Good Grief, Adrian Tomine!

Adrian Tomine's comics are not warm and empathetic. The characters in them are mean, petty, spiteful, and self-destructive. Tomine generates a lot of comedy using this formula, but it can make them a difficult read, especially since the characters who aren't his obvious stand-ins are often paper-thin. While the situations in his previous book, Killing And Dying, were extremely clever, there was something that felt off about the characterizations. There were times it felt like he as reaching for something beyond his grasp as a storyteller. 

At heart, Tomine is a humorist. While he specializes in cringe humor, his work is at its best when he's the target of his jokes. In his newest book, The Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Cartoonist, Tomine unleashes a torrent of humiliations, self-owns, social awkwardness, and a profound lack of perspective on the reader, with each scenario funnier than the next. It's very much in the vein of Charles Schulz' Peanuts, with Tomine casting himself as a Charlie Brown character who desperately wishes he was Linus instead. Linus is pathologically anxious, but he's also introspective, kind, and even possesses a certain cool. Charlie Brown is a try-hard who keeps raging at his failures but doesn't stop trying, no matter how Sisyphean his task might seem. Charlie Brown is also socially inept, especially with regard to romance.

Tomine traces the key humiliations of his life from childhood to the present, often focusing on his career. Going from doing mini-comics as a teenager to getting signed as a pillar of Drawn & Quarterly to achieving international success, acclaim, and attention does absolutely nothing for his self-esteem. Appearing on NPR's Fresh Air program is something cartoonists can only dream of and he knows it, but all he can think about is how dumb his voice sounded on the show. It's like if Charlie Brown wound up becoming a pitcher in the majors and hated himself for saying something dumb on a SportsCenter interview. Objective success and failure have little to do with one's self-image, and all Tomine can think of is his life-long social awkwardness.

That awkwardness settles around the cartoonist's lament: when they are at a signing or a show, all they can think about is how much they want to be alone. When they are back in their hotel room, all they can think about is their crippling loneliness. The title of the book is a funny allusion to the film about a rebellious student who strikes out at authority (The Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Runner). He's cool and a badass. Tomine's character is neither cool nor a badass, so that title is yet another bit of self-deprecation, as his loneliness isn't the pose of a disgruntled teen, but that of someone desperate to be accepted and loved.

To be clear, this book isn't a humblebrag or an attempt to be self-deprecating in order to get the audience's sympathy. It's a series of acknowledged self-owns, much like when he published an embarrassing photo of himself from high school because it had been making the rounds in order to make fun of him. There's something about his success as a "literary cartoonist" that enrages certain corners of the comics world that works to diminish his skill and storytelling abilities. Ultimately, Tomine's tone isn't for everyone, but that combination of deep reserve in his characters masking deep rage is always compelling.

His best character remains himself, or rather a studied caricature of himself rooted in emotional truths but clearly played up for laughs. In the opening story, when he pops up on the first day of school and starts babbling about John Romita to his mocking classmates, he deliberately draws himself like a Schulz character. He's put upon like Charlie Brown but lashes out like Lucy, calling his classmates "stupid idiots." Of course, every humiliation here is specifically linked to comics in some way. His first San Diego Comicon is marked by some asshole confronting him about signing with D&Q instead of another Canadian publisher. and people burning him for ripping off Dan Clowes. The next year, he's nominated for an Eisner award and a childhood favorite, Frank Miller, is reading the list of nominees in his category. Miller makes a comment about not even attempting to pronounce his name as he then loses.

The racism that Tomine has faced in an alternative comics industry that was primarily white for decades is part of the story here, as he got put under a poster for Miller's "That Yellow Bastard" at a particularly anemic signing. While that was a bad signing, Tomine gets laughs not from his own dilemma, but from the shop owner who desperately tries to bring people over to the signing. Similarly, at a lunch with his then-girlfriend and future wife, they happen to sit next to a guy loudly bloviating about how bad Tomine's work was. While he didn't want a confrontation, he had to prevent his girlfriend Sarah from laying into that guy. In the next panel, he resolves to propose to her. It's a rare sweet moment in the book, even if it was propelled by the kind of aggressive know-it-all who frequently attacks his work.

It's also a bit of a corrective. In an earlier scene, when a blowhard asks him at a reading to essentially justify his existence as a cartoonist, Tomine's reaction afterward is to blow up, wishing extreme violence on him and then futilely attempting to backtrack by saying, "Just kidding!" It's an important progression because it reveals a key theme in the book. When Tomine is younger and lonelier, these slights bother him more, no matter how successful he is. When he's firmly with Sarah, like in that restaurant scene, he's able to swallow his rage and indignation much easier. When he becomes a father to two girls, the importance of all of this fades even more.

That's what leads into the final segment, wherein chest pains lead him to go to the ER. He realizes that while he thinks he's dying, he doesn't care about comics. He's only thinking about his wife and children. It provokes a profound moment later when he's back home with his wife, the pains a false alarm. Of course, she falls asleep while he's delivering this soliloquy about the importance of his family, and how much he had come to hate comics. He admitted to his pettiness and claimed he was a narcissist, saying that while he understood that comics had given him everything, all he could think about were the small humiliations. There's a profound moment of professing that he was going to change and be more emotionally open before he realizes she's asleep. 

