of their relationship; neither is truly right about the other, either. With crisp, biting, funny dialogue and spare, evocative art, Tomine charts their bumpy course to a relatively settled point, though not exactly a happy one. Shortcomings is less statement than suggestion, as Tomine widens his scope from the small moments between people to the larger questions — be they about race, relationships, fallacies or futures — that shape them. —Molly Templeton panel discussion THE BEST GRAPHIC NOVELS OF 2007 by Aaron Ragan-Fore Perhaps it’s the modern inheritance of an art form originally designed to be bundled up with yesterday’s newspaper and tossed to the curb at the end of the week, but comic books are always in such a gosh-darn hurry. The growing mainstream acceptance of graphic novels as legitimate cultural commentary has led to an explosion of quality material, and the taste of the current trend is rarely out of the mouths of the nerderati bloggers, convention attendees and guys who dress up as Stormtroopers before they want to sample next month’s flavor. So here’s a little garden of roses the comics fan on your holiday shopping list might want to stop and smell: 2007’s best graphic novels. White Rapids (Drawn & Quarterly, $27.95), Pascal Blanchet’s lush sophomore effort, also uses history as a template for an intimate story, the abbreviated life cycle of a Québécois company town. Each page is composed like a stylishly snappy 1950s travel ad, probably making this the most visually stunning graphic novel of the year. Blanchet’s strictly structured artistic toolbox only serves to underscore the creative skill he employs in advancing the narrative. The book’s formalism compares favorably with Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, but while Ware focuses on the foibles of humans, here it is the town of Rapide Blanc itself that takes center stage.   Featured artists Adrian Tomine Pascal Blanchet            Featured products Shortcomings (HC) White Rapids   SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by The Baltimore City Paper Updated December 21, 2007 Shortcomings by Raymond Cummings 12/19/2007 BALTIMORE CITY PAPER FOR MANY, GENEROSITY, KINDHEARTEDNESS, and consideration are a hassle to maintain consistently; comparatively speaking, being a total asshole is easy. Ben Tanaka thoroughly embodies the self-centeredness endemic to the straight American male, and in Shortcomings, writer/illustrator Adrian Tomine brings him to whining, repulsive life: the perpetually furrowed brow, the nervous, guilty eyes, the arms spreading in exasperation, and the resulting hunch of shoulders, the short fuse easily lit, the instant, babyish defensiveness. He's that guy who can always be counted on to say the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time, who can't accept that things and people change, who's about to have the rug yanked out from under him. Ben and girlfriend Miko Hayashi live a comfortable thirtysomething life in San Francisco; he manages a movie theater between lunches with slutty lesbian gal pal/grad student Alice Kim, Miko's a mild-mannered trustafarian who's an organizer for an Asian-American film festival. But there's trouble brewing in their paradise: Ben's got a heretofore unslaked taste for the white tail, brushing off Miko's sexual advances so he can jerk off to Girls Gone Wild variant DVDs. He scoffs at the indie fare Miko nourishes and harbors a weird, internalized loathing when it comes to his racial heritage; at one point, while attending a Korean family event with Alice as her beard, he stage-whisper exclaims, "Man . . . look at all these Asians!" It isn't long before a frustrated, fed-up Miko chases a prize internship to New York, Alice-sick of the grad-school grind and the one-night stands she's hooked on-follows her lead, and Ben starts panting over the kinds of blondes Miko accused him of hungrily once-overing. When Tomine first made the comics scene in the late 1990s with Optic Nerve, his concise narrative and artistic style drew unavoidable comparisons to Daniel Clowes, whose pop-cultural hijinks had to have been an influence. But while Tomine once shared Clowes' propensity to overvalue irony, quirk, and improbability, he's graduated over the years to a novelistic and visual realism that makes it impossible to not take him seriously. The glaze of winky cartoonishness that seeped into his early drawing is long gone, and Shortcomings' conversations, flirtations, and dustups never feel anything less than probable. Though he isn't stingy with superb dialogue that keeps the plot moving forward-Ben and Alice's exchanges make you pine for bygone undergrad bonhomie-Tomine cinematically lowers emotional booms in a purely pictorial language. His silent panels and pages are among this graphic novel's most powerful: a scattered parade of pained reaction shots; a symbolic, passionless kiss; two pairs of feet glimpsed fleetingly in a bed; and a pair of airport scenes that lay bare Ben's much-deserved solitude. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) WHITE RAPIDS, MOOMIN 2 and SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by The School Library Journal Updated December 21, 2007 Drawn & Quarterly – School Library Journal Reviews – January, 2008 School Library Journal BLANCHET, Pascal. White Rapids. tr. from French by Helge Dascher. illus. by author. 156p. discography. Drawn & Quarterly. 2007. pap. $27.95. ISBN 978-1-897299-24-1. LC number unavailable. Gr 10 Up–In a tour de force exhibiting both style and substance, a graphic artist recounts the creation, populating, daily life, and eventual planned destruction of a Canadian town. White Rapids came into being as part of a private power company’s need for manpower at a site rich with potential hydroelectricity. Fifty years later, after the boom years immediately following World War II, that power source was no longer needed by the now-state-owned company. Blanchet’s retro artwork depicts not only the town’s emergence and eventual abandonment, but also the power of capitalism to create a social organism and then destroy it. The book includes facts and figures as well as views of daily life on the river during construction, habitation, recreation, and final human departure; a discography suggests auditory complements to the images for a truly dynamic realization. An excellent resource for social science research as well as inspiring to nascent artists and graphic novelists.–Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA JANSSON, Tove. Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip. Bk. 2. illus. by author. 88p. Drawn & Quarterly. 2007. Tr $19.95. ISBN 978-1-897299-19-7. LC number unavailable. Gr 10 Up–A collection of comic strips that Jansson wrote during the 1950s for adults, based on the characters from her children’s books. In this volume, the cute hippolike Moomins stay in their Scandinavian home and let the follies of the world–a self-glorifying athlete, snobbish new neighbors, or competing prophets–come to them. But folly can also be home-grown, as Moominpapa one winter decides that his family will eat pine needles and sleep on a pile of hay, because that is how their ancestors lived. Whatever the challenge, though, good sense always triumphs and all ends well. Jansson’s gentle skewering of human foibles is as relevant today as it was 50 years ago. Teens will readily identify modern-day incarnations of Jansson’s characters and appreciate her message that the path to happiness lies in being true to who you are and trusting in the support of caring friends and family. The whimsical black-and-white artwork conveys both the characters’ emotions and the informality of life in Moominvalley.–Sandy Schmitz, Berkeley Public Library, CA TOMINE, Adrian. Shortcomings. illus. by author. 112p. Drawn & Quarterly. 2007. Tr $19.95. ISBN 978-1-897299-16-6. LC number unavailable. Gr 10 Up–Ben Tanaka is a Japanese American in his late 20s, living in Berkeley and working in a movie theater. His confusion and frustration with his girlfriend, Miko, are compounded when she moves to New York for a four-month internship at a film institute, leaving him to have some “time off” from their relationship. The women in his life now include his best friend, Alice, a Korean lesbian; a beautiful, white bisexual who chooses her ex-girlfriend over him; and a performance artist who delights in photographing her own urine and having sexually explicit musical stage shows, but finds kissing icky because of germs. When Ben goes to New York with Alice, he finds that Miko has hooked up with a photographer and isn’t in the city for an internship at all. Tomine uses an understated drawing style that is simple yet effective, and fits well with characters who are intelligent, reflective, and honest. In addition to tackling modern relationships and racial politics, pop culture, art, and cinema are also discussed. Ben acts as an Everyman, standing in for all Americans of mixed ethnicity and the confusion that often surrounds a person divided between two worlds. The wordless final frames speak volumes for his quiet contemplation, and many readers will identify with his struggle.–Jennifer Waters, Red Deer Public Library, Alberta, Canada   Featured artists Adrian Tomine Tove Jansson Pascal Blanchet            Featured products Shortcomings (HC) Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip, Book Two White Rapids   SHORTCOMINGS on Pop Candy's Top Ten list Updated December 14, 2007 POP CANDY Whitney Matheson December 11, 2007 Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly). Tomine collects his Optic Nerve comics into one volume; learn more in my podcast. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS in Digital Journal's Holiday Gift Guide Updated December 12, 2007 Digital Journal's Holiday Gift Guide: Books and DVDs Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine ( Drawn & Quarterly) December 10, 2007 Few graphic novels released this year carry the emotional weight of Adrian Tomine’s latest work. Following a young man’s relationship problems (he’s an Asian accused of checking out white girls while with his girlfriend), Shortcomings doesn’t need elaborate drawings or even colour to showcase Tomine’s talent. The beauty is in the book’s realism as almost every panel reveals a truth about social connections that is rarely magnified in today’s literary works. Shortcomings is a quick read but it’s also a heavy read. Anyone who has been through a frustrating relationship, or anyone embarking on the dating scene after a difficult break-up, can relate to Shortcomings' main characters.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   EXIT WOUNDS, SHORTCOMINGS and SOUTHERN CROSS in The Boston Globe Updated December 10, 2007 Total recall With drawings and text, these graphic novels conjure vivid moments in public and personal history By Carlo Wolff THE BOSTON GLOBE December 9, 2007 Inquiries into history and outsider status spark a striking sampling of recent graphic literature. Nick Abadzis's homage to the first dog in space is largely traditional in its blend of image and word. Similarly, Ann Marie Fleming's reconstruction of the story of her great-grandfather, Rutu Modan's edgy walk along the personal-political border, and Adrian Tomine's finely drawn analysis of young, overintellectualized love hew to lesser and greater degrees of relative conventionality. A history of Students for a Democratic Society resembles author Harvey Pekar's "American Splendor" series in its deadpan realism but transcends the expected by virtue of its many voices. Laurence Hyde's offering is a replica of a 1951 "novel of the South Seas" told in wood engravings. It is a stunning narrative in which the visuals, some tortured but all transcendent, do all the talking necessary. Modan's "Exit Wounds" (Drawn & Quarterly, 172 pp., $19.95) also is about coming to terms with family. Economical of line but vivid in its use of color to denote emotion, it's the story of Koby Franco, a Tel Aviv taxi driver who learns that his estranged father, Gabriel, may have died in a suicide bombing. Consumed by his hostility toward Gabriel, he tangles with Numi, a rich girl who had an affair with him. Modan crafts a meditation on identity in which representatives of various generations intermingle, sex is a weapon, and politics nearly conquers love. Modan, who has worked with Etgar Keret, another piquant Israeli graphic novelist and member of the Actus collective, doesn't always like what she sees in her native land. But she'll never turn a blind eye. Tomine's narrowly focused "Shortcomings" (Drawn & Quarterly, 108 pp., $19.95) pits brittle Ben Tanaka against sensitive, sensual Miko Hayashi, the girlfriend he still wants. Ben is possessive and unfaithful, while Miko has wanderlust and a healthy sense of privacy. Tomine plays his feelings close to the vest, presenting simultaneously spare and spacious pages that allow the moods of his tightly wound characters to flicker and flare. A cutting portrayal of losers beautiful and otherwise, "Shortcomings" is a sophisticated designer downer, intelligently framed by Tomine to convey charged situations that don't resolve easily. Graphic novels are rarely this disquieting and subtle. Hyde's "Southern Cross: A Novel of the South Seas" (Drawn & Quarterly, 255 pp., $24.95) is a work of protest about the atomic-bomb testing the United States conducted in the South Pacific after World War II. It traverses an idyllic South Pacific island visited by the American military, which plants an atomic bomb under the sea, forcing the islanders to evacuate. A US soldier's rape of an island woman prompts the woman's husband to kill the American; it's a frightening sequence and apt symbol of that other violation, the bomb implantation itself. Some of Hyde's images are so packed they're hard to make out, let alone bear. But the message - pacifist, angry, pure - is unmistakable. A timely reissue indeed. Carlo Wolff, a freelance writer and author of "Cleveland Rock & Roll Memories," regularly reviews graphic novels for the Globe. click here to read more Featured artists Adrian Tomine Rutu Modan Laurence Hyde            Featured products Exit Wounds Southern Cross Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS makes SNR's Best Of list Updated December 7, 2007 SACRAMENTO NEWS & REVIEWS December 6, 2007 And from Jonathan Kiefer, not a list, but a rant (because he's the kind of guy who just can't be saddled with a silly old format): In making favorites lists, it's kind of a no-brainer to single out Sacramento native Adrian Tomine's Shortcomings (Drawn and Quarterly), the graphic-novel compilation of three issues of his comic Optic Nerve. But hey, you could stack a dozen "indie" films on top of each other and still not equal Tomine's keen observation, epigrammatic characterization, rhythmic storytelling, elegant imagery and dark, rueful humor. It's about young, selfish urbanites screwing up their own and each other's lives. What's not to love? Here's my Q-and-A with Tomine from October   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   SHORTCOMINGS is a New York Times notable book Updated December 6, 2007 NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW HOLIDAY BOOKS 100 Notable Books of 2007 December 2nd, 2007 SHORTCOMINGS. By Adrian Tomine. (Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95.) The Asian-American characters in this meticulously observed comic-book novella explicitly address the way in which they handle being in a minority. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by Salon.com Updated December 6, 2007 "Shortcomings" By Jascha Hoffman Dec. 6, 2007 SALON.COM The new graphic novel by Adrian Tomine of "Optic Nerve" fame may finally secure his spot in the cartoon pantheon alongside Daniel Clowes and the Hernandez brothers. Under the dust jacket of Adrian Tomine's first graphic novel, "Shortcomings," printed along the bottom edge of the front cover, lies a ruler. It's a gentle nod to a recurring joke that reveals the insecurities of the book's main character, Ben Tanaka, a chubby, grouchy movie theater manager recently abandoned by his girlfriend. At one point, as he is considering dating a lesbian in the hopes that she'll be less "size-conscious," he repeats a riddle he heard in college: "What's the main difference between Asian and Caucasian men? ... The Cauc." Stereotypes aside, Tomine must also be feeling his own pressure to measure up. As a teenager in Sacramento, Calif., he began to hand-distribute his "Optic Nerve" series of comics about young Bay Area loners. Over time, after he moved to Berkeley to major in English, and as the issues of "Optic Nerve" were collected in the books "Sleepwalk" and "Summer Blonde," the stories grew longer and more subtle. The wait for the next issue has been getting longer every year, perhaps because Tomine's exacting standards keep getting higher. This new graphic novel -- Tomine's first -- would seem to mark his arrival as a peer of the great cartoonists of Generation X, such as Daniel Clowes and the Hernandez brothers. His publisher has printed an unprecedented first run of 25,000 copies and the book has been acclaimed by novelists such as Junot Díaz and Jonathan Lethem. (The latter has called Tomine's work "as deceptively relaxed and perfect as a comic book gets.") If the critics are to be believed, Tomine's small lonely moments are destined to stand with those of Raymond Carver and Alice Munro. The reigning mood of his work is a sort of detached longing. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his single-panel illustrations. For instance, a cover he drew for the New Yorker shows a clean-cut young man on the subway who locks eyes with a stunning blonde reading the same book on a passing train. The moment is both detached and intimate, mundane and yet somehow heartbreaking: You could imagine him just sighing and going back to reading -- or madly scouring the city for her. Many of Tomine's characters are, in fact, ordinary people who find themselves turning into stalkers and creeps. In the title story of "Summer Blonde," for example, a timid man begins to follow a girl he meets in a greeting card store and unthinkingly gives away one of her closest secrets. In "Hawaiian Getaway," another story from that collection, a lonely Chinese-American woman unintentionally meets a nice white boy while making a prank call, then invites him to her grandmother's funeral. Like most of Tomine's vignettes of love-starved Gen-Xers, the charm of these stories lies in their subdued tone and bittersweet endings, which often hold open a slim chance of redemption. "Shortcomings," which binds together three recent issues of "Optic Nerve" that tell a single continuous story, is Tomine's most ambitious work by far. Its length is something of an obstacle, as moments that might have been charming in a shorter story seem to hold back the plot. It deals with race and sex in a way that is more playful and explicit than anything Tomine has done before. Compared to earlier work that was more brooding, the tone is light, with plenty of allusive banter and satire. But it is also a real tragedy whose central character seems intent on standing by as his life falls apart. Ben Tanaka, a 30-year-old movie theater manager in Berkeley, treats his girlfriend Miko poorly, alternating between bitter criticism and sullen withdrawal. After she discovers his all-white porn stash, Miko suggests they "take some time off" and moves to New York City. Ben is crushed but in time he begins to pursue a series of blondes. Following a failed attempt to kiss the artsy punk girl who takes tickets at his movie theater, he has a brief affair with a bisexual graduate student who soon dumps him with the sendoff, "I could be totally brutally honest about why I'm doing this, but I'm going to restrain myself because I'm not sure you'd ever recover." Shaken, Ben flies to New York City, where, spying on his own girlfriend, he discovers that she has been sleeping with a white man. Tomine has said that there was a time when he felt that to avoid being seen as a crusading Asian cartoonist he had to "make race a non-issue and deny its impact on life." Clearly this period is now over: Nearly every page of the novel deals with an anxiety specific to his own brand of ambivalently Asian Gen-Xers, or, as Tomine calls them, "characters that happen to be Asian." At the outset, Ben repeatedly denies that being Japanese means anything to him. But he is conflicted about his own assimilated status: He squirms when confronted with spoken Korean and Japanese, rendered in a series of panels that will be as unintelligible to most readers as they are to Ben. As should be clear from his dating patterns, Ben clings to an obvious double standard: It's fine for Asian guys to hit on blondes, but white boys had better stay away from those helpless Asian girls -- especially his own Japanese girlfriend. This kind of double-think is not Ben's only shortcoming: He is a bitter narcissist with, as his own girlfriend points out, "weird self-hatred issues," "relentless negativity" and a pathological fear of change. Tomine depicts these flaws almost too faithfully in Ben's consistently sullen expression, which stands out all the more among the other characters' precisely inflected faces. Ben does have a half-redeeming friendship with Alice, a serial-dating Korean dyke who is something of a narcissist and a hypocrite herself. And he has his tender moments. But he seems consistently clueless about his many flaws. After a hundred pages with such a grating character, the reader may feel pushed beyond pity to a sort of morbid curiosity. Although sour protagonists are not new to comic books or literary fiction, it is still a serious choice to put one at the center of a graphic novel; after all, he's there in nearly every panel staring the reader down. In response to the piles of letters he has received complaining about Ben, Tomine has written that while he is "disappointed if someone hates the book because they hate the character, I also feel somewhat gratified." This suggests that Tomine knows exactly how abrasive he has made Ben, and even that he relishes the chance to confront us with him. In the end, Tomine is such a skillful cartoonist that it doesn't really matter how you feel about his characters. His panels are exceptionally easy to read, combining the precision of line drawings with the gentle pacing of art-house film. The facial expressions and gestures are subtle, and they stand out against the storefronts of Berkeley and Brooklyn, N.Y., which he renders with uncanny fidelity, down to the old light fixtures of Chinese restaurants that have since been remodeled. His dialogue is sharp and true whether he's portraying a squabble in a dive bar or the negotiations that precede a kiss. In this book there is also a strong element of visual satire, taking aim at politically correct Asian American cinema and American Apparel ads. And Tomine leaves a little room to breathe by inserting silent frames: While Ben is escorting Miko to her plane, for example, we see only a haunting series of aerial views of his empty car in the parking lot. Despite all the technique involved, the story itself does feel a little slow, perhaps because Tomine is not yet fully comfortable piecing together his vignettes into a full-scale plot. And it takes some patience on the part of the reader to stay with Ben to the bitter end. But the book is so pleasurable and ambitious that these come across as minor shortcomings.