By: Adrian Tomine Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly Average Rating: Binding: Hardcover Label: Drawn and Quarterly Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 104 Publication Date: October 02, 2007 Release Date: October 02, 2007
FROM THE PREEMINENT CARTOONIST OF HIS GENERATION, THE MOST ANTICIPATED GRAPHIC NOVEL OF 2007
Shortcomings, Adrian Tomine’s first long-form graphic novel, is the story of Ben Tanaka, a confused, obsessive Japanese American male in his late twenties, and his cross-country search for contentment (or at least the perfect girl). Along the way, Tomine tackles modern culture, sexual mores, and racial politics with brutal honesty and lacerating, irreverent humor, while deftly bringing to life a cast of painfully real antihero characters. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Tomine has acquired a cultlike fan following and has earned status as one of the most widely acclaimed cartoonists of our time.
Shortcomings was serialized in Tomine’s iconic comic book series Optic Nerve and was excerpted in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #13.
Amazon.com: Amazon Significant Seven, November 2007: Adrian Tomine draws his mid-twenties slackers with an impeccable, exact line for every slumpy gesture and cultivated rumple. In Shortcomings, this ex-wunderkind tackles a book-length comic for the first time after three collections of stories, and his maturity shows not so much in the ages of his characters, who are still slackly wandering, dropping out of grad school or managing a movie theater, but in his calm and masterful handling of his story, in which vividly individual characters wander through the maze of imposed and self-generated stereotypes of Asian and American identities (the title is a wry allusion to one of the most enduring of those assumptions). Never has that old commonplace that the personal is the political seemed more paralyzing, and more true. --Tom Nissley
More of the same... This book is great and it still has Tomine's signature understated style (both visually and narratively), but he's not treading any new ground here.
Tomine in Top Form Tomine has always been a great storyteller. His writing is wry and laugh-out-loud funny at times, but it's his drawings that really shine in this collected volume. His panels are wonderfully art directed and his renderings are beautifully nuanced and evocative. It's just a matter of time before someone offers this guy a shot at directing. Treat yourself and pick it up.
Yes, it does come up short... A good read, with great art, but not enough to justify the cover price.
What's missing in this story is a sense of urgency that non-Asians should be able to connect with. Without the urgency, the non-Asian reader becomes the uninvolved observer, and this "shortcoming" alone diminishes the universal quality that I think the story ought to possess. Since, after all, this book isn't just meant to be read by the Asian-American community.
Spoiler: It also doesn't help that the lead, Ben Tanaka, is just full of hate. I wanted to like him, but when his girlfriend breaks up with him by the end of the story, I couldn't sympathize. It seems as if Tomine's thesis goes something like, "Not everything is about race. Dwell in it and your life falls apart." But where's the antithesis? If there were enough powerful instances that could justify Ben's attitude, then he could earn favor points in the reader's eye. Thematically, however, the story felt like it was on a one-way street.
This book's title is self descriptive It's not so much that I did'nt enjoy the book, but was disappointed by it it does have, after all, shortcomings...a semi-interesting story.
More of the Same I loved Tomine's early collections, 32 Stories and Sleepwalk, but his last one (Summer Blonde) was a bit of a disappointment, feeling like a rehash of earlier material. This latest book collects issues 9-11 of Optic Nerve into a single narrative arc following a single protagonist. Despite this move from short story to novella-length, Tomine largely fails to take advantage of the space afforded to move into new thematic territory.
His work has always focused on loneliness, and yet again the main character is a socially awkward semi-hipster who tends to alienate people. Ben Tanaka is a 30-year-old manager of an art house cinema in Berkeley (presumably the UC Theater, which like the one Ben manages, was forced to close to due seismic retrofitting regulations), living with his beautiful Japanese-American girlfriend Miko. The story follows Ben's dying relationship with Miko and subsequent rebound attempts with various cute Anglo girls. But Ben is so plagued by insecurity and bitter snobbishness, and is so grumpy and cynical that it becomes increasingly hard as the book progresses to understand what any woman would see in him.
The one new theme Tomine introduces to his work is the struggle to define identity and identity politics among Asian-Americans. Ben, Miko, and even Ben's moxie-laden Korean-American lesbian pal Alice (who tend to steal any scene she's in), all grapple with various stereotypes and self-imposed expectations. However, none of this seems particularly inventive or fresh, and some scenes, such as Alice taking Ben to a family wedding as her beard feel particularly recycled. Then again, I'm not Asian-American, so maybe it has more resonance for that audience.
As usual, Tomine's art is amazing -- his attention to framing, line, and composition are second to none. That said, sometimes his faces tend to drift into similarity -- in a story where race is so central, it's not a good thing when an Anglo guy key to the story looks Asian. As with his other work, those familiar with the East Bay will recognize a lot of the backgrounds (Rockridge, the Durant food court, Cody's, etc.).
On the whole, the book is a disappointment -- it's just way too similar in tone and subject matter to his previous work. Tomine clearly is comfortable in the Berkeley-to-Brooklyn world of 20-30something hipster creative singletons and their friendships and relationships. But that's a pretty insular world, and I'd love to see him break out of it and turn his sharp observational gaze elsewhere. He got married last year, so maybe that'll lead to new directions in his storytelling.
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