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News Briefs featuring Adrian Tomine
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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
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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"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.
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"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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 naïve 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.
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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 |
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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, £14.99)
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, £14.99)
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, £14.99)
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, £7.99)
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, £9.99)
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, £17.99)
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, £13.99 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, £18.99)
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.
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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
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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.
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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, £9.99/ £9.49) 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, £12.99/ £11.69) 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.
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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."
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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.
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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."
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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SHORTCOMINGS reviewed by Comic Book Bin
Updated January 10, 2008
Shortcomings
Leroy Douresseaux
Jan 2, 2008
COMIC BOOK BIN
Cartoonist Adrian Tomine (Optic Nerve) recently saw the publication of his first hardcover original graphic novel, Shortcomings. This book, which mixes ethnic identity and racial politics with recreational sex and relationship dysfunction, continues Tomine’s outstanding work as an observer of contemporary relationships.
After his Asian-American (Japanese) girlfriend, Miko Hayashi, leaves San Francisco for an internship in New York City, Asian-American (Japanese) Ben Tanaka gets to exercise his lust for white women by going on actual dates (instead of being relegated to porno). Ben’s predilection for the white goddess had been a point of contention between Ben and Miko. Miko strongly suspected that Ben has a wandering eye for white women, and she made a point of telling him every chance she got, even going so far as to suggest that Ben is embarrassed about being Asian. Of course, he saw it as no big deal, and claimed not to have a “type” when it came to being attracted to women.
There were more heated arguments and bitterness between the two, and now, Miko is in New York, and maybe something said (or unsaid) before she left is the reason she doesn’t return Ben’s phone calls. So when fellow Asian-American (Korean immigrant) and San Francisco-to-NYC transplant Alice Kim summons Ben to New York, he’s in for a surprise, even though he shouldn’t be surprised.
Storytellers are supposed to make their characters likeable. While this is true (to an extent), even when dealing with antagonists and bad guys, some storytellers excel at creating characters that are not likeable. They are, however, eminently engaging, even being as interesting and fascinating as real people. Adrian Tomine, revealed to be something of a prodigy when Drawn & Quarterly published Optic Nerve #1 in 1995, is a cartoonist and graphic novelist who creates rich, sparkling characters that seize readers’ imaginations even when annoying them.
In Shortcomings, Tomine has created such riveting characters, so obviously pathetic, but so surprisingly winning and ultimately human. They are so like us that Tomine can be described as Shakespearean in his ability to create humanity in fiction.
Ben and Miko, always dissatisfied and yearning, inject pettiness into the dynamic of their relationship, fighting about things that are so often insignificant to the larger picture. If nothing is ever enough, even love, can they last as a couple? Socio-political arguments move to the fore, and suddenly deeper issues take a backseat. It’s possible for Ben and Miko to seem less like a couple than “friends with benefits,” and the friendship might end over a trivial argument about why black men… ooops, I mean Asian men like white women.
It’s so easy to get disgusted with these two (and their friend, the bed-hopping Alice Kim), but Ben and the rest of the cast are so interesting; they cannot be ignored. Tomine engages his readers, like an accomplished illusionist conning his audience into his staged reality. Whether they are worthy of sympathy, disgust, or maybe even mild empathy, you gotta pay attention to Ben, Miko, and company. So the secret is not likeable characters, but fascinating, remarkable figures that drag you into their world.
Brutal, honest, provocative, and funny, Adrian Tomine brings the reader into a minefield of human foibles – a place where conflict is built on mutual hypocrisies and double standards. Shortcomings is simply a grand adventure into contemporary people.
A
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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
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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 Nuñez. --> Thu 11/8, 7 PM, Quimby's Bookstore, 1854 W. North, 773-342-0910. ÑJerome Ludwig .
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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.
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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.
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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)
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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ADRIAN TOMINE mentioned by Comic Book Bin
Updated November 2, 2007
Adrian Tomine in Toronto
By Avi Weinryb
Oct 25, 2007
COMIC BOOK BIN
Toronto's annual literary celebration, the International Festival of Authors, has rolled into town and this year it features Adrian Tomine amongst its ‘graphic novelist’ offerings.
Tomine is the highly regarded author of the Optic Nerve series. His masterfully produced, ever-growing body of work is published by Montreal’s Drawn and Quarterly. His illustrations have also been featured in many mainstream magazines, as well as on the merchandise of rock band Weezer.
A new novel, Shortcomings, is Tomine’s first attempt at a long-form graphic novel. Its content is collected from its originally serialized format in the Optic Nerve series.
Adrian Tomine is to be interviewed by Toronto novelist Sheila Heti in an event hosted by Peter Birkemoe, co-owner of The Beguiling comic shop. The event is to take place on Saturday, October 27th at 3:00pm at the Studio Theatre at York Quay Ctr, 235 Queens Quay West . Tickets may be purchased through the Festival’s web site.
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