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by Pop Matters Updated December 4, 2007 POP MATTERS Shortcomings Writer: Adrian Tomine Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly by Brian Bethel Adrian Tomine’s latest graphic novel Shortcomings, a collection of three Optic Nerve issues serialized from 2004 to 2007, opens with the ending of a fictional Joy Luck Club-style film. The ending is a biting parody of the kind of overly-sentimentalized, tear-jerking tales of cultural acceptance that Shortcomings sets itself firmly against. On the contrary, the graphic novel’s protagonist Ben Tanaka, a Japanese-American theatre manager in Northern California, begins the story with a sense of cultural self-acceptance that slowly unravels throughout the novel. In place of a conclusive affirmation, Shortcomings weaves an intricate portrait of the various responses to age and identity that set in during the early years of post-twenties life. Tomine doesn’t seem interested in issues of Asian-American identity so much as in the multitude of lifestyles created by people in reaction to the question of their idea of self. His characters don’t create themselves around their identity but out of ways to avoid it, and it’s in the subtle language and aesthetic of avoidance that Tomine as a writer is strongest—he excels not at the larger issue of Asian-American identity but in the precise language of the arguments it leads to. Tomine never directly tackles any larger question of identity but instead fills Shortcomings with each of its minor outward personifications, drenched in the forgiving language of post-1990’s California. Miko defends her new boyfriend by saying, “He’s half Jewish, half Native American,” to which Ben responds: “Is that what he put on his college application?” Reading Shortcomings, one can’t help but feel his glee at skewering overly-sentimentalized independent films, clichéd “Margaret Cho impressions,” and predetermined statements on heritage and identity. In many ways Shortcomings feels like a state-of-the-union type of work, one that examines the varied reactions to the early-thirties slump approached by the sarcastic Gen X kids who initially populated Tomine’s works. His characters visually appear left over from the nineties, sporting a mélange of bleached blond hair, striped sweaters, and casual ties that leaves a trace of slightly out-dated hipness on the entire book. But Tomine’s difficulty in completely updating the style of his characters parallels their own plight in Shortcomings. The question of how Tomine as an author goes about transporting his characters from the laid-back party atmosphere of their twenties into the world of legitimate responsibility and creation is the same question that his characters must ask themselves. As the reader ponders how the glazed discontent of nineties generation found itself here, we understand the very question Ben and Alice must be asking themselves. It’s in the reaction to delayed maturation that the characters’ shortcomings lie. Ben, cozy in his dead-end relationship and menial theatre job, hasn’t reacted to the pressures of growing out of youth, and Shortcomings essentially examines how everyone else has. Awakening out of the collapse of his long-term relationship, Ben seems an alien visiting a new planet. His movements in social circles are restricted by a web of political phrases that he refuses to recognize, but the problem lies not in Ben’s political incorrectness but in his refusal to follow any sort of conviction through. Through Ben’s eyes, Shortcomings becomes a journal of the renewed reactions of a skeptic to a landscape swathed in politically correct phrases and symbols, as well as a questioning of the value of those symbols in place of that which preceded them. It also criticizes the very creativity that Ben resists. Tomine understands all too well how creativity easily falls into categories without going anywhere, how people’s projects are a part of their image more than a plan or ongoing interest, and how when Auburn tells Ben that her performance group is “taking the physicality of modern dance and the improvisation of free jazz and infusing it with a punk sensibility,” it’s code for “I dropped out of college to work at a movie theatre.” It’s not only Ben that Tomine is dissatisfied with – his other characters have just as easily drifted into the venues and categories already set out for them, be it the predictable political-correctness of graduate academia, the bored hipness of menial work, or the tired futility of recycled creative production. Tomine is skilled at mocking the lifestyle choices of twenty-somethings but problems arise when one gets a sense of how much he seems to enjoy aestheticizing his own characters, and how genuinely attracted he seems to be to the lifestyle he attempts to criticize. One certainly gets the sense that Tomine gets as much pleasure in drawing skinny blonds with cropped haircuts and the individual squares of plaid on Ben’s shirts as he does in self-deprecatingly critiquing the dazed hipness of his characters. He parodies the late-nineties ideal only to the extant that he seems genuinely attracted to it, and in the end, Tomine never really gets to condemn the over-stylization of his characters in the face of legitimate life decisions because he is the cause of them being so heavily stylized in the first place. The struggles of Shortcomings‘ characters at times feel inauthentic because they occasionally appear to take place in an American Apparel ad. In the end, though, Shortcomings is a work of sympathy for a person who has dug himself into a hole in life and in outlook, and a knowing criticism of that which has led him there. If Tomine has an underlying message, it’s perhaps a dissatisfaction that his unique generation ended up drowning in over-determined political correctness and tired experimentation. Yet there is a certain sympathy in Tomine’s dissatisfaction, and an understanding of the relative ease of falling back on the remnants of disaffected youth culture. We are left with a sense at the end that Ben does not have the motivation to overcome the abrupt change in stasis his life has sustained on his own. It’s necessary for him to adopt one of the predetermined venues of his generation—at least as a starting point. Ultimately, then, Tomine demonstrates the necessity of the obvious categorization of his peers to cope with the jarring reality of post-twenties life even as he criticizes it. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS in The Bloomsbury Review Updated December 4, 2007 BLOOMSBURY REVIEW Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine December/January The poignant shortcomings of soulful slacker Ben Tanaka are artfully presented in this striking volume. And, of course, Ben isn’t the only one with shortcomings, either. When his live-in relationship in Oakland falls apart and his girlfriend leaves him to take a Manhattan internship, Ben finds himself succumbing to his wandering eye, spending ever more time with his lesbian best friend and eventually flying to New York to see what the hubbub is about.   Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   MOOMIN, EXIT WOUNDS and SHORTCOMINGS in The St Louis Post-Dispatch Updated December 4, 2007 The Fun Never Stops! 12/02/2007 ST LOUIS POST-DISPATCH Exit Wounds By Rutu Modan (Drawn and Quarterly, 172 pages, $19.95) An Israeli, Modan tells a story that initially appears political in nature — identifying a man killed in a suicide bombing — but quickly mutates into something more personal: an account of a severed family bond and a growing romantic connection. King-Cat Classix By John Porcellino (Drawn and Quarterly, 384 pages, $29.95) This beefy collection of Porcellino's mini-comics provides a revealing sampler of his work, which deftly mixes whimsy and biography, sharp observation and poetic musing. Shortcomings By Adrian Tomine (Drawn and Quarterly, 108 pages, $19.95) Graphic literature's most gifted realist, Tomine pointedly explores ethnic identity in a fiercely honest story of a relationship undone by the toxic combination of too much self-obsession and too little self-awareness. click here to read more Featured artists Adrian Tomine Tove Jansson Rutu Modan            Featured products Exit Wounds Shortcomings (HC) Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip, Book Two SHORTCOMINGS mentioned by CBC Updated November 30, 2007 All the rage Tracking the trend of angry Asian men By Kevin Chong, CBCNews.ca November 21, 2007 Starting from real characters instead of a political stance is what makes Adrian Tomine’s wry and observant treatment of white-Asian dating so fascinating. Shortcomings, a graphic novel culled from Tomine’s comic book Optic Nerve, follows Ben Tanaka, an angry Asian man with an Asian girlfriend, Miko, who takes issue with his interest in porn featuring only white women. After Miko moves from Berkeley, Calif., to New York, Ben dates a couple of white women. When these relationships fizzle, he heads to New York to find Miko, who has since begun dating a white guy. Their relationship sets Ben off on a racist tirade. What makes Ben Tanaka so compelling is also what accounts for Tomine’s wide appeal (and the praise of writers like Jonathan Lethem and Nick Hornby). With an eye for awkwardly revealing interactions, he depicts Ben as a sometimes unpleasant character (rather than a put-upon Asian Everyman) who’s openly disdainful of Asians who blame all their troubles on racism and the boosterism within Asian-American cultural circles; he has to be convinced that race has anything to do with his relationships. Ben might be angry, but not in a way that’s different from the Asian female and white males that Tomine also writes about.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by the Independent News Updated November 30, 2007 Shortcomings INDEPENDENT NEWS by Joani Delezen Anyone who has ever had trouble finding or keeping a significant other will relate to Ben Tanaka, the painfully realistic anti-hero in Adrian Tomine's latest graphic novel 'Shortcomings.' Tanka is sad and shy, giving him that likable, underdog edge. Too bad he's also bitter, sarcastic and excruciatingly selfish. He's caught up in a long-term relationship that's falling apart, primarily because he's got thing for a white girls and his Asian girlfriend knows it. Using that conflict, Tomine explores racial stereotypes on both a personal and societal level. At turns hilarious and heartbreaking, 'Shortcomings' is realistic portrait of how self-doubt can eat away at a relationship. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS on the Globe and Mail gift guide Updated November 30, 2007 GLOBE AND MAIL All they'll want for Christmas November 24, 2007 Critic and editor Bruce Handy recently called children's picture books, my favourite gifts to buy and give, "low-tech virtual-reality experiences." Adrian Tomine's beautiful graphic novel Shortcomings (Drawn & Quarterly; $22.95) extends those experiences to grownups. He tackles ethnicity, love and pop-culture obsessions in a visual stew that would make Philip Roth proud.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   ADRIAN interview, review of WHITE RAPIDS, SPENT, DOGS AND WATER in fast forward weekly Updated November 16, 2007 New comics, the Drawn and Quarterly edition Adrian Tomine on his new book Shortcomings, reviews and more Published November 15, 2007 by Bryn Evans in Books Adrian Tomine’s self-portrait Adrian Tomine’s cartooning ranks among the best in modern comics, each new issue adding to a mythology of lovelorn slackers, family politics and sex. His latest, Shortcomings (Drawn and Quarterly, 104 pp.), serialized in Optic Nerve issues 9 to 11, is the story of Ben Tanaka, a disgruntled movie theatre manager who, like most men his age raised on a steady diet of pop culture — detritus and all — lives a private life of strong opinions and hidden desires. His already-strained relationship with his girlfriend Miko becomes increasingly antagonistic, as she accuses him of wanting other women — white women. Shortcomings is Tomine’s most expansive story yet, told more through rich visuals than words, cadenced panel compositions and his inimitable facial characterizations and expressions. Fast Forward asked Tomine about getting into comics and the creation of Shortcomings. Fast Forward: The first Optic Nerve issues were printed in 1995, when you were 21. What inspired you to get into comics? Adrian Tomine: I was doing some mini-comics even earlier, at age 15. Love and Rockets was my gateway drug into more artistic, personal comics. Did you go to art school? I had a self-guided education. I went to college in Berkley, California, as an English major. Well, I started as an art major, but quickly grew disenchanted with that. I enjoyed English more. For me, it was a good thing to learn on my own and at my own pace. I also got to know some pros when starting up that were generous with their time and very helpful. You’ve done commercial work for The New Yorker and Rolling Stone. Do you still do much of that? I used to. It’s one of the nice things about the change in the market — getting to the point now that people can make money from comics. (Comics are) a pure labour of love, so there’s a hustle to do illustration work. Gratefully, I can now work on my comics and do commercial work that doesn’t overtake that. Would you consider illustrating another writer’s work? I don’t think so. It has been proposed — some high-profile stuff. Maybe the net result would be better, but the process of drawing is so slow and frustrating. I work slowly, and it would be too much work in service of something that my heart wasn’t in. What inspired Shortcomings? It had been kicking around for a long time, before I put pen to paper. I was feeling very aware of just how apparent my artistic influences were in my work. I was reaching a point of being frustrated at not being able to break free of that, but there’s no way that I could. Rather than immerse myself in a new drawing style, I wanted to explore new avenues of content, story and characters. Is there a biographical element to the work? It’s not an autobiographical work. There isn’t any type of fiction totally sprung from the artist. Because of the nature of working in this form, it’s not like you’re making statements — there’s some kind of protection from working in private. I was more worried about offending people esthetically (laughs). The pitfall I was most conscious of was running the risk of being sanctimonious. When I started working on it, I thought, “what is it about books and art that address race that doesn’t appeal to me?” (I wanted to) build a story around that — not just art that deals with race, but anything fake, that houses simple messages and characters. I tried to create characters that felt real to me, so that any kind of thematic content was suggested, or gently emerged. Joe Matt gives himself quite the self-loathing critique in his new work, Spent (Drawn and Quarterly, 120 pp.), another entry in the sad sack, chronically masturbating cartoonist pantheon. He’s a hugely selfish prick, but elevates the hatred with humorous, cartoony art, and the eight-panel page structure doesn’t feel cluttered. Anders Nilsen’s latest dystopian work, Dogs and Water (Drawn and Quarterly, 96 pp.) is pretty much that — a boy wanders across a dreary wasteland with a pack of wild dogs. The dreamlike quality of the work doesn’t necessarily connect, but Nilsen’s sharp line work has a delicateness to it that adds to the eerie story, made even grander through expanses of nothingness. Québécois artist Pascal Blanchet’s White Rapids (Drawn and Quarterly, 156 pp.) has recently been translated to English, giving readers a chance to check out this gorgeously constructed tale of Rapide Blanc, a town created in northern Quebec in 1928 by the Shawinigan Water and Power Company that housed families who maintained the area’s dam. Blanchet’s Art Deco-inspired work flits between quaint and sinister, and the muted tones and rusted orange colours make it look like a pamphlet you’d find in an old roadside gas station. click here to read more Featured artists Adrian Tomine Joe Matt Pascal Blanchet            Featured products Spent Dogs & Water (hardcover edition) White Rapids ADRIAN TOMINE interviewed by LA CityBeat Updated November 16, 2007 Long and ‘Short’ In his first book-length story, Adrian Tomine explores identity, truthfulness, and maturity ~ By NATALIE NICHOLS ~ “Even since I was a teenager doing these little mini-comics out of my parents’ house, I would get these totally divergent and sort of irreconcilable opinions of my work,” says graphic novelist Adrian Tomine. “It would be, like, ‘You’re great; you’ve got a lot of potential,’ or ‘Give up; you suck!’” On a recent sunny Saturday afternoon, the 33-year-old is sitting in a Los Feliz café down the street from Skylight Books, where later he’ll be signing copies of his new book, Shortcomings. Bespectacled and mild-mannered, the Sacramento-born artist-writer seems an unlikely candidate to incite such extreme reactions. The clean-lined, black-and-white cartoon vignettes in his long-running, critically lauded comic book Optic Nerve do occasionally depict grueling or even violent moments, but mostly they capture scenes of everyday life, usually in minute emotional detail. Shortcomings, published last month by Montréal-based Drawn & Quarterly (the Fantagraphics of the Great White North), contains issues 9 through 11 of Optic Nerve. Previous collections of the comic, including Sleepwalk and Other Stories (1998) and Summer Blonde (2002), have consisted of many short pieces, but the new book represents his first single full-length story. It’s about the unraveling relationship between snarky Berkeley movie theater manager Ben Tanaka and his artist-activist girlfriend Miko Hayashi – a deceptively ordinary tale that delves deeply into questions of identity, truthfulness, self-awareness, and maturity. By turns funny, insightful, and painfully honest, it’s also a first for Tomine in that it directly addresses Asian American stereotypes and other ethnic issues. In fact, the book required Tomine to explore many new frontiers. “I actually had to write a story for the first time in my life,” says the Brooklyn-based cartoonist and illustrator with a laugh. Indeed, he’s been criticized for never offering complete tales but only short bits, like scenes excerpted from a play or film. (Although those vivid vignettes can be compelling on their own.) “Trying to string a bunch of those together in a way that had some logic to why one thing would lead to the next was a whole new challenge for me,” he says. Another new challenge was to maintain a consistent focus on one project, which took five years to finish. Like one of his heroes, Jaime Hernandez of Love and Rockets fame, Tomine started self-publishing young, when he was just 16. Working in the short form allowed him to experiment freely. “I could say, like, ‘Hmm, I think for this little two-page throwaway, I’ll try drawing in a ballpoint pen. Ah, that didn’t work out well, but whatever – next!’” With Shortcomings, however, “as soon as I drew that first page, everything was locked into place, and I was basically trapped into that way of working for like the next 95 pages.” This is a graphic novel, so the images give the reader as much, if not more, information as the words do. Such elements as characters’ gestures or subtle changes in their facial expressions telegraph their thoughts and emotions, speaking volumes from the page. “One of the rules or challenges I imposed on myself was to not use any thought balloons and no narration, things I feel I relied on kinda heavily in the past,” Tomine says. “I wanted to try and suggest stuff about what’s going on [with the characters] internally, in the way that you might experience it in real life.” Indeed, Tomine’s work, while not always personally confessional, is largely concerned with translating real-life experiences into comics form. This explains why his influences include the Hernandez brothers (Jaime and brother Gilbert), as well as other cartoon auteurs who deal in autobiographical material such as Dan Clowes, Chester Brown, Julie Doucet, and R. Crumb. He notes that, while Jaime Hernandez has obviously affected his drawing style, the older artist inspired him in other ways. “It was a real eye-opener to me as a kid, the way he approached the subculture – the punk stuff, the ethnic stuff, the gender stuff – all in such a matter-of-fact, kinda casual way.” For example, Jaime didn’t find it necessary to announce that the main characters of his Locas tales, Maggie and Hopey, were lesbians. “It was just, you started to think it, and then suddenly you saw them kissing,” Tomine says. “It’s the way you would experience it if you knew these people in real life.” Another comics auteur who’s had an impact on Tomine is Japanese veteran Yoshihiro Tatsumi. This pioneering mangaka (comics artist), who’s been working since the 1950s, has only recently been introduced to Western audiences, largely via Drawn & Quarterly collections designed and edited by Tomine. Despite being half a world and many decades apart, the two are kindred spirits, exploring their respective worlds in ways that feel authentic to them, regardless of others’ expectations. Unlike the late Osamu Tezuka, who created such popular characters as Astro Boy, Tatsumi “was not gonna achieve that kind of public embrace,” Tomine says. The way Tatsumi’s work dealt with post-World War II Japan, for example, didn’t have mainstream appeal. “He’s more focusing on the micro, like the trickle-down effects,” Tomine says. “The war is [often] this sort of distant presence, but it informs the strange way the characters are behaving. I think that was the last thing a lot of Japanese readers wanted to see in print. They wanted stories about big robots who beat the villain.” Tatsumi, with whom Tomine has visited in Japan and also attended the San Diego Comic-Con with a few years ago, simply opted not to bother appeasing audiences. And Tomine’s handling of Asian American issues in Shortcomings reveals a similar mindset. The Japanese American artist’s work has often featured characters of Asian descent, but he’s been a disappointment in some quarters for not focusing on his race. “Some people, usually an Asian American journalist, feel that I’ve hidden my own identity,” he says, “and that I’m squandering my opportunity as a published author to use every pen stroke to make a statement about my experience.” Such critics have even “presented drawings that I did of myself where my glasses were opaque. It’s like, ‘That’s the disguise; you’re not showing your slanted eyes!’” He laughs. “But that’s a very old cartooning tradition that has been done for generations.” Yet Shortcomings won’t necessarily assuage such critics, as Tomine tends to pick at cultural scabs rather than offering feel-good resolutions. Ben’s gay best friend Alice enlists him to attend church with her family, opining that, while many Koreans still feel animosity toward Japanese over WWII atrocities, her parents “would rather see me with a Japanese boy than a Korean girl.” Ben’s relationship with Miko suffers in part because of his almost hostile lack of interest in his own culture, as well as his penchant for white girls. (But Miko isn’t honest with Ben about what attracts her, either.) Tomine even tackles the most taboo stereotypes: In one squirmingly funny scene, Ben and Alice discuss the “Asians have small penises” meme. Although Shortcomings isn’t specifically autobiographical, but more a “fictional way of expressing thoughts, rather than actual experiences,” Tomine adds that many of those thoughts stemmed from events in his own life. “And these journalists asking why I was hiding my identity sort of opened up a file in my brain,” he says. “I’d have some experience, maybe something like what you’re seeing with Ben and Alice, and I’d think, ‘This would really bum out that journalist.’ Because it would be addressing the issues that they want me to, but not in the right way.” He laughs, not too diabolically, and insists that, really, vengeance didn’t guide his pen. “If I started thinking about that, I’d push it even further. I’d have some, like, Asian American journalist character who I would unload some real venom on.”   