In October his publisher, Drawn & Quarterly, will put out the collected issues, as story once entitled "White on Rice", as a hardcover now entitled Shortcomings. You can pre-order your copy here, and unless you've bought or are planning to buy all three comic book issues, do it.
Tomine, 33 years old, recently moved from his longtime Berkeley home to Brooklyn, and while he hasn't changed his deadpan, wry, semi-tragic story voice, he's upped the ante bigtime.
Tomine's original Optic Nerve comics were usually four stories, give or take, each in a kind of post-punk, post-grad Raymond Carver style where, as Elizabeth Chou writes:
Adrian Tomine has a way of taking his already lonely characters and ripping them even further away from society, even as they attempt in socially weird ways to reach out. With the exact same motion, he sets up a psychological wind tunnel that pulls unsuspecting readers into the minds of those isolated characters. Though I wouldn’t call this a formula of his, this is usually the thing about Tomine’s work that gets me.
That's his meal ticket, such as it is. The first major descendant of 50% of the Love & Rockets team, Jaime Hernandez, and somewhat mentored by Dan Clowes of Ghostworld fame, Tomine combines a graphic black & white look (no greyscale, just crosshatching) that strives for perfection with a flirtingly cynical realism about modern lives and our countless tiny deaths of the spirit.
Ben Tanaka, the emotionally stunted protagonist of the three-issue series, is a West Coast American of Japanese descent, like Tomine himself. He's living in a relationship with a young woman of similar ethnicity who's helping put on Asian-American film festivals and thinking of bigger things. Ben manages a rundown movie theater and acts like the bitter moral superior intellect in his world, clearly afraid of growing up but pretending that through his cynicism he's already there and doesn't have to actually allow himself to be touched, the way we all must in order to grow.
At the end of the first installment Ben's girlfriend, Miko, leaves for a promising internship in New York City, and during their "break," in the second issue, Ben indulges his hankering for white girls all through his ongoing debate with his best friend, a grad school lesbian named Alice, about his heavily sublimated racial issues. What's been clear from the start is that Ben's narcissism is the mirror of his self-loathing, kind of a modern Asian-American version of Jewish self-loathing.
It's Alice's move to NYC and a call to him from the streets of Manhattan with "something here that you have to see with your own two eyes," that provides the turning point into Act III, Ben joining Alice (now co-habitating with a half-Asian lesbian professor) in New York to track down Miko, who hasn't been returning his phone calls, and coming to face his worst fears.
Considering that Tomine's seductive line imagery and hard blacks often draw us into a claustrophobic psyche, while never showing us more than the surface of actions (no internal monologues or Freudian dream sequences), it's a relief to have a whole issue where he's freed himself from Northern California and opened up into New York locales. While his pages still lay out like Edward Hopper in Bento boxes (each ingredient just as delicious and just as spare), the character bar has been raised, with rays of actual truth coming from Alice's girlfriend, Meredithe, and in the climax itself.
As for the ending, Metamorphostuff has something to say about another Tomine trademark:
And they all lived happily ever after.
Or not. Adrian Tomine doesn't do happy endings. He barely even does "endings" in the usual sense: His stories tend to be snapshots, moments in the life of the protagonist that keeps going on after the story ends. Epiphanies and revelations are in short supply, and those that do come along don't always change someone's life for the better. Often, the life-changing moment comes only in the final panels, and the audience never sees what effect it ultimately has.
It's almost always an emotional Rorshach Test with Tomine, sometimes less successfully, more obscurely than others. When it works, it's a masterly counterpoint to his clean drawing style, the graphic look a secret weapon driving home his cold, lean knife into the reader's heart. This one is more Kuleshov Experiment, your reaction to the final page based on your reading of whether or not Ben has cut through all his anxiety and shown maybe a glimmer of true understanding.
Yep, this is Tomine's best work to date, and since all of his work is good, that's great news.
The reason for this artistic development, and maybe why it took a span of four years to write, draw, ink, letter and publish the story, comes from Tomine in a Nichi Bei Times interview last September:
NBT: Last year you said in an interview that the material for your three-part story (formerly titled “White on Rice”) had been in your head since college. What is it about the story that’s stuck with you over the years?
AT: The biggest motivation for doing this particular story was my frustration with the fact that I’ve spent my entire career very much in the shadows of my influences. I always felt like the kind of watered-down, less interesting version of the cartoonists I learned from. And I know first-hand that it’s nearly impossible to just snap your fingers and suddenly come up with a completely original way of drawing. Believe me, I’ve tried and it just doesn’t happen for me. So I think I probably tried to focus more on the content of my work, and searched for a story that those other guys would never write, just because of the fact that the particulars of the story are so tied into my own life experiences.
There you have it. A master draftsman telling his most personal story to date. Maybe it took four years because its literature.
2 comments:
Ask Jordan to tell you his Tomine story.
He did, very funny. I won't say more here -- don't want to prolong the pain!
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