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   ADRIAN TOMINE event in the San Francisco Bay Guardian Updated November 16, 2007 EVENT Adrian Tomine Adrian Tomine's comics work is part stripped-down slice of life, part perfectionist's pencil-and-ink rendition of city living, and part emotionally stunning oblique character study. I've dreamed of a time when great understated artists would be earnestly inspired by crates of money. Pay this guy first. We should be showering him with whatever he needs to get fresh comics out. The last three installments of Optic Nerve — in which a San Francisco couple's differing takes on "Asian-ness" collide — are finally collected in Shortcomings, a new trade paperback. (Benedict Sinclair) In conversation with Glen David Gold 7 p.m., free Booksmith click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by San Jose Mercury News Updated November 16, 2007 Graphic novelist puts East Bay on the map By Randy Myers 11/14/2007 from "Shortcomings" by Adrian Tomine, courtesy of publisher Drawn & Quarterly For East Bay residents, one of the immense pleasures of reading Adrian Tomine's observant graphic novel "Shortcomings" is spotting the Bay Area landmarks. Berkeley's venerable California Theater, Oakland's hip dive bar the Alley and the greasy but lip-smacking burger joint the Smokehouse on Telegraph Avenue make guest appearances. Even a Hegenberger highway sign serves as a turning point in this critically lauded book, which had its second printing. Just don't expect to see the names matching the locales. In keeping with the bulk of Tomine's work, the creator of the series "Optic Nerve" tinkers with reality, rarely deciding to call things as we East Bayers see them. "The whole book is like that, clearly linked to real life but with a lot of fictionalizing," he said. The characters also seem East Bay born and bred. Ben Tanaka, the sarcastic and blunt protagonist, lives in Berkeley and manages a movie theater. His best friend Alice, a lesbian, is a Mills College grad student. They meet up for coffee at Oakland's Mama's Royal Cafe, where they discuss Ben's doomed romance and his latest crush. Of all the East Bay locales, the one that saddens the 33-year-old Tomine is the late Cody's on Telegraph. Tomine said the closing of that Cody's, which he visited often during the 12 years he lived in Berkeley, shaped his tour's itinerary. "It was one of the first bookstores in the area to have a really good graphic novels section," the Sacramento native said. Advertisement To pay tribute to it, Tomine chose to appear in mostly independent stores instead of large chains. "I think when Cody's shut down, I had this real shock to my system and realized how immediate and dire the situation is for these bookstores." Ironically, as the small bookstores withered, comics gained in popularity. Attitudes changed, Hollywood took notice of comics, and now graphic novelists go out on book tours. Tomine, who illustrates for the New Yorker, seems stunned by the attention he's receiving. Last Sunday the New York Times offered "Shortcomings" its seal of approval, while author Junot Diaz ("The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao") raved about it in another review. Tomine worries the comics renaissance could lead to publishers snatching up inferior graphic novels to make a quick buck. "The real risk is that comics as a medium wears out its welcome," he said by phone from his Ann Arbor, Mich., hotel room. "I'm astonished to say that there might be a greater demand than supply of top-notch work." Even though the public's greater acceptance might be trendy, the business itself is anything but, he believes. "To be new isn't as important as being good," he said, pointing to the esteemed careers of Chris Ware and Oakland's Daniel Clowes. From an early age, Tomine fell in love with comics and could never fathom doing anything else. "I never had a phase where I wanted to be an astronaut," he said. His work eventually caught the eye of Chris Oliveros, publisher of Drawn and Quarterly, which releases high-quality comics. Oliveros remembers receiving copies of Tomine's self-published mini-comics and being impressed. "I naturally assumed that this was done by someone in his twenties, and I was later surprised to learn that he was just out of high school." Fourteen years later, their partnership still flourishes, with the Canadian company publishing "Shortcomings" and his "Optic Nerve" series, which developed a cult following and generates a lot of letters. Part of the reason for those letters is that Tomine is unafraid of bringing up touchy topics. In "Shortcomings," his mostly Asian-American characters talk candidly about interracial dating, political correctness and even penis size in Asian men. Tomine refuses to use his cartooning as a soap box. There are more immediate ways of accomplishing that goal, he says, adding that "Shortcomings" took him five years to produce.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   ADRIAN TOMINE interviwed by The Seattlest Updated November 16, 2007 November 12, 2007 Seattlest Interviews: Adrian Tomine, Author of Shortcomings Seattlest.com Adrian Tomine started making comics in his teens when he created Optic Nerve. In it, he tells stories about people who tend to be searching for answers to questions they seem to think everyone else already knows. After a few years putting out Optic Nerve on his own, it was picked up by publisher Drawn and Quarterly. Tomine is coming to Seattle to promote his first full-length graphic novel Shortcomings. Seattlest used it as an opportunity to geek out during an interview with one of our favorite writer/artists. You told The Believer that you wanted Shortcomings to be as readable as possible so you could reach a broader audience. How did you do that? Well, I should clarify. It almost [sounds] as if I deviously sat down and said "I want to crassly try and make as much money as possible selling my work to the lowest common denominator." That wasn’t the case. Whatever audience I had, I wanted their focus to be on the content more than anything else. I just wanted people to almost lose sight of the fact that they were reading a comic, almost as if they are hearing the dialogue as if they’re eavesdropping on it. A lot people talk about Raymond Carver as a big influence on your stories but who you do you consider to be your literary influences? I think one of the things that indirectly affected me quite a bit in working on Shortcomings was a lot of Phillip Roth's novels. Just the other day, reading his new novel, I suddenly felt myself in the weird position that a lot of readers of Shortcomings have portrayed when they come up to me. I wanted to get on the phone with Phillip Roth and say, "Now did this really happen to you? And how autobiographical is this?" I thought that maybe at some point, that had guided me a little bit in terms of the clouding of autobiography and just using the safety of fiction to probe even deeper into things that you might be apprehensive about if it’s your face right there. It seems like books and other forms of art are a constant in your work. Like that New Yorker cover where the two people are sitting on the different subways and they see each other. The only connection that they have in that moment is the book. It seems like books, films and music have a major role in your stories. That’s a good point. I guess it must sort of be reflective of my own life and my own personality in some ways. Specifically with the New Yorker, they've just pegged me as the guy who does covers about reading books. But I think that especially with Shortcomings, I was writing it at a time when I felt, in my real life, I was evolving and wrestling with my relation to the media-based youth culture. When I was younger, it was so important for me to be up on the latest bands and go to their shows all the time. I think that maybe it was a bit on my mind. Not the complete the disavowal of that, but the struggle with it where there's sort of a distinction between the real world and the things that you intake for entertainment or for culture. On that cover, the man's look conveys a longing which is a pretty common theme in your stories, especially for the men and boys. Not to be presumptuous, but I know a lot of your work is pretty autobiographical, so is there stuff that you’re still longing for now that you're getting lot of commercial and critical success and just got married? I think that some of the themes you're mentioning are, at least in my mind, a little more general than the way they get played out in my stories. They were materialized or physicalized in a very simple, romantic form. As if getting a date with the girl you see on the subway is going to fix everything and eradicate all sense of loneliness that you feel in your life. Like our lives were in our 20s. Yeah. I think that there’s certainly something about my personality that has sort of a pendulum or a see-saw type relationship to other people in terms of needing pretty intense periods of solitude. And then also at some point also being overwhelmed with a kind of existential fear of being alone. So I think that tension is going be something that’s at least in the back of my mind as I am working for quite awhile. Do any of those people who write those almost vitriolic letters you print in Optic Nerve ever show up in person? Oh yeah. They generally want me to recognize them as the person who sent me the vitriolic letter. I have this recurring episode in my life where at almost every event there’s what I call "The One Guy." It’s like you can spot him a mile away. Generally he gets up and has a long prepared statement about his own feelings and then it’s usually followed by a pretty confrontational or insulting question that I am the forced to answer in front of a group of other people. It’s amazing to me that somebody would even do that. Yeah there’s definitely an atmosphere at a lot of these events that I do where I feel like people are hoping to have some interaction – whatever, positive or negative – with the other attendees. So I sometimes think it is a very misguided attempt on The One Guy’s part to maybe impress the girls in the audience or something like that. You have a pretty deep history with Seattle, don't you? I almost think of Seattle as something of a home town because I have a lot of family there. My brother lives there and throughout my whole life I have always gone there to visit quite a bit. Do you have any favorite spots in Seattle that maybe you’ve drawn or something that we’ll get to see in a story someday? I think it would require me to settle in there and get more of an insider’s feel for the place because the way I experience Seattle is pretty minimal. It’s spending time at my family member's house and then jumping in the car and going to Uwajimaya. I think that a lot of the real life settings that I put in my comics are not something I chose randomly. It’s something that I have to have to feel some tiny amount of authority about the area that I am writing about. Adrian Tomine is speaking at the University Bookstore on Monday, Nov. 12 at 7 pm. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS, EXIT WOUNDS and AYA make PW's Best of List Updated November 16, 2007 Comics Shortcomings Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly) A lacerating, falling-out-of-love story that profiles Ben Tanaka, a crabby know-it-all with an eye for white girls; his Asian-American activist girlfriend Miko; and the dissolution of their relationship. Alice in Sunderland Bryan Talbot (Dark Horse) The history of Sunderland, an obscure British city and a haunt of Lewis Carroll's, provides the metaphor for a dizzying survey of the ways ideas and people have connected over the centuries. Exit Wounds Rutu Modan (Drawn & Quarterly) While searching for his father, a young Israeli taxi driver discovers unexpected truths about himself and contemporary Israel. All-Star Superman Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely (DC) A glorious postmodern return to what made Superman super, as the man from Krypton deals with supernovas and his own conventions. I Killed Adolf Hitler Jason (Fantagraphics) Hard-boiled hit men, a time machine and a quest to save the world add up to a story about the permanence of love in this darkly humorous tale. Laika Nick Abadzis (Roaring Brook/First Second) The story of the first dog in space is a known tragedy, here rendered with an eye to historic fact and without sentimentality. The Salon Nick Bertozzi (St. Martin's) A period fantasy involving Picasso, Braque, Satie, Gertrude Stein and a potent brand of absinthe offers a dizzying tour de force of art styles. Aya Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie (Drawn & Quarterly) The charming story of a smart teenage girl and her boy-crazy friends, set in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, during a period of peace in the 1970s. Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together Bryan Lee O'Malley (Oni) Our slacker hero is still playing in a band, still dating the mysterious Ramona Flowers—and dealing with her seven evil ex-boyfriends—but he decides to get a job! Tekkonkinkreet: Black & White Taiyo Matsumoto (Viz) Two street urchins—one called Black and the other White—with unusual powers take on the police, the yakuza and the citizens of Treasure Town in this poignant, experimentalist manga. MW Osamu Tezuka (Vertical) A young boy who survives a horrific military accident develops into both a powerful businessman and a warped murderous psychopath in an exploration of the modern reality of evil. MPD-Psycho, Volume 1 Eiji Otsuka and Sho-u Tajima (Dark Horse) A police detective tracking a serial killer descends into multiple-personality syndrome after his wife is found murdered and mutilated in this psychologically disturbing manga.   click here to read more Featured artists Adrian Tomine Rutu Modan Abouet & Oubrerie            Featured products Aya Exit Wounds Shortcomings (HC)   Slate.com quotes ADRIAN TOMINE Updated November 9, 2007 Best Quote From the Believer's in-depth interview with graphic novelist Adrian Tomine, on the subject of readers relating with his work: "On one hand, it's nice, but at the same time, it's cold water in the face to realize you're not nearly as special and unusual as you might have thought when you were an alienated teenager." click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) ADRIAN TOMINE Q+A in The Seattle Times Updated November 9, 2007 Adrian Tomine on "Shortcomings" By Chris Mautner The characters in "Shortcomings" include protagonist Ben; his girlfriend, Miko; and Autumn, an artist he's attracted to. Author appearance Adrian Tomine will discuss "Shortcomings," 7 p.m. Monday, University Book Store, 4326 University Ave. N.E., Seattle; free (206-634-3400 or www.ubookstore.com). It can be tough to be the wonder kid. Just ask Adrian Tomine. Tagged as the "hot new indie artist" when he was still in high school, he's had to compete with unrealistic expectations about his work — usually serialized in his ongoing comic-book series, "Optic Nerve" — ever since. It's unfortunate, because he's really one of the most talented and interesting folks working in comics right now. His naturalistic stories about disaffected and insecure young adults call to mind authors such as Raymond Carver and Alice Munro. His latest book, "Shortcomings" (Drawn and Quarterly, 104 pp., $19.95), is also his longest work. It tells the story of Ben Tanaka, an overly critical, sarcastic young man who has, shall we say, "issues" about his own ethnicity, including a yen for white women, something his Asian girlfriend has understandable trouble with. The book follows Ben as his love life slowly implodes, and he tries to get back into the dating scene. It's a captivating, smart look at how people trip over issues of race and sex in an attempt to get the things they think they want. I talked to Tomine over e-mail a few days before his impeding marriage to discuss his new book. Here's what he had to say: Q: What was the impetus for "Shortcomings?" A: "Shortcomings" was the result of me wanting to try something a little more challenging after spending many years working on short stories. I admired the achievements that some of my fellow cartoonists had made with longer narratives, or "graphic novels" as they're now called. So whether or not I was truly ready to take on a 100-page story, I basically just forced myself to give it a shot. In terms of the content of the story, I'd been accumulating material for years, and I knew that at some point I would want to group it all together. Some of the topics that are raised in this story are things that I hadn't dealt with in my past work. Q: What sort of challenges did creating a lengthier narrative pose for you? A: The initial challenge I faced was simply figuring out the process I wanted to use to create the story. I'd gotten pretty comfortable with writing shorter stories, and often I was able to pretty much just write a story like that in my head. But something like "Shortcomings" required a new level of organization and forethought for me. The other challenge I faced later on was that of just maintaining my focus on something that I'd been toiling away on for several years. I've always had a pretty quick arc from the conception of a story to its completion, and at times there was a bit of a Sisyphean feeling to the process of drawing "Shortcomings." I've never had to draw the same faces so many times before in my life! Q: One of the things that's interesting about the book is there are very few sympathetic characters. Was this a deliberate choice? A: I think it's more just that I have a different sense of what's "sympathetic" than a lot of other people. I have to admit that there might've been some miscalculation on my part in terms of what readers would accept before a character became "unlikable" or "unsympathetic." But to answer your question more directly, I don't think I made a deliberate choice either way. Sympathy or empathy with the characters was never a primary guiding force as I was writing the book. Q: Can you talk a little bit about the issues of ethnic identity and sexuality that you explore in the book? How does Ben's attitude jibe with your own personal experiences? A: A lot of people have been asking me about the relationship between the character Ben and myself, and I think I have myself to blame for that correlation in some readers' minds. I might've misled some people to think that this was a more autobiographical story than it really is with a few very specific details about Ben, including his appearance. But the truth is, it's entirely a work of fiction, and if any of my real beliefs and personality are to be found anywhere in the book, they're scattered amongst all the primary characters. Q: Your work is very dialogue-heavy, yet never comes off as overly wordy. How do you as an artist break down a conversation so that it doesn't become a slog to read through? A: Well, thanks for saying that, because that's certainly something I struggle with. For me, the challenge isn't so much about not being overly repetitive with the visuals. I think like so many cartoonists, I grew up with the notion that comics had to always be visually dynamic with all kinds of absurd "camera angles" and unconventional layouts. And now to me, as a reader, that's just as deadly, if not more so, than something being visually repetitive. I think that kind of simplicity works beautifully for people like Charles Schulz or Chris Ware, whereas any time I see a page that looks like something out of "How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way," my interest just kind of shuts off.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   SHORTCOMINGS in The Georgia Straight Updated November 9, 2007 Comix king Adrian Tomine discusses his Shortcomings Books By Shawn Conner November 8, 2007 American alt-comic guy Adrian Tomine. After years of writing and drawing short but elegant snapshots of relationship angst, Adrian Tomine has turned his talents to a longer piece. With Shortcomings, the cartoonist wanted to stretch his storytelling ability and reach a broader audience, while still maintaining fans of his comic Optic Nerve. But maybe things haven't turned out exactly as planned. "I don't know if I was choosing one audience over the other, or specifically trying to reach out to one," Tomine says, reached at home in Brooklyn, where he's working on a New Yorker cover. "I just wanted to create a book where the focus is primarily on the content…and to make the language of the comic storytelling more invisible." With its emphasis on precise facial expressions and body language, Tomine's clean, realistic style has become one of the most recognizable in alternative comics. Signed to Montreal publisher Drawn & Quarterly, he produces an issue of Optic Nerve once or twice a year and does frequent commercial illustrations. But it was Summer Blonde, a 2003 collection of short pieces gleaned from Optic Nerve, that introduced him to the mainstream press, with critics likening his minimal storytelling style to that of Raymond Carver. In its subject matter, Shortcomings is familiar Tomine territory, as characters struggle with their own worst enemy–themselves. In this case, Ben is a dude with a perennial chip on his shoulder, and his disposition doesn't improve as life throws a series of obstacles in his way. What isn't said is as significant as the carefully selected information in the panels. This is sophisticated, adult work. And so, in the world of alternative comics, it's suspect. Since the 33-year-old began publishing mini comics in his teens, his pieces have struck some of the medium's watchdogs as the epitome of hipster navel gazing. Shortcomings, which took him five years to complete, has stirred controversy as well, partly because of the protagonist's ambivalence about his Asian heritage. "For the number of new Asian readers I've gotten, I've probably turned away an equal number," says Tomine, whose parents spent time in American Japanese-internment camps during World War II. "I've learned long ago that when it comes time to do the work, it's best to try and shut out thoughts about how people are going to react to it." Some readers seem to have assumed Shortcomings is autobiographical, including its rather unsympathetic protagonist. "That misunderstanding has been at least one component in some readers' less-than-enthusiastic response," says Tomine. "It's almost like they had some illusion of who I was, and by confusing me with this character some of those notions had been [further] confused.…It's certainly not by accident–there are a lot of things thrown in there for no other reason than to create that confusion." One area where Tomine and his creation are definitely dissimilar is that of professional success. Ben might be unfulfilled in his job as a movie-theatre manager, but with Shortcomings Tomine continues to stand out as one of alt-comics' best and brightest. Adrian Tomine appears in conversation with Kevin Chong on Tuesday (November 13) at Sophia Books (450 West Hastings Street) at 7 p.m. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) ADRIAN TOMINE event made critics' choice by Chicago Reader Updated November 8, 2007 ADRIAN TOMINE The deficiencies alluded to by the title of Adrian Tomine's new graphic novel, Shortcomings (Drawn & Quarterly), belong to Ben Tanaka, a 30-year-old Asian-American who manages a movie theater in Berkeley. Ben is a typical Tomine antihero, a misfit who compounds his insecurity with social missteps and false bravado, which never fails to boomerang on him. He's got a lovely, artistic, sympathetic girlfriend, Miko, but his critical, self-absorbed, unambitious attitude drives her to the end of her rope and into the arms of a man in New York City; it doesn't help that Miko is Japanese and Ben's obsessed with cute, young white girls. Even his best (and only real) friend, outgoing lesbian Alice Kim, eventually loses patience with his petulance. It's Tomine's spare yet vividly evocative drawings that make this all go: a single wordless panel can be arresting in its depiction of a character's inner thoughts and feelings. Tomine made his name in the comics world with his Optic Nerve series; here he'll participate in a Q and A with Reader editor Irma Nuńez. --> Thu 11/8, 7 PM, Quimby's Bookstore, 1854 W. North, 773-342-0910. ŃJerome Ludwig .   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   ADRIAN TOMINE in NewCity Chicago Updated November 8, 2007 Tip of the Week Adrian Tomine Brian Hieggelke It’s amazing what "Optic Nerve" creator Adrian Tomine can accomplish in a mere 108 pages, the length of his new graphic novel, "Shortcomings." His story of Ben Tanaka, an under-employed 30 year old who is grappling with issues of identity in all forms—racial, sexual and, in the largest struggle of all, personal—reads so fluidly that its economy goes unnoticed, except when you finish and find yourself so fully engaged in the story of this circle of friends and lovers that you thirst for more. Tomine is the master of comic-book reality, with an unrivaled command of pacing, narrative and characterization. This is augmented by Tomine’s drawing style: deceptively simple with clean lines and compositions that reward study without retarding pacing. Deceptively simple means far from generic, though; like that of most great cartoonists, a Tomine page is recognizable with a mere glance. Adrian Tomine discusses "Shortcomings" at Quimby’s, 1854 West North, on November 8 at 7pm. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by Philadelphia Weekly Updated November 8, 2007 Lit Gloss by Liz Spikol If you remove the dustjacket of Adrian Tomine’s new graphic novel Shortcomings, you’ll find the hardbound book has a ruler printed on it—a stroke of genius on Tomine’s part (he designed the book himself). While the jacket simply depicts protagonist Ben Tanaka and his girlfriend Miko, that ruler tells the deeper story. It represents Ben’s insecurities, his fear that he doesn’t measure up. Ben lives every day with that ruler wrapped around him, and it explains why he can be such an infuriating asshole. Shortcomings chronicles a rough patch in Ben’s life, when his relationship with Miko runs aground and he struggles to decipher his erotic feelings toward white women. He’s both comforted and goaded by his lesbian friend Alice Kim, who derides the “fence sitter” to whom Ben is strongly attracted. If racial and sexual politics sound like challenging material for a graphic novel, never fear: Tomine is up to the task. An accomplished illustrator, Tomine’s style is spare, elegant and representational. His illustrations appear regularly and to great effect in The New Yorker. Here, small details—like the contours of a table lamp, or two small barrettes in a young woman’s hair—effortlessly convey worlds of information. In some panels Tomine gets quiet, allowing us to imagine what’s happening beyond the frames. But most of the time his characters are so funny and familiar, we’re eager to hear what they have to say. Chatty and complicated, they don’t disappoint.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by the San Francisco Bay Guardian Updated November 8, 2007 San Francisco Bay Guardian SHORTCOMINGS By Adrian Tomine Ben Tanaka, the protagonist of Adrian Tomine's graphic novel Shortcomings, is an ambitionless Berkeley cinema manager who attributes his outsider status not to race but to his being "a nerd with a bad personality and no social skills"; his girlfriend, Miko, is a successful organizer of an Asian American film festival who resents Ben's attraction to Caucasian women. Every conversation between the two becomes an argument, and Ben sees every argument as a personal attack on him. So it's with some relief that the two "take a break" while Miko's in New York, leaving Ben free to pursue a pair of blonds. But the girls he idealizes turn out to be just as flawed as he is, as revealed by one's earnest but ridiculous art projects and the other's passive-aggressive cruelty. Even Miko proves to be a hypocrite, shacking up with a "rice king" designer in Manhattan. from the past three issues of Tomine's Optic Nerve comic, Shortcomings isn't all heartache and betrayal. There's subtle comedy in small details like Crepe Expectations, the name of the café where Ben holds venting sessions with his friend Alice, a wisecracking womanizer, as well as moments of outright hilarity, as when Miko's new white boyfriend (sorry, I mean half Jewish, half Native American) busts out a defensive karate stance when confronted by Ben on the street. And Ben's recurring tirades about how shitty a place New York is (Tomine recently moved from the Bay Area to Brooklyn) might even be a nod to Woody Allen, the ultimate geek-cum-lothario whose wit, charm, and, above all, ability to laugh at himself are passable currency for his own shortcomings. So is he a sarcastic but sweet loner in need of understanding, or is he a superficial, insensitive creep who deserves a life of rejection and loneliness? Ultimately, Shortcomings is an honestly told story about the ugly end to a relationship that isn't that black and white. (Hane C. Lee) Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by the Straits Times Updated November 8, 2007 Lifestyle - Read Shortcomings 4 November 2007 By Adrian Tomine Drawn and Quarterly/ Hardcover/104 pages/ $28 (with GST)/ Comics Mart/**** 1/2 BEN Tanaka is a self-righteous, bigoted, sarcastic and unmotivated Japanese American, whose fetish for white girls drives a wedge between him and his Japanese-American girlfriend. Not exactly a guy to root for. Despite his flaws, the 30-year-old protagonist in this graphic novel is strangely appealing. As his love life crumbles, you feel sorry for the man, angry with the world only because he does not know where his place is. A fourth-generation Japanese American himself, writer Adrian Tomine balances levity with sensitivity perfectly. Not content with just racial issues, he throws homosexuality and bisexuality into the mix too. The result is a hilarious yet poignant look at the internal turmoils of the minority in the melting pot that is the United States. In one scene, Tanaka's only friend, Alice Kim, a Korean American lesbian, forces him to accompany her to church to placate her parents, who are still in denial about their daughter's sexual orientation. He asks: 'Why don't we just say I'm Korean while we're at it? You know... really make their day.' She replies: 'All Asians might look the same to you, but my family would spot your Japanese ass a mile away. Besides... I don't want to satisfy them too much.' The dialogue alone deserves multiple readings. The icing on the cake is the nuanced drawings by Tomine, a regular illustrator for The New Yorker magazine. He uses the black-and-white medium very well, creating shadows and light to set the mood, and to bring focus on where it matters - an embarrassed hand on the back of the head, a forced smile on the face. Lee Sze Yong   Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   ADRIAN TOMINE Q+A in Willamette Week Updated November 8, 2007 ADRIAN TOMINE [GRAPHIC NOVELIST] Adrian Tomine was something of a boy wonder when he became widely recognized on the national comics scene in 1995. The then-21-year-old artist, who got his start distributing mini-comics in Sacramento, Calif., won a Harvey (the comics equivalent of an Academy Award) for early issues of his comic series Optic Nerve . The last dozen years have seen him experiment with as many artistic approaches—but his storytelling remains grounded in realism and is intrinsically character-based. His characters, largely misfits and outcasts, are always portrayed with compassion and empathy. Shortcomings , Tomine’s longest and most layered work to date, tells a story of social inversion and broken relationships. It also finds Tomine—a Japanese-American artist who never wanted to be defined by that label—dealing extensively with issues of race for the first time in his career. WW spoke to Tomine via telephone from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y. CASEY JARMAN. It must be cool to be so deeply involved with an art form like comics that’s still in its early stages. Yeah, it is. As a practitioner, it’s nice because it feels like there are lots of possibilities still ahead that haven’t been explored, and also it’s just nice to be a part of a business that’s still so small and young and friendly. I mean, it’s not scary Barton Fink kind of stuff, like trying to work in the film industry. And it’s an industry that, at this point at least, totally rewards talent. Where a lot of comics artists keep coming back to similar protagonists, there’s a huge amount of breadth between your character choices. [Those are] departures I have to make in a creative process from my own personal experience, because as a guy who stays at home most of the time and draws comics, the actual day-to-day experiences are often quite mundane. There are a lot of cases where a story originates out of conjecture or a brief observation that leads to a storyline...where I’m trying to figure out something that I’ve seen or experienced that was maybe a little strange at first. What feeling do you get when you complete a story? It’s more a feeling of having purged something rather than an accomplishment. It’s very rare that I’ll go back and look at something once it’s seen print. [Shortcomings ] took me many years to work on, so I felt like I was living with these characters and the storyline for a long time. So when I finished it, it felt like summer vacation feels when you’re in school. Freedom. So how do you keep from rushing through your work, then, when you get three-fourths of the way through something? Not even—how about one-fourth of the way through? I guess that’s one of the good things about working in a public way: You feel this obligation. I feel it to readers, but I also, strangely, am thinking of my fellow cartoonists a lot when I’m working. I think, aw, they’d give me such shit if I bailed on this halfway through. Why did you decide to tackle race where you hadn’t before? I was just really trying to find a way to make a tentative baby step closer to finding my own voice, and I tried to think of a story that might be a little more specific to my own experiences. But I was at a conflict then, because was I just giving in and doing the story that I never wanted to do? Almost since the start of my work being published I would often get asked by journalists or fans, why wasn’t I using comics for a platform to address racial issues, since I’m of Japanese heritage?…I didn’t learn to become a cartoonist to express all these political ideas I had. And so, I think even with this book I was still trying to stay focused on things like character and dialogue. There’s really nothing that I’m trying to bash over the reader’s head. But did you learn anything about yourself by making a decision to address these issues critics had wanted from you all along? I think I did force myself into some types of introspection that might not have come up otherwise. And I think I also learned a lot from the audience’s response to the book. But I don’t think I’ve satisfied those early critics. I think I’ve frustrated them more than ever. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by The LAist Updated November 8, 2007 November 6, 2007 Shortcomings, a Graphic Novel by Adrian Tomine I hadn't ever read anything by Adrian Tomine before recently reading his newest graphic novel, Shortcomings. But I had heard of him many times before. He's been hailed for his comic book Optic Nerve, which he started writing and self publishing at the age of 16, as well as his artwork, which has filled magazines like The New Yorker and numerous album covers for bands like Weezer and Eels. Shortcomings though, is a combination of issues from his Optic Nerve comic, brought together in one cohesive breath. It's a story about love you could say, but more so about a person trying to find themselves. The person in this story is Ben Tanaka, a guy who's completely insensitive and critical, who happens to have a dead end job managing a movie theater. He's starts having problems in his long-term relationship because his girlfriend thinks he has a wandering eye, which could very well be true. Without giving too much away, the story unfolds as the characters try to discover who they really are, and what it takes to make themselves happy. I have to say that I truly enjoyed this book. I had a hard time dealing with the main character Ben because he's a huge prick. But as I kept reading it, I realized that I've had those same fights I was reading about. I've been in that weird, awkward situation where you know things are not going to work out like you planned. It's something in the way that Tomine draws the characters, and the exact words that they say that makes you realize this isn't a story. This is probably something that happened once to him. Because it feels like you're reading a page right out of life.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   ADRIAN TOMINE interviewed by The Michigan Daily Updated November 8, 2007 Boyhood cartoonist turned novelist in A2 By Nora Feldhusen, Daily Arts Writer on 11/7/07 Tomine will be at Shaman Drum tonight at 7 p.m. Don't miss it. (Courtesy of Adrian Tomine) Adrian Tomine started out like any other comic strip artist and graphic novelist. A self-admitted fanatic of "terrible 1970s superhero crap," Tomine religiously bought the newest Marvel comic book every week until he was 12. His first works were imitations of what he saw in trashy, action-based comic books. But early in his career, Tomine reached a "saturation point" at which he was no longer satisfied with mainstream comics, instead turning to underground forms where he found inspiration for the witty, satirical and poignant work he produces. Tomine - who will be at Shaman Drum Bookshop for a reading and signing of his new book, "Shortcomings," tonight at 7 p.m. - is more than a cartoonist. He started his first comic book, "Optic Nerve," at 16, and it remains one of the most popular sellers for his publisher, Drawn & Quarterly. Like all of Tomine's work, "Optic Nerve" is based on both personal experiences and intuitive social observations. Throughout the years, Tomine has illustrated his ability to relate to all types of characters. His shorter strips have depicted angst-ridden teenagers, lonely old people, criminals and dreamers. Without preaching, he expresses emotions at their core, using comic strips and graphic illustrations to make stories more accessible. Tomine's first full novel, "Shortcomings," tells the story of graduate school dropout Ben Tanaka and his relationship problems. It comes at an integral time in Tomine's career. Feeling complacent in his work, he saw the novel as a challenge and a way to extract himself from the shadows of mentors like Jaime Hernandez and Daniel Clowes. After signing on with Drawn & Quarterly, Tomine felt a professional expectation to talk about heavier issues. This isn't to say that deep and challenging issues aren't included in his shorter strips. He has a knack for fluidly incorporating political and social issues into individual narratives and interpersonal relationships. The mere girth of this novel, though, has pushed him to explore issues of race and the 20-something generation. Many reviews label the novel a critique, yet Tomine calls it more "a celebration" of this age group. What's so refreshing about Tomine, and what has probably fueled his increased popularity, is his hesitance to judge his characters. "Shortcomings" is the result of five years at the drawing board, and Tomine is more than happy to admit he didn't set out "to say anything." "Most of all I wanted to create an interesting, fictional story with characters who come to life and seem real," Tomine said in a phone interview. With a success like "Shortcomings," Tomine could probably ride this wave out. The novel's story left room for a continuation, but he's not interested in creating some soap opera-esque epic. After five years with these characters, he's excited about different smaller projects. Right now he seems to be a work in progress himself, attempting to pinpoint what exactly he learned from writing the novel as well as breaking out of its confines to work on smaller pieces for magazines and anthologies. Tomine recognizes the increased popularity of graphic novels and ascribes this interest to the large number of authors and publicists working in the medium. "Shortcomings" and Tomine's national tour are a significant chapter in this movement. He may have started out as a kid imitating his favorite artists, but it's likely that today there are 13-year-olds finding inspiration in each new copy of "Optic Nerve." Adrian Tomine Tonight at 7 p.m. At Shaman Drum Free click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) ADRIAN TOMINE in The Phillyist Updated November 8, 2007 November 6, 2007 Yo, Adrian If you were a cool girl, you had a crush on a New Kid. If you were a nerd girl, you had a crush on a graphic artist. Phillyist fell (who are we kidding, falls) into the latter category with a decidedly loud thud. So it is with the drooling affect of an oversexed pre-adolescent that we greet the news that Adrian Tomine, our very first comics crush, will be reading tonight at the Free Library (Central Branch). We first read Optic Nerve in Pulse, that free magazine that used to be given away at Tower Records, and we would cut them out of every issue and put them up on the wall. The forlorn alienation of early adult life portrayed there—while not comforting insofar as it made us think, “Wait, you mean this shit doesn’t end?”—was comforting insofar as it assured us there were people out there who listened to Crabwalk and spent a lot of time smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and infusing their thoughts with philosophical posturing. It was an indie adolescent’s dream. As an adult reading his longer collections, such as Summer Blonde, there is still a taste of panic underlying the life-as-we-know-it stories—but sometimes panic itself can be comforting. He talks tonight about his new work, Shortcomings. We wouldn’t use that word in relation to his work otherwise. Adrian Tomine Free Library of Philadelphia, Central Branch Tuesday, November 6, 7PM FREE   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   SHORTCOMINGS in The San Francisco Chronicle Updated November 8, 2007 San Francisco Chronicle Adrian Tomine and Derek Kirk Kim graphic novels an accurate mirror Jeff Yang Tuesday, November 6, 2007 Adrian Tomine's "Shortcomings" is the artist's first book... In "Shortcomings," artist Adrian Tomine gets personal wit... In Derek Kirk Kim's "Good as Lily," lead character Grace ... When I first read "American Born Chinese," the graphic novel by Fremont writer, artist and schoolteacher Gene Yang, I told friends that it was the best work of Asian American literature I'd read in a long time. Rereading it led me to amend that statement: It was, I subsequently declared, one of the best Asian American novels I'd ever read, period. Now that the book has won a sheaf of the most prestigious awards in publishing, I just keep my trap shut and give the book as a gift to the not-yet-enlightened - a dozen copies to date, and counting. With the publication of two new graphic novels, "Shortcomings" by Adrian Tomine and "Good as Lily" by Derek Kirk Kim, my holiday shopping list just grew a little bit longer. Tomine is, of course, a longtime alt-comics fave. As creator of the long-running title Optic Nerve, he's established himself as a master portraitist of the awkward and alienated - each new copy of Nerve is like opening the refrigerator door; it sheds just enough light to send cockroaches of shame and self-hatred scurrying in a dozen different directions. It's never quite entertaining to read Tomine's work, but it's a gripping and addictive exercise in voyeurism and masochism that doesn't exorcise inner demons so much as trace them out in sharp relief. ... Both artists are Asian American, male, of approximately the same age and similarly rooted in the Bay Area: Kim grew up in Pacifica and graduated from the Academy of Art University, and Tomine was born in Sacramento and went to UC Berkeley. Perhaps it isn't a stretch to compare the two, but their latest works do more to illustrate their contrasts than their commonalities. "Shortcomings" is a milestone for Tomine in two ways: It's his first book-length story and the first in which he deals squarely and personally with the concept of Asian American identity. The nisei protagonist of "Shortcomings," Ben Tanaka, is bespectacled, misanthropic and allergic to just about everything ("peanuts, walnuts ... crab, lobster, squid ... bee stings, olive tree bark ..."), all characteristics of his creator as well. Nevertheless, Tomine is quick to assert that the story is "wholly fictional." "Inasmuch as any story can be, anyway," he says. "There's certainly aspects of my own personality and life experiences in there, but they're pretty democratically spread amongst all the main characters," which include Tanaka, his increasingly remote girlfriend Miko and his lesbian Korean American best friend, Alice. The story follows Tanaka's self-sabotage of his relationship with Miko while he furtively pursues a series of iconic white women. But even if Tanaka shouldn't be read as a Tomine analogue, there's a corrosive authenticity to the character, a lived-in feeling that's sharper here than in his earlier, more emotionally remote works. As Tanaka grumpily shoulders his way through the narrative, sharing flagrantly egocentric takes on race and sexuality ("When you see a white guy with an Asian girl it has certain ... connotations," pontificates Ben. "And when you see an Asian guy with a white girl, you think ...? Good for him! Good for both of them!"), his character seems cut from life's cloth - and maybe, for many Asian American male readers, kidnapped from the bathroom mirror. For Tomine, the book is an admitted release. "A starting point for this story was my desire to create something that was my own, rather than just an amalgam of influences," he says. "I started thinking about subject matter that might be more closely connected to my own particular experiences - characters and scenes that might not ever appear in the stories of my mentors." On the other hand, he professes to be taken aback in the past expectations that his ethnicity should be a focus of his work. "I'm sure there are artists who've been taken to task for not addressing issues concerning what it means to be left-handed or something," he says. ... While Tomine's book could be described as a tale of someone irredeemably stuck in time, unwilling to change or to allow change, "Lily" is a story of the good things that occur when one faces and embraces the future. They're antitheses and complements bookending the Asian American experience in all of its passive-aggressive glory, and they join a growing canon of works that, along with Yang's "American Born Chinese," Tomine's earlier "Summer Blonde" and Kim's "Same Difference," should be read by anyone wanting to see the future of Asian American literature today - even if their creators resist such easy labels. "I don't think any of us set out to create 'Asian American literature,' and maybe that's why the work being done in comics is so interesting," says Kim. "None of us had any expectations that anyone would read our stuff, so we never had that pressure of 'representing' our community." But that's precisely why their stuff does, and so well. Unhampered by the need to be by, for or about, they simply hold up a true glass to Asian America's morning face, and despite bedhead and stubble, it's beautiful to see. Get more: Read the longer version of this article at SFGate.com. Adrian Tomine: Q&A and book signing. 7 p.m. Nov. 14. Book-smith, 1644 Haight St., San Francisco. www.booksmith.com. 7 p.m. Nov. 15. Cody's, 1730 Fourth St., Berkeley. www.codysbooks.com. Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS in The Ann Arbor News Updated November 8, 2007 ANN ARBOR BLOG Graphic look at breakup Sunday, November 04, 2007 To anyone who's ever had a relationship circle the drain, it's painfully clear from the opening few pages of Adrian Tomine's first full-length graphic novel "Shortcomings'' that Ben and his girlfriend Miko aren't going to make it - and that the sarcastic and self-absorbed Ben hasn't figured it out yet. When Miko leaves for a months-long internship with a firm "don't call me, I'll call you,'' she tugs on a string that's about to start unraveling his whole life. But even as their arguments before her departure cover depressingly familiar terrain, it's unique and specific in the way that every love disaster is. You can hear Tomine read from "Shortcomings'' at Shaman Drum Bookshop, 311 S. State St., at 7 p.m. on Wednesday. Leah DuMouchel, The Ann Arbor News   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   SHORTCOMINGS in The Philadelphia Inquirer Updated November 8, 2007 Posted on Sun, Nov. 4, 2007 'Shortcomings' long on ambition Shortcomings By Adrian Tomine Drawn & Quarterly. 104 pp. $19.95 Reviewed by Dan DeLuca Ben Tanaka, the hero of Adrian Tomine's graphic novel Shortcomings, is a sarcastic jerk. The 30-year-old manager of a movie theater in Berkeley, Calif., he's got a beautiful girlfriend named Miko, who works as an assistant director of the Asian American Digifest, a film festival of movies shot on digital video. Shortcomings begins with panels depicting big-screen scenes from one such make-believe movie, a prize-winning feel-good yarn about a Chinese woman's heartwarming relationship with her fortune-cookie-factory-owning grandfather. Our man Ben - who, like Miko, is Japanese American - has nothing but contempt for the endeavors of his beloved. He denigrates the entries into the film fest as "digital videos made by Asian Americans who happen to live around here . . . don't they also have to be left-handed or something?" Miko, for her part, suggests her beau "is ashamed to be Asian," and later accuses him of having a thing for blond white girls, using the Sapphic Sorority DVD she finds in his drawer as evidence of his obsession with "the typical Western media beauty ideal." That Shortcomings begins in a theater and revolves around a cast of movie buffs is particularly apt. Tomine's understated, minimalistically drawn comic style is as cinematic in its uses of telling silences and shifting visual perspectives as it is literary in its believably human depiction of day-to-day issues of race and romance. Tomine, 33, a Berkeley graduate who lives in Brooklyn, has long been one of the rising stars of alt-comics. He draws the series Optic Nerve - in which Shortcomings was serially published - and has done graphic work on CD covers and posters for the Eels and Weezer, among other rock acts, as well as racked up illustration work for the New Yorker and Entertainment Weekly. Shortcomings is his most ambitious, sustained work so far. It does a compelling job of making you care about characters that usually are not nice, but often are funny. And inevitably likable, like Ben's best buddy Alice Kim, a Korean grad student whose stated goal is "to make out with a hundred girls before I get my Ph.D.," but who has to pretend that Ben is her boyfriend so her parents don't figure out she's a lesbian. As for Ben, he gets the freedom he thinks he wants when Miko moves to New York after she gets a coveted internship. Then he has to decide whether his idea of fun is romancing a performance artist whose latest project photographically documents her daily urinations. "It'll be a huge installation someday," she says, while Ben works hard not to roll his eyes. She is, after all, a blonde. Tomine's elegantly simple drawings recall those of Eightball and Ghost World creator Daniel Clowes. In Shortcomings, though, he's even more restrained, eschewing thought balloons and often moving the narrative forward with wordless panels that convey longing and loss with, say, a view out an airplane window or an image of a torn picture on the sidewalk. Shortcomings' tale of romantic comeuppance along the road to painful but not redemptive self-realization has the feel of a wrenching short story. Tomine tells his story with pictures, as well as words, but knows that even with his precise drawing style at his command, his tale will be all the more compelling if he doesn't tell us - or show us - too much. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by Campus Circle Updated November 8, 2007 Adrian Tomine Shortcomings (Drawn and Quarterly) By Angela Matano Comic books have come a long way since the 1930s with Famous Funnie. Not only have they reached a place of true legitimacy in their own right, but the graphic novel form, in the hands of writers like Adrian Tomine (Optic Nerve) and Daniel Clowes (Ghost World), truly breach the divide of comic and novel. Tomine’s latest venture, Shortcomings, printed in hardcover form, looks and reads like a novella. The story of Ben Tanaka, and his romantic travails, captures the frustrations and confusions of a character who seems stuck in a post-college funk even though, or because of the fact, he has reached the ripe age of 30. Shot through with both angst and painful moments of self-discovery, Tomine explores the plight of an Asian man, possibly hung up on the fantasy of white women, and full of self-loathing that he cannot scale. Funny, true and original, Shortcomings grips the reader from the first frame to the last. Shortcomings is currently available. Adrian Tomine will be at Skylight Books on Nov. 3 at 5 p.m. Skylight Books is located at 1818 N. Vermont Ave.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   ADRIAN TOMINE in The Philadelphia City Paper Updated November 8, 2007 Adrian Tomine Tue., Nov. 6, 7 p.m., free, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341, www.library.phila.gov. by Sam Adams Published: Oct 30, 2007 reading/signing Adrian Tomine's Shortcomings opens with a Chinese-American woman comparing her grandfather to the fortune cookies he makes, "a hard protective shell, containing haiku-like wisdom." Has Tomine, with his clean black-and-white panels and flair for awkward silences, suddenly gotten literal-minded on us? Not to worry. Shortcomings' first page turns out to be a pointed fake-out, an excerpt from an Asian-American film festival that telegraphs both Tomine's intention to tackle matters of race and his evident anxiety about doing so without violating his gracefully understated style. With an ear for double-edged dialogue and poignant pauses, Tomine follows Ben Tanaka, a 30-year-old grad school dropout with a host of unexplored issues, from a covert fascination with white women to a generalized self-loathing barely masked by a caustic hostility to the world. He's the kind of protagonist you want at once to console and to strangle, not sure which of the two might do him the most good. Tomine has already proved himself an expert conjurer of mood, but with Shortcomings, he takes a major step forward. Tue., Nov. 6, 7 p.m., free, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341, www.library.phila.gov. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by Time Out Chicago Updated November 8, 2007 Review Shortcomings By Adrian Tomine. Drawn and Quarterly, $19.95. For 16 years, Tomine’s comic book series Optic Nerve has captured the romantic and interpersonal quirks of the young, restless and impudent. Shortcomings, the Japanese-American cartoonist’s first graphic novel, was culled from three issues of the comic, and finds Tomine upping the dramatic ante, delving as much into racial tension as sexual tension. True, the stories in Tomine’s precise, draftsmanlike panels have always been peppered with diverse casts, but this is the first time race feels significant in his work. As the story begins, we are thrown into the uneasy orbit of the likable but incredibly indignant Berkley, California, movie theater manager Ben Tanaka and his frustrated girlfriend, Miko Hayashi. The couple’s long-term relationship is in disrepair—the main reason being race. While Miko actively cultivates pride in her Asian-American heritage, Ben wants to forget about his. Tomine displays a deep understanding about what really matters to indie-comics readers, and fleshes out a seen-it-before subject (i.e., race) in ways that are fresh, funny and never heavyhanded. In one scene that’s as humorous as it is cringeworthy, Miko discovers Ben’s largely Caucasian porn stash and becomes justifiably convinced white girls are his type. “That’s not true,” he says, fumbling nervously with the DVDs. “Look…there’s a, uh, Latina, girl in this one…or wait, maybe she’s on the All Girl Action disc.” When the couple decides to take some time away from each other, Ben’s leap back into the dating pool is painfully awkward. His failed attempts at indulging his sexual fantasies only arouse more self-loathing. (At a crucial bedroom moment, he sweats and nervously shakes in front of his date, a white girl, convinced by a stereotype that his size is an issue.) Tomine has never been one for cut-and-dried endings, and Shortcomings is no different. Rather, it’s a complex, often tragicomic cocktail muddled with sexual fetishes, shame and a desire for racial assimilation. But even when it’s apparent a Tomine character is destined for unhappiness, tracking his downward spiral from panel to poignant panel is still a joy. — Jake Malooley   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   ADRIAN TOMINE interviewed by Inkstuds Updated November 2, 2007 Adrian Tomine INKSTUDS November 1, 2007 Adrian joined us in the middle of his tour to promote Shortcomings, his latest graphic novel pulled from his series Optic Nerve, published by Drawn and Quarterly. If you are in Vancouver, come join me and other locals at Sophia books for Adrian’s book signing on November 13th from 7-10pm. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by The Maneater Updated November 1, 2007 Graphic novel addresses racial identity Zack Shlachter October 26, 2007. Only a few pages into Adrian Tomine’s new book, “Shortcomings,” main character Ben Tanaka asks a question that might double as the author’s own premonitory and self-deprecating note: “I mean, why does everything have to be some big ‘statement’ about race?” This is, to be sure, new territory for comics writer and artist Tomine. It’s his first graphic novel, which has been serialized over the last three years in his comic “Optic Nerve” and now collected in a 100-page book. Perhaps more importantly, it’s also his first direct attempt at addressing his Asian-American identity, something he sees as an opportunity to distinguish himself from his peers Dan Clowes and Jaime Hernandez. “Shortcomings” follows Tanaka, a Japanese-American graduate school drop-out and movie theater manager who finds himself forced to confront a mess of confounding issues: life after college, love, sex, masculinity and race. He’d never given a second thought to these things until his girlfriend, Miko, reaffirmed her Asian-American identity. After a series of fights, primarily stemming from Ben’s not-so-secret fetish for white women, the two agree to a break, and Miko heads to New York under the pretext of landing an internship. The loneliness of the following months is punctuated by relationships with two white women, one an exhibitionist employee of his at the theater and the other a bisexual colleague of his lesbian, Korean best friend, Alice. Indeed, the most enjoyable aspect of the book is the snappy, self-effacing dialogue between Ben and Alice, whose rapport and sheer honesty with each other make much of their questionable outlooks, and behavior, or miserable dilemmas palatable. What’s honest about Tomine’s work is that he shows the ambiguities of racial and sexual politics. Instead of demolishing stereotypes as Gene Luen Yang did in the fun, child-friendly “American Born Chinese” by deftly satirizing them, Tomine features characters with conflicting viewpoints and who occasionally uninformed but never unrealistic. In “No-No Boy,” considered the first novel by a Japanese-American writer, John Okada played on the notion that size matters when two of his characters, afflicted by their divergent wartime experiences, argue over whose problems of self worth are bigger. Fifty years later, the issue returns a bit less metaphorically for Tomine’s Ben, who has bought into a one of the many stereotypes tailored to Asian Americans that the characters confront. Tomine is no doubt receiving flak from a small contingent among the Asian-American community. Their criticism rests on the premise that any negative portrayal of minorities by minorities will only reinforce the malicious stereotypes regardless of context or purpose. It’s the same criticism that some Jewish Americans have infamously leveled against Philip Roth, for whom the label “self-hating Jew” was long synonymous. But what Ben discovers in the third act helps explain the novel’s title and what could easily be misconstrued as a lack of resolution: Whatever convictions we might have, we all fall a little short.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by Sidelines Online Updated November 1, 2007 Graphic novel review 'Shortcomings' Jamie Lovett Issue date: 10/29/07 Sidelines Online There's been a small wave lately of young, Asian-American artists making a name for themselves in the American comics arena. Eisner-Award-nominated Derek Kirk Kim did it with his anthology "Same Difference and Other Stories." Gene Yang did it with his award winning web-comic turned graphic novel "American Born Chinese." Adrian Tomine has done it with his ongoing series of short, serialized stories "Optic Nerve." "Shortcomings" is the third and longest of the "Optic Nerve" stories collected thus far. Throughout the story, Tomine deals with stereotypes of race, gender and sexual orientation, the challenge of dealing with change and ones own personal deficiencies. "Shortcomings" focuses on the life of Ben Tanaka, a Japanese-American university dropout living in Berkeley with his girlfriend, Miko Hayashi, and working as a movie theater manager. Despite their devotion to each other, Ben and Miko's relationship is deteriorating and feels cold unless heated by an argument about race, politics or Ben's fixation with white women. When Miko decides to take an internship opportunity in New York, Ben is left on his own, forced into a series of events and changes that he has to deal with. What makes "Shortcomings" so memorable is the way Tomine tells Tanaka's story through his supporting cast, rather than the main character himself. As the lives of the people around him seem to move at a pace faster than they can keep up with, Tanaka is left spinning his wheels in a failed attempt to move forward. It brilliantly illustrates Tanaka's unwillingness or inability to deal with the fast-paced world around him and how desperately he tries to stop it from moving at all. Tomine sets himself apart from his contemporaries through a sense of sad realism that contrasts starkly with the bright, stylized work of Kim and Yang. The work is entirely black and white, and Tomine shows an incredible amount of skill in using light and dark contrasts to let the panel reflect the emotion of the characters within it. The black and white adds to the underlying mirror symmetry in the story that is present in how Ben and Miko's relationship plays out, the certain amount of East Coast versus West Coast sentiment mixed into the story, and the structure of the graphic novel itself. The characters are masterfully crafted, particular Tanaka. At the beginning of the story, you feel a certain amount of pity for Ben because he is so awkward, but the more you get to know him, the more you start to cringe at the things he says and does. By the end of the story, you simply want to strangle him for his stubbornness. The relationship between Miko and Alice - Ben's Korean and homosexual best friend - is equally solid. Miko's sense of sadness at being trapped in her relationship with Ben is constantly on display during her conversations with him. Alice's more spirited conversations with Ben provide an appropriate amount of comic relief to the otherwise downbeat story. Tomine manages to juggle all of these elements and themes skillfully and weaves the various threads into a tightly-knit tapestry. No panel is wasted and no one plot thread ever takes the spotlight longer than it should. All of the themes and plot points fit together perfectly to create one emotionally saturated story. "Shortcomings" is a great comic that's full of tension: racial, sexual and those inherent in relationships and, simply, living life. Tomine's characters transcend the racial barriers that are focused on throughout the story, so that any reader can relate to them emotionally. We can feel their pain and frustration as they deal, or fail to deal, with life's unexpected challenges and their own shortcomings. With "Shortcomings," Tomine not only stands shoulder-to-shoulder with other popular Asian-American comics artists, but, perhaps, through his sense of realism and incredible comic craftsmanship, pushes himself to the forefront. Adrian Tomine proves to be a creator worthy of the indie scene buzz surrounding him, and "Shortcomings" proves itself to be a relevant, endearing, and resonant piece of work. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) ADRIAN TOMINE in The Varsity Updated November 1, 2007 The Shortcomings of Adrian Tomine Cult graphic novelist gets personal for highly anticipated IFOA appearance Chandler Levack 29/10/07 The Varsity For someone who reportedly hates being labelled an “Asian hipster Woody Allen,” cult graphic novelist Adrian Tomine sure fits the bill. Hanging out at his hotel room before his highly anticipated International Festival of Authors appearance (Tomine visited the festival three years ago, sandwiched between two political novelists), all the signposts of a serious New York artist are present—the thick-framed glasses, the sweetly meditative work about a self-obsessed youth in a distressed, long distance relationship, the jibes about West Coast culture. Tomine is a recent California expat, and his move from Berkeley to Brooklyn (spurred by a marriage to a longtime New Yorker) is the undercurrent to his first long-form graphic novel, Shortcomings, in which thirtysomething Bay-area resident Ben Tanaka must confront his friends’ and lovers’ “total hard-on for New York.” “It’s on my mind a lot,” admits Tomine. “Especially as I was mulling over the decision to move. I kept going back and forth on these trips where I’d visit New York in the summer and think, ‘Oh my god, the weather here is awful and I can’t stand the humidity,’ and then travel back to Berkeley and complain, ‘Oh, there’s only three restaurants that I like to go to here.’” “It’s an observation I’ve made from living in the Bay Area for so long. There’s always been this idealization of New York there, it seems to be the place where most people from the Bay Area go on vacation or want to move to, but then again, New York has always been the most mythologized American city. It’s made up for people like me, who’ve spent their childhoods seeing movies and reading books about it and have this fantasy version of the big city.” Tomine began his particular brand of sharply outlined, intimately personal novella-like renditions of tortured relationships (both real and idealized) when he was 16, mailing copies of Optic Nerve to Montreal’s prestigious Drawn and Quarterly Press (publishers of Julie Doucet, Chris Ware, and Seth). The press ignored his letters for years before printing a small run that eventually grew to an exclusive contract with the artist. His mini-comics offered glimpses into the lives of protagonists you didn’t want to admit you (desperately) related to. Take Hilary Chan in Optic Nerve’s “Holidays in the Sun”—a pessimistic Delia’s mail-order operator who begins placing hateful phone calls to strangers as a kind of vicious entertainment. As a critic from Time revealed, “I worry about Hilary Chan in a way that I don’t worry about other fictional characters.” Said a fan in the next issue, “Poor Hillary…what a sad little bitch she is.” Now Tomine is illustrating full-page covers for The New Yorker. Tomine’s portrayal of compromised humanity continues in Shortcomings. Ben Tanaka pursues his harbored fetish for white women once his Japanese girlfriend leaves for a New York internship. (Asks one woman: “Don’t you think is this just a sublimated form of assimilation?”) For Tomine, labelled a “Twinkie” by his Asian dorm-mates at Berkeley, he’s just speaking honestly on obvious racial issues that others would rather sweep under the rug—including an unfair stereotype about Asian penis size. “For as long as I can remember, my work has always had a strangely polarized response… People either seem to say, ‘I fucking hate this! It’s garbage!’ or ‘It’s so great! I really loved it!’— and I’m always freaked out by either response. After ten years of this, it was really good preparation for how this book would be received… “I first published this story in a serialized form in Optic Nerve, so I’ve received a responsein- progress—which isn’t always a good way to finish a work. There’s been a whole range of responses, really. Especially with Asian- American readers, people have come up to me at signings and said really negative things. No one is having an idiotic response; they think my take on stereotypes is at least…interesting. But instead of saying, ‘you’re a racist, Adrian!’ or even, ‘You’re an idiot!’ they’re asking, ‘Why did you even bring that up? Isn’t it better just to push it aside and not even address that?’” Tomine spent four years creating Shortcomings, from illustrating Flatbush Avenue in twopoint perspective to sketching out the pages in stick figure form to making sure it would fit the page count. During this time, Adrian’s life changed immensely—including a move to New York, a marriage, and adjusting from his introverted “vampire” hours to his wife’s nineto- five work schedule, so he can’t help that the novel encompasses his own shortcomings, as much as those of his fictional character. “Especially in the world of alternative comics, every step of the way is made by the same hand, and that is perfectly suited to the world of very personal storytelling. I mean, sure, other people have managed to convey very personal stories in other media, but to me it seems that the more hands that touch something, it can’t help but be compromised or diluted. The way someone experiences a comic is very personal, more so than sitting in an audience with a hundred people watching a screen… “There are enough autobiographies strewn throughout my work. No matter what I do, people seem to read it as a straightforward autobiographical story of my life. A lot of people have approached Shortcomings that way—that I’m Ben Tanaka and that’s it. But it’s my own thoughts and personality that are spread out within all the characters, even the more minor ones. “I certainly don’t abide by the saying that these characters started to write themselves and took on a life of their own…There was really specific ground of who Ben had to be, how he had to move within the story. But the Alice character was definitely inspired by friends of mine, especially the relationship she has with Ben. I’ve always had female friends that are much more outgoing, much more open, and often had better luck with girls than I have. It’s definitely a dynamic that I’m familiar with.”   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   ADRIAN TOMINE mentioned by Seattle Weekly Updated November 1, 2007 Adrian Tomine SEATTLE WEEKLY Today a contributor to The New Yorker and McSweeney's, Tomine made his early reputation with the comic Optic Nerve. Now he takes issues of class, ethnicity, and male sexual longing on a road trip in Shortcomings (Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95). His hero, Ben Tanaka, has a thing for white girls—is that wrong? His Asian girlfriend thinks so ("I know your type"), and perhaps so does Ben, but maybe his fixation is just an excuse for breaking up. Driving from the Bay Area to New York, he's forced to consider his mixed motives, all rendered with the kind of artful self-awareness that Tomine brings to his distinctive panels. His pen is as decisive as his hero is not. University Book Store, 4326 University Way N.E., 634-3400, www.bookstore.washington.edu. Mon., Nov. 12. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by The Oregonian Updated November 1, 2007 Shortcomings by Steve Duin October 02, 2007 Categories: Graphic Novels Ben Tanaka is a total pain-in-the-ass, listless, grating and self-obsessed. He's Christian Bale in "American Psycho" or Jim Carrey in just about everything he's ever made. He's an incessant whiner, a bitter loser, a never-ending stream -- his one and only friend points out -- of "charming negativity." Thus, watching Tanaka open wide while Adrian Tomine stuffs these just desserts down his throat is kind of a kick. Tomine's Shortcomings -- published by Drawn & Quarterly -- collects the story serialized in issues #9-11 of Optic Nerve. And, believe me, Tanaka wastes no times getting on everyone's nerves, including the reader. The 30-year-old theater manager is dating a Japanese woman, Miko Hayashi, who is rapidly losing patience with the chip on his shoulder and his undisguised lust for Caucasian teenagers. "Do you have any idea why this might offend me?" Miko asks. "It's like you're obsessed with the typical Western media beauty ideal, but you're settling for me." Of course he is. Realizing Tanaka is no more able to confess that to her than to admit it to himself, Miko heads to New York for a four-month internship at the Asian-American Independent Film Institute. And while the steady girlfriend is away ... In Miko's absence, some seriously entertaining characters step to the front of the stage, including Alice Kim, a Korean lesbian who is much luckier in love than the tedious Tanaka. Unceasingly loyal to Ben, she is always at the other end of the line when Tanaka calls to report how things went with August, the vapid cashier, or Sasha, the rare woman Alice has never seduced. When Alice decides to vacation in New York, she begins the chain of events that delivers Tanaka's long-awaited comeuppance. He ends up alone, a rather predictable fate when you prefer sarcasm to sentimentality, the superficial to the genuine, your own shortcomings to the all-too-human frailties of others.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by YuppiePunk Updated November 1, 2007 Book Review: Adrian Tomine’s ‘Shortcomings’ YUPPIEPUNK October 28, 2007 From Sophia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation” to Nick Hornby’s “High Fidelity,” we’re a sucker for a good relationship story, which is a big part of why Adrian Tomine’s work has always appealed to us. And while his latest offering (and first full-length work) “Shortcomings” isn’t quite of the caliber of the aforementioned favorites, it is a little gem of a book. And Tomine’s skills as an illustrator ain’t too shabby either. His keen eye for capturing the subtleties of a moment are superior to his peers, as is his ear for dialogue. And though they may be drawn in black and white, his characters are colorful and interesting. So too are the urban settings the story is set in — the cafes and bedrooms of Berkeley, California and New York City. At the center of the novella is Ben Tanaka, a cynical Japanese-American movie theater manager who is obsessed with white girls, and who is struggling to get along with Miko, his not-white live-in girlfriend. The pair fight frequently, mostly because Ben is a self-obsessed jerk, but also because he can’t quite manage to keep his disdain for Miko’s interests to himself. Adding some comic relief to the story is Alice, Ben’s Korean-American best friend/lesbian, who is eternally at college — most recently at an all-girls school — where Alice never tires of the “incoming freshwomyn.” “Shortcomings” is an quick and breezy read, but it still packs a lot of emotion into its 100 pages. Tomine’s previous work has been bashed for being overly-emo, but those criticisms can be finally put to bed. Here he keeps the story rooted in relationships without weighing it down, or more accurately, lightening it up, with the overly-romantic youthful fantasies of his earlier stories. Though his earlier works were good, “Shortcomings” is much better. It would also make for a cool little film. Richard Linklater or Terry Zwigoff should direct. Sean Lennon or Masi Oka should star. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) ADRIAN TOMINE interviewed by Panels and Pixels Updated October 25, 2007 Graphic Lit: An interview with Adrian Tomine CHRIS MAUTNER PANELS AND PIXELS October 22, 2007 It can be tough to be the wonder kid. Just ask Adrian Tomine. Having been tagged as the “hot new indie artist” when he was still in high school, he’s had to compete with unrealistic expectations about his work — usually serialized in his ongoing series, “Optic Nerve” — ever since. It’s unfortunate, because he’s really one of the most talented and interesting folks working in comics right now. His naturalistic stories about disaffected and insecure young adults call to mind authors such as Raymond Carver and Alice Munro. His latest book, “Shortcomings,” is also his longest work. It tells the story of Ben Tanaka, an overly critical, sarcastic young man who has, shall we say, “issues” about his own ethnicity, including a yen for white women, something his Asian girlfriend has understandable trouble with. The book follows Ben as his love life slowly implodes and he tries to get back into the dating scene. It’s a captivating, smart look at how people trip over issues of race and sex in an attempt to get the things they think they want. I talked to Tomine over e-mail a few days before his impeding marriage to discuss his new book. Here’s what he had to say: What was the impetus for Shortcomings? How did the story come about? Shortcomings was the result of me wanting to try something a little more challenging after spending many years working on short stories. I admired the achievements that some of my fellow cartoonists had made with longer narratives, or “graphic novels” as they’re now called. So whether or not I was truly ready to take on a 100-page story, I basically just forced myself to give it a shot. In terms of the content of the story, I’d been accumulating material for years, and I knew that at some point I would want to group it all together. Some of the topics that are raised in this story are things that I hadn’t dealt with in my past work, and since I was forcing myself to attempt a story that was longer than anything I’d done before, it also seemed a like a good opportunity to attempt to delve into some different subject matter. Shortcomings is your longest work to date. What sort of challenges did creating a lengthier narrative pose for you? Is it the sort of thing you'd like to do more of in the future? The initial challenge I faced was simply figuring out the process I wanted to use to create the story. I’d gotten pretty comfortable with writing shorter stories, and often I was able to pretty much just write a story like that in my head. But something like Shortcomings required a new level of organization and forethought for me. The other challenge I faced later on was that of just maintaining my focus on something that I’d been toiling away on for several years. I’ve always had a pretty quick arc from the conception of a story to its completion, and at times there was a bit of a Sisyphean feeling to the process of drawing Shortcomings. I’ve never had to draw the same faces so many times before in my life! And trying to maintain at least a modicum of consistency in the art—not only in terms of style, but just how the characters look—that was something I was not well-versed in either. In terms of the future, I think I probably will work on longer stories again, but maybe not right away. On one hand, I feel like I now want to do the exact opposite, and do something shorter and contained. And on the other hand, I have this feeling like Shortcomings was almost like an apprenticeship, or a learning process, and it gave me some abilities that I think will come in handy should I attempt something even longer. One of the things that's interesting about the book is there are very few truly sympathetic characters. Was this a deliberate choice or was it something that grew organically as you developed the story? I think it’s more just that I have a different sense of what’s “sympathetic” than a lot of other people. I have to admit that there might’ve been some miscalculation on my part in terms of what readers would accept before a character became “unlikeable” or “unsympathetic.” But to answer your question more directly, I don’t think I made a deliberate choice either way. Sympathy or empathy with the characters was never a primary guiding force as I was writing the book. Can you talk a little bit about the issues of ethnic identity and sexuality that you explore in the book? How does Ben's attitude jibe with your own personal experiences? Do you think Asian-Americans and Americans in general are as obsessed with stereotypes as Ben seems to be? A lot of people have been asking me about the relationship between the character Ben and myself, and I think I have myself to blame for that correlation in some readers’ minds. I might’ve misled some people to think that this was a more autobiographical story than it really is with a few very specific details about Ben, including his appearance. But the truth is, it’s entirely a work of fiction, and if any of my real beliefs and personality are to be found anywhere in the book, they’re scattered amongst all the primary characters. As for the last part of your question, for me to answer that would be in direct conflict with my goals for this book. I don’t want to put words in anyone’s mouth, least of all giant groups of very distinct people. I liked the way you subtly sprinkled the pillow case motif on the cover and endpapers and through the book. How did you decide to do that and could you talk about some of the other subtle visual motifs you use in the book (the cup of coffee, the x-rated dvds, etc)? The pillowcase motif was something that just kind of developed organically as I wrote and drew the comic. And the way it bled over into the design of the book was probably secondary. On one hand, I just liked the way that pattern looked on the cover, and on the other hand, I was probably trying to take something that was basically invisible to the reader at first, and then kind of imbue it with some relevence to the actual story. I’m not sure what to say about those other things you mentioned, other than that one of the new things that I enjoyed about working in the context of a longer narrative was the way that you could repeat images, and have little things gently echo things from maybe 50 pages prior. I’m not saying I did it with the greatest of skill and subtlety, but I do know that attempting that kind of thing in a shorter story is usually just too sudden and obtrusive. Your work is very dialogue heavy, yet never comes off as overly wordy or "a bunch of talking heads." How do you as an artist break down a conversation in comics so that it doesn't become overly repetitive visually or just a slog to read through? Well, thanks for saying that, because that’s certainly something I struggle with. For me, the challenge isn’t so much about not being overly repetitive with the visuals…if anything, I have to push myself in that direction a bit. I think like so many cartoonists, I grew up with the notion that comics had to always be visually dynamic with all kinds of absurd “camera angles” and unconventional layouts. And now to me, as a reader, that’s just as deadly, if not moreso, than something being visually repetetive. I think that kind of simplicity works beautifully for people like Charles Schulz or Chris Ware, whereas any time I see a page that looks like something out of “How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way,” my interest just kind of shuts off. In general, I wanted Shortcomings to be as readable as possible, so this issue you raise was kind of like a tightrope walk. I didn’t want it to be too dull and boring, but I also didn’t want the visuals to be inappropriately wild in relation to the subject matter. Your work always seems to come up as exhibit A in the "indie comix are boring stories about whiny twentysomething losers" complaints that crop up all the time. It's not a stance I particularly understand let alone agree with as I find your work engaging. What do you make of that attitude and does it at all frustrate or bother you? Well, that should all change now that most of my characters are whiny thirtysomething losers. In all seriousness, I can’t really let myself worry too much about that kind of thing. For some reason, my work has always been evaluated in kind of a polarized way…people tend to either really like it or really dislike it. That’s always kind of surprised me, but I think it’s been useful in terms of learning to not take either type of extreme reaction too seriously. I never imagined that my work would even appeal to as many people as it does, so it seems perfectly appropriate that there would be some people who really don’t enjoy it. What are you working on now? I recently finished my contribution to the next issue of Kramers Ergot, which is a great anthology published by Buenaventura Press. This issue is going to be a massive, full-color hardcover book, and it was a lot of fun to be doing something so different from Shortcomings. I’ve also been spending some time lately on a little project that very few people will probably ever see: a mini-comic that we’re giving as a favor at my imminently-approaching wedding!   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   SHORTCOMINGS in The National Post Updated October 25, 2007 SPLITTING IMAGE Adrian Tomine began his short-story cartoons while still a teen, but a new project finds him leaving his comfort zone Mark Medley, National Post Published: Thursday, October 25, 2007 After finishing each issue of his self-published cartoon, Optic Nerve, a teenage Adrian Tomine would slip the comic into an envelope, slap on enough stamps to ensure it survived the cross-continent journey from the southern U.S. to Canada and drop it into a mailbox with a Montreal address scrawled on the front. The comics -- painstakingly drawn panel by panel, Xeroxed and assembled by Tomine -- would weave through the system, cross the border and wind up on the desk of Chris Oliveros, head of alternative comics publisher Drawn and Quarterly. Tomine had already sent about a half-dozen issues to Quebec without response when he finally got a letter from Oliveros. He nervously read the note, which was scrawled on the back of some scrap paper. It was, Tomine recalls, "a very brief and somewhat critical response." "On one hand, it was very hard for me to read what were some pretty insightful criticisms," says Tomine, on the phone from Berkeley, Calif., southwest of Sacramento, where he grew up. "But on the other hand it was such a thrill to see that envelope in my mailbox with his return address on it ? It made me realize he had been getting all these packages I'd been sending to him, and he had been reading them and watching my progress." In fact, Oliveros had received every issue of Optic Nerve -- "I was definitely following his work very closely," he says -- and was so impressed with the maturity and skill of the comics that he assumed Tomine was in his twenties. Email to a friendPrinter friendly Font: "He had skills that were beyond his years," says Oliveros, on the phone from Montreal. "The funny thing is, I think if I had known [his age] I would have contacted him sooner." D&Q eventually offered to publish Tomine in 1994, and he's been with the company ever since, slowly churning out issues of Optic Nerve and collecting short stories into books such as Summer Blonde and Sleepwalk and Other Stories. Now, at the age of 33, Tomine has just published Shortcomings, his first full-length graphic novel. "In a way, I wanted this book to be a summation of all the things I've learned in comics leading up to it," he says. Though he jokes that "people who want to write negative reviews of the book have a lot of puns ... they can use that title for," the book, like most of Tomine's work, is garnering critical acclaim and has been compared to that of authors such as Raymond Carver and Alice Munro. Tomine felt he'd finally reached a "comfort zone" with the short-story form ("Not that I'd mastered it or anything," he adds), and he had always wanted to try his hand at a longer project -- though he admits he wasn't sure he was prepared to make the leap. "It was a bit of a gamble," he says, "but that sort of uncertainty was something that I hadn't felt for awhile; I think I sort of enjoyed that." Shortcomings tells the "almost entirely fictional" story of Ben Tanaka, a 30-year-old theatre manager living in Berkeley. The book, which took five years to complete, is a heartbreaking work; each frame of simple black-and-white drawings conveys pages worth of emotion. Tomine, agrees Oliveros, is only getting better with age. "He's improved on every level," he says. "We're still near the beginning of his development as a cartoonist. It'll be very exciting to continue to watch him mature." It's a long way from those self-published stories Tomine penned as a teen. He doesn't even look at those anymore. He's even gone so far and asked that older material -- which was collected in 32 Stories: The Complete Optic Nerve Mini Comics -- be removed from publication. "I don't even want to look at recent stories," he admits. "It's like looking at old family photos or something. It's just too personal and too embarrassing for me." Now living in New York, Tomine is unsure what he'll work on next. For now, he'll continue to promote Shortcomings, a task which brings him to Toronto this weekend for the International Festival of Authors. "Working on this book was a lot about trying to expand or trying to move beyond the confines of what I felt I was capable of," he says. "Now that it's done and I have the book in front of me, I look at it and think, 'Boy, I can't believe how mildly I succeeded in that regard.' " He laughs. "I aim super high, and I think I'm going to totally change and do something completely extraordinary, and then I achieve [only] a fraction of that. But it's still something." -Toronto's International Festival of Authors presents Adrian Tomine in conversation with Sheila Heti on Oct. 27 at 3 p.m. Shortcomings is published by Drawn and Quarterly ($22.95). click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS in Eye Weekly Updated October 25, 2007 Books By Chris Randle EYE WEEKLY Long story Short Adrian Tomine's first long-form work after years of shorter stories, Shortcomings (Drawn & Quarterly, $22.95, 112 pages), centres on self-loathing Japanese-American Ben Tanaka and his nation-spanning quest to find the girl of his dreams (read: corn-fed and white). His only obstacle: his (Asian) girlfriend. Attachments screw up everyone's fantasies and delusions in this book. Tomine's spare realism and angsty characters have often left me cold, but this graphic novel's barbed treatment of racial and sexual politics is a progressive leap forward without abandoning his trademark style. It's funny, for one thing – a welcome return to the humour in the artist's early mini-comics after the wrist-slashing alienation and hapless emotional cripples featured in Summer Blonde, a collection of short stories culled from his series Optic Nerve. The jokes aren't exactly broad – Tomine was influenced by Dan Clowes' later work, rather than his earlier projects such as “The Sensual Santa” and “Needledick the Bugfucker.” Still, he's a sharp satirist, opening each chapter by skewering cringeworthy art and lacerating a particularly annoying film-nerd archetype in a single panel. Ben's ladykiller friend Alice is the most likeable character the cartoonist's ever created; warm and irreverent – the mere fact that she can stand the guy makes him a more sympathetic anti-hero. The entire cast of Shortcomings is livelier than Tomine's previous work, in fact. Where some of his earlier stories felt as though the cartoonist was moving attractive-looking automatons around a well-drafted set, this book is populated by nuanced, complicated people whose entanglements feel organic and genuine. Tomine has claimed that the prospect of drawing a longer story like this one terrified him, but the absence of the narration captions he's used before suggests greater confidence in his work and eliminates the distance that previously lay between his stories and the reader. His trademark minimalism still colours everything here, though: the austere storytelling, the pacing so cinematic and economical it almost feels miserly. While Tomine will probably never make the wild, freewheeling comics I tend to prefer, his cartooning is a pleasure nonetheless. The man knows his craft – I don't even want to know how many hours he spent clutching a Rapidograph to draw those painstaking backgrounds. His spotless lines demonstrate a masterful command of facial expressions, which reveal the emotional depth of his characters even when his dialogue can grate; they display brutal truths that his protagonists are only able to face themselves once it's too late. That's the thing about Tomine – unlike these mutually destructive characters, looking past his shortcomings is easy. ADRIAN TOMINE APPEARS AT THE INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF AUTHORS ON OCT 27, 3PM. INTERVIEWED BY SHEILA HETI, HOSTED BY PETER BIRKEMOE. $15; FREE FOR STUDENTS. STUDIO THEATRE.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   SHORTCOMINGS gets an A from Entertainment Weekly Updated October 25, 2007 Shortcomings (2007) Adrian Tomine A By Ken Tucker With delicate draftsmanship and dialogue, Adrian Tomine makes slacker anomie dramatic. Ben Tanaka is a likable complainer, an Asian-American loser in love who denies his friends' accusations that he's drawn only to white women. For Fans of… Dave Eggers, Daniel Clowes. Bottom Line Exploring race, adulthood, and ambition with exquisitely tuned humor and poignancy, Shortcomings is a graphic narrative as piercingly realistic as any prose fiction. A click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by Las Vegas Weekly Updated October 25, 2007 [Comics] Size matters October 11, 2007 by J. Caleb Mozzocco Adrian Tomine explores interracial relationships -- kinda -- in his new graphic novel God knows even the most simple and straightforward romantic relationships are complicated and can be difficult, oftentimes trying to navigate, offering fertile ground for drama—fictional or otherwise. But when you add racial sensitivities and identity politics into the mix, the metaphorical minefield of a relationship becomes an even trickier, more dangerous place. Adrian Tomine’s new graphic novel explores one such relationship, although to what degree race is even an issue in its conflicts is something the characters themselves seem to disagree on and, in one case, even constantly deny. It’s called Shortcomings (Drawn and Quarterly), and though the ruler graphic on the edge of the beautifully designed cover draws attention to a literal meaning, protagonist Ben Tanaka’s inability to please the woman in his life—and himself—likely has much less to do with the size of his penis than the kind of person he is. Tanaka manages a university-area movie theater in Berkeley and lives with his girlfriend, Miko. Their relationship seems to be full of more sniping and accusations than support and affection. Miko suspects Ben fetishizes white girls, a suspicion supported by the all-white porn stash she discovers, and that he’s secretly ashamed of being Japanese-American, like her. When she takes an internship with the Asian-American Film Institute in New York City, they find themselves in a four-month break-taking phase, which, after a few long-distance phone fights, he exploits to try and bed a white girl. Lucky for him, a flirty, exhibitionist performance artist has just started working for him at the theater. Ben’s what you might call a piece of work, but, at the same time, he’s pretty much a normal person—he’s you, and everybody you know. And that’s what makes Tomine’s downplayed drama so biting. On its surface, Shortcomings is merely a book about a single relationship ending, although the hang-ups of the characters involved open it up to a more charged reading about identity. It’s hardly a polemic, though, or anything other than a straight realistic detailing of a relationship; if it addresses race or gender issues, it’s because the people in the book are dealing with them, not because Tomine wants to make them deal with them. It’s that subtle hand that separates Tomine’s work from the pack, even in today’s increasingly crowded graphic-novel market. Well, that subtlety and Tomine’s amazing artwork. His figures and settings are all so realistic that they seem to exist in the space between reality and drawings of reality. Staring at a Tomine panel, it’s impossible to tell where a pencil or pen touched the paper, and where Tomine moved it next. But at the same time his clean, crisp, black-and-white art doesn’t look quite photo-realistic either, eschewing lighting effects and the static staging that usually accompanies highly representational work. The combined effect is a story that doesn’t seem told as much as captured, with settings you can walk right into and people you meet rather than read about. There are still a few months to go, but thus far Shortcomings is a strong contender for the best graphic novel of the year.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by Chicago Sun Times Updated October 25, 2007 Fear and self-loathing in a state of self-awareness October 21, 2007 BY MARK ATHITAKIS CHICAGO SUN TIMES Ben Tanaka, the hero of Adrian Tomine's new graphic novel, Shortcomings, is educated enough to know a few things about the world, and cynical enough to hate practically everything in it. As the story opens, he's grousing to his girlfriend, Miko, about the crummy film they just watched at an Asian-American film festival in Berkeley, Calif. Soon it's clear that he interacts with just about everybody from behind a force-field of contempt. New York? Overrated. Airports? Full of hassles. Performance artists? Poseurs. People who make a big deal out of their ethnicity? Self-deluded. That last assertion plays into the novel's central conflict, because the one thing that Ben (who's of Japanese descent) seems to like unequivocally is white women. Soon after Miko grows exasperated with Ben and moves to New York, he calls Autumn, the blond he's just hired to work at the movie theater he manages. Whether this reflects a reasonable preference or speaks to his deep-seated neuroses about stereotypes and fitting in is Shortcomings' central concern, and it's to Tomine's credit that there's no artful resolution at the end. If anything, the problem gets worse, and the story's power comes from the way Ben's self-loathing threatens to swallow him whole just as he becomes aware of it. Tomine has an excellent ear for dialogue, which successfully sells the high-strung disconnection between Miko and Ben. ("How would you like it if I was obsessed with picture of big, muscular African-American men?" "Yeah right. ... You reach for your pepper spray the minute you see a black guy walking towards you on the street!") But he's doing just as much work in his drawing to make it clear that the two are headed for trouble. Ben and Miko rarely stand next to each other; Ben and Autumn's figures constantly overlap. He bemoans his fate to his friend Alice over lunch, but Tomine subtly makes it clear that Ben's not meeting her eyes. He's watching the blond walking to the counter to pay her bill. A fit of jealousy ultimately thrusts Ben into something like self-awareness: After learning that Miko has a new boyfriend and does side work as a model, he heads to New York to confront her. He's been roughed up by breakups with Autumn and another woman, and as he confronts Miko and meets Alice's new girlfriend, it's clear that his taste in women is a symptom of a larger emotional paralysis; his screw-it-all sarcasm, which he could once chalk up as cleverness, is annihilating his relationships. Somewhat less clear is how Ben earned those relationships in the first place. Ben had to be a likable person at some point for these women to interact with him, and though Ben is handsome, and polite and genial when he first meets Autumn, that's not quite the same thing as attractiveness. Tomine has boxed himself in to an extent: to portray the wreckage that self-hatred generates, Ben needs to be both unlikable and sociable, but he's more convincing as the guy cloistered with his porn DVDs than somebody who'll comfortably play boyfriend when his lesbian friend needs a date to a wedding. That doesn't discount the validity of Ben's struggle, though. Nor does it make Shortcomings any less compelling. Ben could easily have become a target for a writer's mockery, or an object of pity. But Tomine knows that those smart-ass wisecracks are evidence of larger problems, and his novel is a clear-eyed portrait of the toxicity of fear. Mark Athitakis is a free-lance writer based in the Washington, D.C., area. SHORTCOMINGS By Adrian Tomine Drawn & Quarterly, 108 pages, $19.95 • • Adrian Tomine will sign copies of Shortcomings at 7 p.m. Nov. 8 at Quimby's, 1854 W. North. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by The Record Updated October 19, 2007   click here to download the PDF (118.75 KB) Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   ADRIAN TOMINE interviewed by The Villager Updated October 19, 2007 Adrian Tomine, author of the comic series “Optic Nerve,” has just come out with his first, full-length graphic novel. Graphic novelist hits an optic nerve By Rachel Fershleiser THE VILLAGER October 17-23 2007 Subtle, literate, and superhero-free, Adrian Tomine is a cartoonist for the rest of us. His quietly moving tales of friendship and flailing relationships read like indie films or award-winning short stories. His dialogue is spare but honest, his characters are flawed but relatable, and his drawings capture a world of feeling in a simple line. He counts among his fans, not only more women and comic book newbies than most of his colleagues, but book world heavy hitters like Jonathan Lethem and Junot Diaz. “Shortcomings,” which came out last week, is actually his first graphic novel—his other books have been collections of individual pieces. His first big work since moving to New York from California, it focuses on cynical slacker Ben Tanaka as he tries to navigate his relationship with girlfriend Miko, his attraction to while women, and the web of stereotypes and assumptions that complicate everything. Originally serialized in Tomine’s long-beloved comic series “Optic Nerve,” it is now a lovely coffee table-ready hardcover. The new format seems to have added metaphorical as well as physical heft. Read straight through, “Shortcomings” provides a truly thought-provoking look at the role of race in contemporary America. It’s also funny, poignant, and a pleasure to read. Your books explore a lot of themes not traditionally associated with comics — were you into superheroes as a kid? I don’t know many good cartoonists that didn’t love comics as a kid. I read a lot of superhero comics, but also a lot of Archie and Harvey comics. What writers and artists to you admire, especially those from other media? Here’s a few, just off the top of my head: Philip Roth, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, Chip Kidd, Mark Oliver Everett, Richard McGuire, Larry David, Amy Bennett, Michael Haneke. How autobiographical is your work? You’d have to ask me that on a story-by-story basis. I did a lot of comics in the past that were explicitly autobiographical, almost like literal transcriptions of events from my life. My new book, “Shortcomings,” is probably the most “fictional” story I’ve written, although it might not seen that way to some readers. Was it a deliberate decision to make Ben look so much like you? Uh, I have a beard now, so we look nothing alike! I think there might’ve been somewhat of a deliberate decision to make this story seem autobiographical, and that would certainly contribute to that. How do you write from the point of view of characters nothing like yourself (you’re especially good with lesbians)? Well, thanks for the compliment, but I think it’s a mistake to assume that things like a character’s gender or sexual predilection would make them “nothing like yourself.” I find it pretty easy to get inside the minds of characters who might not be exactly like me in every way. In fact, some of those differences between me and the character in question actually help to organize my thoughts, and often allow me to channel specific sides of my personality into the story. How do you think such early success affected your career trajectory? It offered me a lot of encouragement early on that probably helped me to stick with it and keep trying, even when there was very little financial reward. On the downside, I think there was some amount of over-hype, and I’m sure some people were disappointed with the supposedly great work I was producing at the time. Of course in retrospect, I’d prefer that every step of my learning process from the last 15 years wasn’t put out on public display, but there’s not much I can do about it. Do you think fans have an especially intimate relationship with your characters? I take that kind of thing as a real compliment. I remember when I first discovered the comic book “Love & Rockets,” and I honestly felt like I’d just been introduced to a whole batch of real people. I think comics, in particular, invite that kind of connection between the reader and the creator. Why don’t you use thought bubbles? I’ve used thought bubbles in the past, but I just imposed a “no thought bubbles” rule on myself for “Shortcomings.” I wanted to attempt to create a fairly intimate, personal story that would be communicated only through the external. Do you come up with your stories ahead of time or just begin to draw? I usually do varying degrees of pre-planning before I actually start drawing. “Shortcomings” was very loosely plotted out in advance, and then I wrote each chapter as I arrived at it. I know there are some cartoonists who produce amazing work by being completely spontaneous, but I’m probably not on that level yet. Do California and New York have different influences on your work? At least right now they do, if only because I’m relatively new to New York. When I moved, Berkeley was feeling very familiar to me…I was very aware of a certain “cast of characters” that the city was comprised of. Everywhere I went I’d see someone I either knew or at least recognized, from restaurant employees, to homeless people, to neighbors, etc. And here in New York, I feel like I’m inundated with new experiences every time I set foot outside. I’d be surprised if that didn’t affect my work in some way. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS in the Tampa Tribune Updated October 18, 2007 Graphic Novel Draws On Relationship Issues By KEVIN WALKER Published: October 14, 2007 'Shortcomings,' by Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly, $20) Ben Tanaka, the central character in this graphic novel for adults, is self-centered, judgmental and unpleasant. He suffers from self-esteem issues. He's an Asian-American with a thing for white girls. This obviously doesn't sit well with his live-in Asian-American girlfriend, Miko. Long past trying to make it work, the two instead turn every conversation into an argument. Sometimes it's about his wandering eye. Sometimes it's about her nagging him about his wandering eye. They're in the proverbial bad place. Page 19 sums it up nicely. Miko invites Ben to come to bed. He says he's not tired. She responds, 'Well, we don't have to go to sleep right away.' She's almost challenging. He tells her there are some DVDs he wants to check out. Ouch. His only friend is Alice, a Korean-American lesbian. Their banter is worthy of a Judd Apatow film (Alice, at school for her doctorate, says her goal is to 'at least make out with a hundred girls by the time I get my Ph.D.'). But the profane Alice shows profound insight into Ben. She constantly calls him on his contradictions. She seems to be the only one who sees sweetness beneath the bitter exterior. When Miko leaves San Francisco for an internship in New York City, Ben pursues other women. When that doesn't satisfy, he starts obsessing about Miko, who is not returning his calls. This leads him to a fateful trip to the East Coast. While 'Shortcomings' has points to make about the modern male, racial hang-ups and romance, Tomine never sacrifices story for message. That's to his credit and the reader's pleasure.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   ADRIAN TOMINE in Now Updated October 18, 2007 NOW October 18 Adrian Tomine has been compared to filmmaker Eric Rohmer, but in Shortcomings he seems more like Woody Allen – that is, if Allen were Asian, 30-something and had started out on the West Coast instead of the East. Tomine's a funny/serious chronicler of urban relationships, and this is his Annie Hall. Ben Tanaka is a judgmental, slightly insecure schlub working in a Berkeley movie theatre. When his girlfriend, Miko, moves to New York for an internship, he's stuck hanging out with his promiscuous dyke best friend, Alice, and reluctantly begins dating again. Then he finds out what Miko is really doing in Manhattan. Readers of Tomine's previous books will recognize not only the perfect cadence of his characters' voices (I guarantee you'll know these people) but the subtle artistry of his drawings. Few graphic novelists can suggest as much with the angle of an eyelid or the tilt of a head. An extended scene in a parking lot – much of it silent – is rich with complicated emotions. Look for a couple of visual jokes at the beginning of chapters: some panels make us think we're entering a different kind of narrative and then take a turn. Other graphic tricks play with dialogue bubbles. Even the flower pattern on the dust jacket takes on resonance by the final chapter. But what's so thrilling about this book is that it marks the first time Tomine, a fourth-generation Japanese American, has dealt with his ethnicity in a sustained way. He gets it completely right, from the constant debates about stereotypes and representation to less often voiced feelings of sexual anxiety and paranoia. Tomine is interviewed by Sheila Heti October 27, 3 pm, in the Studio Theatre. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by the Michigan Daily Updated October 18, 2007 U. Michigan: BOOK REVIEW: 'Shortcomings' far from uplifting 12 October 2007 By Nora Feldhusen, Michigan Daily (U. Michigan) ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Adrian Tomine's first novel "Shortcomings" illustrates the power of dialogue, which is somewhat of a surprise for a graphic novel. The book's stark style consists of simplistic pen drawings of the characters, often overshadowed by their constant chatter contained in speech bubbles. The only background information we get is a military-style introduction to each character: profile picture, height, birthplace, profession. The hero of "Shortcomings" is Ben Tanaka, a graduate student dropout in Berkeley, Calif. Ben manages Berekely's movie theater, which is more a side job to his primary interests - sitting in coffee shops with his best friend and whining about social idiocy and his sexual inadequacies. Tomine's venture into the graphic novel allows him to elaborate on issues that aren't fully realized in his shorter comic strips. In 108 pages of simple drawings and dialogue, Tomine addresses life crises, race relations and minority status. Ben is Japanese-American with a thing for blond hair, blue-eyed American girls, much to his Japanese girlfriend Miko's dismay. His best friend, Alice, was born in Korea and is a lesbian, much to her conservative Christian parents' dismay. Things begin to unravel as Miko and Alice leaves Ben for New York City. The two women leave Ben behind literally and figuratively. Ben is the typical stuck-in-a-rut character. He's miserable, but his sole outlets for unhappiness are criticism, sarcasm and self-deprecation. The story of Ben Tanaka is not unlike most coming-of-age stories, although he's supposedly 30. So if 30 is the new 20, and Ben is just beginning to find himself at 30, what are we supposed to be doing now? "Shortcomings," short and accessible, offers a glimpse into the possibilities of post-undergraduate life - basically, into everyone's worst fears. There is a lot of talking, pretty much only talking, about what each character wants. But as Miko puts it, Ben is "pathologically afraid of change." Tomine blatantly portrays the various stereotypical lifestyle choices of late 20-somethings. And what's a more appropriate medium than a graphic novel - usually equated with comics and growing up - to relay such a prototypical coming-of-age story? His style is part of a larger movement geared toward portraying the trends and vices of today's youth through visual graphics. The same pen-and-ink drawings are used in David Rees's popular comic strip "Get Your War On." Rees moves somewhat beyond adolescence and hormones to discuss issues like the aftermath of Sept. 11 and the war in Iraq. Yet his use of comics to address important issues is similar. There's a level of accessibility and creative expression inherent in this style. This new generation of graphic novelists shows promise for a fresh look at socio-political issues. "Shortcomings," however, doesn't leave us feeling particularly optimistic - we are left with Ben, who remains stuck inside the graphic novel, clinging to the unreality of enduring childhood.   Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   EXIT WOUNDS, SPENT and SHORTCOMINGS in the Georgia Straight Updated October 18, 2007 Georgia Straight October 11, 2007 Exit Wounds (By Rutu Modan. Drawn & Quarterly, 172 pp, $21.95) Koby Franco has a poor relationship with his father, but when his dad's girlfriend shares her fear that he's been blown up in a terrorist explosion outside Tel Aviv, Koby consents to help her solve the mystery: is his father's the one unidentified corpse? (The story comes from Israeli filmmaker David Ofek's 2003 doc No. 17.) Rutu Modan's detailed panels–filled with average people going about their affairs (why are so many comics told as though the protagonist is the only person in the world?) and conveyed in the desaturated hues of despair–speak of a country where death is a constant presence and kindnesses can't be counted on. Bonus: the ending, though not the one you might expect, is a happy one. Shortcomings (By Adrian Tomine. Drawn & Quarterly, 108 pp, $22.95) Adrian Tomine is the reigning king of comic ennui, and with Shortcomings, which collects issues 9 to 11 of his Optic Nerve, he continues his wonderfully misanthropic rule. The story centres on Ben Tanaka, a typically maladjusted Tomine character with poor social skills and corrosive envy. The aimlessness of modern life, a distrust of ambition, and an interest in surveillance are all vintage, but Shortcomings is Tomine's most explicitly racial book yet, using Tanaka's relationship with a fellow Japanese American and his sexual yearnings for white women to explore issues of assimilation and self-hatred. Shortcomings isn't the happiest book you'll ever read, but it's eerily familiar, like something shared in a midnight call to your last friend on Earth. (Tomine makes a rare Vancouver appearance on November 13; for info, contact Sophia Books at 604-684-0484.) Spent (By Joe Matt. Drawn & Quarterly, 124 pp, $22.95) Joe Matt returns with the latest bound collection of his ongoing series, Peepshow. Here, issues 11 to 14 document the cartoon version of Matt compulsively collecting and editing porn footage; we're treated to several pages of his alter ego lining up and dubbing just the right frames. "God help me, I don't wanna end upa sex-crazed old man, living all alone in a basement somewhere," he tells himself, but unless his–only–friends Chester Brown and Seth (real-life cartoonist buddies) can pull him out of himself, it seems he's already holding his hermit-perv destiny in his own oily hands. The clean lines and flat duo tones put Matt squarely in line with powerhouses Seth and Brown. click here to read more Featured artists Adrian Tomine Joe Matt Rutu Modan            Featured products Exit Wounds Spent Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by E!Online Updated October 18, 2007 Identity Crisis: Adrian Tomine's Shortcomings Categories: graphic novel, comic books, sex Uptight Asian nerds. Weird arty types. Horny lesbians. Stereotypes, if you're looking for them, abound in Shortcomings, the new Drawn + Quarterly graphic novel by Optic Nerve series creator Adrian Tomine. And that's Tomine's point: Pigeonholing people by race, gender identity or level of nerdiness can cloud your ability to see anything else about a person, including things that could prove to be way more pertinent. Like, say, the fact that they're crazy! The story concerns Ben Tanaka, the cloddish manager of an art-house movie theater, and his exploits (or lack thereof) with women—i.e., his girlfriend, Miko, his best friend, Alice, and the various Caucasian women he lusts after. The black-and-white artwork is clean and clever, and you should check this out to see some of the inspirations for the locations. The book's title, not to mention the ruler printed along the cover, reveal much about Ben: He has an abiding fear that his Asian anatomy won't satisfy the white women he so desperately wants to be with. Ben is pretty unsatisfying, but the irony is that this has nothing to do with the size of his penis. He's just kind of a dick. But Tomine's engaging, quick read doesn't let anyone off the hook—not Ben's long-suffering girlfriend or his vivacious and promiscuous best friend. Despite this, the writing is subtle and quietly funny, managing to elicit feelings for Ben even as we'd like to sock him in the nose. Or kick him in the...well, you'll just have to read that part. We all have our shortcomings. Tomine's, however, are worth your attention.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   SHORTCOMINGS in the Edmonton Journal Updated October 18, 2007 Character building Getting to know cartoonist Ardian Tomine's strengths ... and Shortcomings Gilbert A. Bouchard, edmontonjournal.com Published: Sunday, October 14 Cartoonist Adrian Tomine specifically set out to make life difficult for himself with the publication of his full-length graphic novel, Shortcomings. For starters, the critically acclaimed artist decided to write a highly non-traditional comic book that's being described as a "falling-out-of-love story," a book that also boasts a highly unlikeable protagonist. "There are some conservative readers that will be disappointed that the most mature character in the book is a lesbian, and the male heterosexual lead character is the most flawed, but there is no point spending five years writing about characters that have been seen before," says Tomine. He's not kidding. Shortcomings' central character - Ben Tanaka - is a particularly insensitive and rather unpleasant personage, and would be as much in any genre of literature, graphic or otherwise. Being charitable, you could call him a self-obsessed slacker, a contrarian's contrarian and a self-professed "race-blind" Asian-American, whose uncomfortable longing for Caucasian women eventually alienates him from his girlfriend, Miko Hayashi. If you're Hayashi, however, you'd call him a depressive with "anger management ... weird self-hatred issues and relentless negativity ... you're critical of everything, you have no career ambitions anymore, you have ... what? One friend?" Harsh, yes, but a character-building exercise that is more typical than not for a comic-book writer known for his hard-hitting characters and dramatic tensions. Novelist Jonathan Lethem has compared Tomine to Canadian literary icon Alice Munro in his "mastery of narrative time." Another Canadian connection of sorts, the 33-year-old New York-based artist has been published for the past 13 years by Canada's Drawn & Quarterly Press. Still, this initial shock at the character's negative ways has come as a bit of shock for Tomine, noting that he found Tanaka's character "fun" to write. "A lot of people have told me they could not connect with the protagonist, which was sort of a surprise to me because it all felt very real, very evident to me." Tomine also wanted this book to explore in some depth some pretty serious subject matter, notably sexual and ethnic identities. "I've been challenged about ethnicity from day one of my career. I've always had journalists asking me why I wasn't writing about characters of Japanese descent. I always saw this as pretty odd given that I'm a fourth-generation (Japanese)-American and my family has been here longer than many of the critics challenging me on that issue. So many critics, readers and comic-book fans had visions of some story I was holding back." So, Tomine decided to take up the challenge of addressing ethnic identity issues while also "staying true to my other interests and work." The upshot was a "strange book" that specifically avoids "feel-good, politically correct" beliefs. "My guiding principle was to be honest and realistic over being positive and uplifting or politically correct or anything like that. That aspect of the story is somewhat reflective of my own personality and a reflection of other work and my own life. I also have plenty of friends like Ben who are always saying what they should be saying," he says. Tomine's hunger for honest and realistic storytelling has led him to develop a particular style of comic-book narrative. "I use no narration, no voiceover, no thought balloons and no flashback. I'm trying to capture real-life experiences in as realistic a way as possible," he says. "I want to go deep and personal, but I also want to keep it clean and straightforward at the same time." click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            ADRIAN TOMINE on PopCandy Updated October 18, 2007 Podcast: Adrian Tomine talks 'Shortcomings' I'm excited to share this week's podcast because it includes an interview with one of my favorite writers and artists, Adrian Tomine. Tomine is the creator of the award-winning comic-book series Optic Nerve, and his latest graphic novel, Shortcomings (Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95), just arrived in stores. It tells the story of Ben Tanaka, a theater manager who begins dating white women after his girlfriend, Miko, moves across the country. It's funny, poignant, beautifully drawn and a deliciously fast read. Tomine and I chat about the long process of writing Shortcomings (he began the story five years ago), its themes of race, the possibility of an Optic Nerve movie and other topics. I was hoping to see the artist at the Small Press Expo this weekend, but he'll be getting married instead! He did just launch a book tour, though, so try to catch him on the road.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   SHORTCOMINGS in the Sacramento Bee Updated October 5, 2007 READ SACRAMENTO BEE October 2nd, 2007 About a boy: Sacramento native Adrian Tomine explores a crumbling relationship in his latest graphic novel, "Shortcomings" (Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95, 104 pages). In it, San Francisco resident Ben Tanaka tries to navigate the intricacies of love, race and kung fu. As always, Tomine's work is equal parts elegance and wreckage, comedy and despair. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) SHORTCOMINGS in Nichi Bei Times Updated October 5, 2007 Tomine's ‘Shortcomings' Is Anything But From the Nichi Bei Times Weekly October 4, 2007 By BEN HAMAMOTO Nichi Bei Times "Why does everything have to be some big statement about race?" Ben Tanaka, the main character in Adrian Tomine's new book, "Shortcomings," proclaims. For the entirety of his career, Tomine has told human stories in which race and politics, if present at all, are relegated to the background or subtext. "Shortcomings" is probably the closest he will come to making "a big statement about race." For the first time in his comic book career, Tomine puts both racial and political issues front and center, however, much like his other work he explores the issues from all sides, rather than pass judgment. The surface confrontation of racial themes is one of many firsts that "Shortcomings" represents for the author. While Tomine has gained international recognition for his short stories that usually run up to about 30 pages, "Shortcomings" is his first graphic novel, a sustained narrative weighing in at over 100 pages. It tells the story of Ben Tanaka, a Japanese American slacker who manages an art house theater near UC Berkeley. His girlfriend, Miho, programs a local Asian American film festival. Their relationship, which seems to have been on the decline for some time, starts to reach its breaking point after a screening of a cheesy film one of Miho's friends directed. Ben, who is relentlessly, aggressively negative, is especially critical of the film, going as far as saying "everyone knows it's garbage, but they clap for it anyway because it was made by some Chinese girl from Oakland." The argument escalates and Miho accuses Ben of "being ashamed of being Asian." Her suspicions are not eased when she later finds a set of porn DVDs in his desk starring only white women. Ben discusses his failing relationship over lunch in a Rockridge Crepery with his best, and only, friend, Alice, a Korean American grad student doing her best to hook up with as many girls at Mills College as she can manage. Alice is, though flawed, by far the most likable character in the book. Despite having a stereotypical "Korean temper" and being given to impulsive actions, she is practical enough to make these things work for her. Alice knows how to handle Ben and keep him from stepping over boundaries. She acts as a patient voice of reason and tells him that he is the opposite of one of their old dorm mates who used to blame all his problems on anti-Asian discrimination. Ben, she says, refuses to acknowledge the way race impacts his life. He brushes off her analysis as his eye wanders to a white woman at the restaurant counter. Making Ben such a disagreeable character is a bold decision on Tomine's part. In his first long form comic, in which the reader's interest needs to be sustained over many more pages than his previous work, he sets up a protagonist who is more irritating than ingratiating. Making a reader care enough to want to continue reading about a character like Ben is a tough job, but Tomine does it admirably. He manages to make the reader care about Ben. Each decision he makes, each cruel or stupid word that comes out of his mouth, doesn't make the reader hate him. Instead it makes the reader feel embarrassed on his behalf. And while it is obvious that Ben is overdue for some comeuppance, and obvious that it will be good for him in the long run, the reader is afraid to see what he'll be left with if his defensive negativity is taken away. So when Miho decides to take a summer job in New York, the reader can only dread what will happen next. The two relationships with white women that Ben pursues begin to expose the source of his bitterness and he is suddenly faced with his own hypocricy and limitations. His troubles only worsen when Alice moves to New York as well. She makes a surprising find in the big apple however, and is thus able to lure Ben out to see it with his own eyes. When he arrives a series of events unfold that forces him to accept some uncomfortable truths. Ben's realizations in the last stretch of the book are indicated subtly, with a facial expression here, or a few words there. And though he has learned things, we are given no indication of how he will apply the new-found self knowledge. In "Shortcomings," Tomine takes on race in much the way he takes on all aspects of humanity; he treats it as something convoluted, contradictory, and ultimately unsolvable. As mentioned earlier, the book opens with a scene from a sentimental, obvious Asian American film, complete with a voice over about identity and intergenerational conflict. Tomine is poking fun, but he is also signaling self-awareness about what he is doing. The same can be said of what he is doing by opening the second chapter with a pretensious piece of deliberately disagreeable underground "alternative' art. He is dismantling the alternative with these pages and again signaling something about what his own art strives to avoid being. For the last chapter, he shows an American apparel style set of fashion model photos, a mix of the populist, obvious sensibility from the first chapter and the pretensions edginess of the second. Needless to say, it manages to be more despicable than the sum of its parts. In the book, Tomine dismantles self-righteous views on race in a similar fashion. He lampoons Asian fetishes, but also self-righteous, hypocritical critiques of it. As Alice points out early on, but Ben and his dorm mate are wrong. Her girlfriend Meredith later makes what is perhaps the most rational argument by telling Ben not to make "moralistic generalizations" about Asian white couples and then tells him "if you dig deep enough into anyone's sexuality, you're bound to find something you'd rather not examine too closely." She then, however, uses that as grounds to ignore the issues. By taking this approach however, Tomine might not be leading anyone to a direct conclusion, but will hopeful give anyone who has considered these issues something to think about. And for all the seriousness, Tomine doesn't forget to keep the reader entertained and occasionally go for a laugh. There are three panels in the scene where Ben meets Miho's lover which are comedic gold. With "Shortcomings" Tomine proves that he is capable of doing graphic novels and taking on Asian American issues with the nuance and subtlety that has made him famous.   click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC)   ADRIAN TOMINE interviewed by Sacramento News & Reviews Updated October 4, 2007 Yo, Adrian A conversation with Sacramento native and comic Adrian Tomine. Shortcomings By Jonathan Kiefer With the release this week of the graphic novel Shortcomings, Sacramento native Adrian Tomine, 33, publishes his longest, most ambitious work to date. It's the three-part story, first serialized in Tomine's highly collectible comic Optic Nerve, of a surly, somewhat nebbish 30-year-old Japanese-American man with—among other troubles—a certain jaded fondness for white women. A marvel of honed understatement and emotional sophistication, Shortcomings delivers yet again on the promise first made in the monthly comic strip Tomine wrote and drew for Tower Records' Pulse! magazine as a teenager. By now, though, with his poignantly quotidian scenes of young people navigating the denials and double standards of relationships, the personal and political aches of true intimacy, Tomine might already be a master. Now living in Brooklyn, he took time out from a busy schedule—including his own wedding last weekend—to talk to SN&R about practice making perfect, guilt over schmoozing in the "real" book world, and why he'd be lost doing comics about barbarians or space aliens. Why tell stories in this medium? I could go on and on about why I think comics is such a great medium, but I think the truth is, it's just the one thing that I've ever shown any real aptitude for. I've always suspected that any ability I have now is not so much the result of any innate talent, but more just the accumulation of a lifetime of practice. And why this particular story? I'm guessing you didn't just sit down and say: "I want to tell a graphic-novel tale dramatizing issues of race and sexual jealousy among the young people of today." Or if you did, you sure knew how to avoid making it phony and preachy and ridiculous. This was a story that I had been working on, almost subconsciously, for many years before I ever decided to commit it to paper. I think I was probably grouping certain ideas together in my mind, and then it seemed like it was too much for one of my usual short stories. So when I decided to challenge myself a little bit and attempt a longer story, this was the material that I naturally gravitated towards. And thanks for saying it wasn't phony and preachy and ridiculous. Your work keeps getting compared—favorably and deservedly—to great movies and short stories. It's generous praise, but what does it say about people's willingness (or lack thereof) to take comics and graphic novels on their own terms? I think we're at an unusual point in terms of how America thinks about comic books. It's as if the general, adult population is finally willing to afford comics some respect, but the highest praise they can offer is to say that a comic is kind of like, or almost as good as, something from a different medium. Not to dwell on the autobiographical elements of your work, but I think people respond to your fluency with auras of unsettledness, of lonesome, melancholic ambivalence. As you've become more established and unequivocally successful (and a New Yorker, and married, etc.), how do you figure your work might evolve? I'd have to look into a crystal ball to answer that one! While my stories have rarely been strictly autobiographical, they unavoidably reflect something about my real thoughts and my real life, so I'm sure all those things you mentioned will somehow find their way into my writing. I love your draftsmanship, and eye for compositional details, and ear for dialogue—but I think your sense of rhythm is also crucially important, and sets you apart from many other artists. Can you talk about how you compose a given sequence, how you pace the emotional beats of each scene? Does the imagery come first, or the dialogue, or...? I remember asking some of my cartooning heroes similar questions when I was younger, and being crestfallen when they told me that a lot of that stuff was just intuitive. And now I think I have some sense of what they meant: I can never really articulate what I'm striving for or what I'm frustrated by in any given scene, but I just know when something doesn't feel right, and I hack away at it until it does. I think I have a real advantage in this regard due to the fact that I'm working in a very realistic setting. I always have verisimilitude to use as a criteria or goal. I don't know what I would do if I was writing about barbarians and space aliens. I'd be constantly asking myself things like, "Well, what would this made-up creature do in this invented scenario on this non-existent planet?" and feeling like there was no clear answer. I guess what I'm saying is that it's been helpful to me to be a fairly uncreative writer! Part of what makes Shortcomings so rich, despite its deceptive minimalism, is the characterization. Even the relatively minor characters can be wonderfully maddening and inexplicably contradictory. How do you develop these characters? I hate to keep dodging your questions in a way, but I don't feel like I could give a really good, honest answer without boring the majority of your readers to tears. Again, it's a lot more intuitive than it is systematic or explainable. I think there are some people who read my work and assume that I'm basically just transcribing from life, and that's rarely the case. There's certainly elements of real life in there, and that even includes observation from a distance or conjecture, but then there's kind of an inexplicable mental process in which I keep struggling with a given character until they "feel right." There are of course other great details, too. I love the little rhyme you make with that image of a woman's hair falling on Ben's pillow. And in fact that pillowcase motif comes up in the first chapter (and on the cover) before we even realize its full importance. Do you have a system for installing these visual cues in your work—is it something that comes to you early in the process, or later, closer to the end? Thanks for noticing all that! For me, that kind of stuff works best when it's not forced. I've tried doing that in a more conscious way in the past, and I've always felt like it was way too obvious and imposed. That flower pattern thing you're talking about developed pretty organically as I was writing the comic, and I think I was probably a little more strategic when it came to the use of it in the book design. That was one of the nice things about working in this longer format: I was able to let little ideas like that just emerge as I worked. There's a lot less room for improvisation or "happy accidents" when you're writing a very short story. Can you comment on the relative pleasures or maybe frustrations of working in an ongoing serial format versus a single self-contained volume? It seems reductive to describe Shortcomings as simply an Optic Nerve "collection." Will there be more multi-part series? For this one, how did you know three was the right number of parts? Two parts seemed too skimpy, and I didn't know if I'd have the stamina and focus to do four. One of the downsides to the recent cultural elevation that comics have experienced in America is the fact that the market has started to dictate a change in format. "Graphic novels" are now the dominant iteration of comics in terms of getting sold in regular bookstores and on Amazon, and also just in terms of being treated with any kind of respect. What used to be known simply as a comic book has now been semantically downgraded to a "pamphlet," or worse, a "floppy." I actually still like comic books, and I like going to buy them at comic stores, so that was part of the motivation for publishing Shortcomings in serialized form originally. I probably felt a little guilty knowing that when the story was finished, I would be publishing it as a hardcover book, and kind of schmoozing a bit with the "real" book world. So I thought it was kind of a nice thing to still put it out in comics form, and basically give comic stores and their patrons exclusive access to it. Ironically, one of the main responses I got when I did that was from readers who were annoyed at the long gaps between issues! One guy, whom I imagined sounding a lot like the comic shop owner on The Simpsons, wrote to inform me that he would be removing Optic Nerve from his weekly "saver list" to punish me for my poor work ethic. It also occurs to me that if you told these sequences in a different order, our sympathies might really change. Can you talk about what sort of feelings or reactions you want your readers to have, and what you do to achieve those results? Well, I can explain a bit about what I strive for, but I don't want to seem like I'm waving the "mission accomplished" banner. Basically, I like the idea of a reader having shifting or conflicting feelings towards the characters. I know one of the things writers try to avoid is flat characters, but the thing I dislike even more than that is the character who has exactly two surprising or contradictory sides. You see this a lot in movies, where there's, say, a despicable, racist cop, but then we learn that he's got an ailing parent that he's very tender towards. I feel like to just flop the audience's sympathy once, and in like a 180-degree turn, it becomes the worst kind of trick...the kind that the audience is immediately aware of. Life would be pretty amazing if it was like that, but at least in my experience, I have kind of an endlessly evolving or deepening feeling towards people I know. You've been working with these characters and this world for a few years now. How if at all have your feelings about them evolved? Have any of the letters you've received influenced your attitude? For that matter, has any of your mail influenced the direction of the story? I probably would've had a different answer if you'd asked me this six months or a year ago, when I was still at work on the story. But the way my mind works, for whatever reason, is that as soon as a story is printed and distributed, it's basically sealed in amber to me. I don't have any real feelings towards the fictional characters anymore, partially due to the fact that I almost never go back and re-read my work from that point on. As for the letters I've received, I'd say I was surprised by some of them, but it was probably too late for them to really influence the story at that point. From very early on, I've received a lot of inexplicably vehement letters, both positive and negative, and I think that's kind of inured me to the point that I take everything with a grain of salt. Given how far you've come, and how far you hope to go with the form, what do you figure is your biggest challenge? Are there shortcomings of your own that get in your way? I think one of the greatest quandaries that an artist who is striving for a lengthy career faces is the fact that often their greatest strengths come to be viewed as their greatest weaknesses. In other words, if you do the same thing too many times, no matter how great it was initially, and no matter how much you were encouraged to go in that direction, you will eventually be criticized for that. So I'm certainly not blind to that challenge. I think I also need to keep reminding myself that for many years, drawing comics was my hobby...something that I did purely for enjoyment. By the time I was finishing up Shortcomings, and I'd been writing and drawing in essentially a very prescribed mode for four or five years, it was starting to really feel like a job. And then recently, I drew a 16-page mini-comic just for fun, and it was completely refreshing and invigorating. It was kind of like a palate-cleanser between courses. What sort of claim can Sacramento still make on you? It was one thing when you were close at hand in the Bay Area, but now you're long settled in Brooklyn. I know you can't make predictions, but do you have any feeling about whether Sacramento people or places or moods might ever figure into your work again? I still visit Sacramento at least a few times per year, so it's not like I've completely lost touch with my hometown. It's always a little bit emotional for me because I watch the town evolve in fairly dramatic increments. I'll be driving around and notice that the Kinko's where I made the first Optic Nerves has shut down, or the cafe where I used to hang out with my first girlfriend has changed names, or something like that. I think spending my teenage years there had an indelible effect on me, one which colors my perception of any new city I move to. Even after living in Berkeley for 10 years, I still had the feeling of being a transplant, and that same feeling is even stronger here in New York. click here to read more Featured artist Adrian Tomine            Featured product Shortcomings (HC) <