Then the premise of this book hits him, and he gets to work on it. It's a fantastic punchline to a series of what amounted to shaggy dog stories, but it goes deeper than that. It's not just that Tomine is at heart a gag man who couldn't resist a series of humiliating gags that he had etched in his memory. It's not just that Tomine was expected to do comics and he felt pressure to do so. At heart, this comic is about how making comics gives Tomine genuine pleasure, even with all of the bullshit that surrounds it. It's why he got out of bed after a harrowing evening in the ER. Making comics is fun, and making comics about one's own humiliations is even more fun, especially since he gets to control the narrative. How "true" these stories are is irrelevant; what matters is how they serve the greater overall themes of the comic and how they work as individual narratives. The lack of context other than what he chooses to serve this humorous narrative makes this as closed as it gets with regard to autobio, but Tomine makes no pretensions otherwise. The only context the reader needs is what's given in each story, and each story is structured such that there's a different kind of humiliation each time. 

If it seems strange that Tomine marinates in these humiliations for an entire book's length, consider that he's been marinating in them his entire life. The book gave him the outlet he needed for them. Tomine's line absolutely crackles here as he pays tribute to artists like Clowes and Schulz, but his mastery over microexpressions and gesture (especially with regard to his children) refines the gags to an exquisite degree. This is sad-boy memoir that laughs at itself, as Tomine fully understands how lucky he is to have a career based on his skills and artistic expression as well as a loving family. He fully understands how much kvetching he's doing in the book, but he does it anyway because it's funny and because it allows him to trace this history of pettiness and overreaction and shows how he's grown out of a lot of self-destructive lines of thought. It balances the solitude of the artist with the need for social interaction of the person, even as it shows just how painfully funny these lessons were for him. Adrian Tomine may be a big blockhead, but at least he knows why it's funny that someone keeps pulling that football away from him at the last second.

Adrian Tomine: Old and New

Reviewed are two recent re-releases from Drawn & Quarterly by Adrian Tomine: a new edition of 32 STORIES (a collection of the original OPTIC NERVE minicomics) and a paperback edition of SHORTCOMINGS (his most recent work).

It was a pleasure to compare the early and latest strips from Adrian Tomine, whose sheer ambition as a writer is a wonder to behold. In many ways, Tomine is the epitome of the neurotic, self-conscious, loner cartoonist stereotype. It's why so many comics fans give him so much grief: he takes himself and his work very seriously, making him an easy target for mockery. There's also the charge that he writes too much about the lives of so-called "hipsters" and/or too-obvious character stand-ins for himself, dipping into self-indulgence. I find these charges to be nonsensical, given that most of his strips featuring thinly-disguised stand-in characters are brutally self-deprecatory. None of his stories do anything to glorify the lives of hipsters. Indeed, what Tomine is the master of is distancing character from reader. Like his biggest influence, Dan Clowes, Tomine actively creates antipathy between reader and protagonist. He plays this antipathy for acidic laughs, especially in SHORTCOMINGS. Tomine's constant flattening of affect (both in word and image) creates a weird tension on the page where lust, guilt and jealousy are bubbling under. His greatest skill is making the reader want to read a story where virtually every character is awful yet totally believable.

Tomine's work is about authenticity and the way people desperately avoid authentic speech and action. The artist's eye and pen are harsh judges of inauthentic action, especially in himself. That shows in his harsh assessment of 32 STORIES, a new edition of his minicomic version of OPTIC NERVE. Tomine goes into great detail as to his reluctance to have this material reprinted because of its rawness, but relented if it could be reprinted in its original format. He didn't pretend that this approach was any less self-aggrandizing (coming in a fancy box and even featuring the Optic Nerve sticker from #4), but he did think it was a more honest approach--warts 'n all. Tomine's demolition of his own author's statement from 1995 is hilarious, as he calls himself out for copying Dan Clowes and David Mazzucchelli, being vain and having no sense of humor about himself. To that end, he reprinted an embarrassing photo of himself from his high school yearbook that someone tried to humiliate him with on the web a few years ago.

What stands out about these seven minicomics was his astounding ambition as an artist at a very young age, having published the first when he was sixteen. His earliest strips were crude but bursting with energy, dealing with small and often brutal moments. While the sort of emotional distancing that Tomine would make his trademark was present, these stories frequently had a visceral quality that would fade as his line became more sophisticated. They felt a bit like Tomine going through his R.Crumb/Julie Doucet underground phase. Still, his early autobio was frequently hilarious, especially when he started grappling with the idea of reporting "truth" in these stories. Early on, it became quite clear that, like many authors, Tomine revealed more of his true self through fictional characters than his own autobio persona.

Indeed, that latter persona was as deliberate and artificial a creation as any of his fictional characters. His character Amy was a combination of extrapolating the life of someone he saw at a bookstore and his own yearnings as a loner. His own self-caricature had an appropriately blank expression, his eyes always obscured by his glasses. That figure was an apt representation of the impotence he felt in expressing his rage; "Adrian Quits His Job" featured him apparently screaming at his own boss, his face dissolving in a bit of Ralph Steadman-esque scribble, until we see that such an expression of anger was simply a fantasy.



The fifth issue saw him start to move into his mature style, and the sixth issue featured two significant stories in "Smoke" and "Leather Jacket"--distilled but restrained expressions of despair and freedom with regard to relationships. The seventh and last issue saw him go into full-on Clowes mode in terms of both line and narrative style, but the best story was "Happy Anniversary", the kind of examination of a doomed relationship that would become Tomine's trademark.



Fast-forwarding to SHORTCOMINGS, we find Tomine's line and voice honed to a razor's edge. By this time, he had shed the slickness that had started to infect his work around the time of OPTIC NERVE #7, simplying and clarifying it while at the same time adding a level of sophistication in his character expressiveness and understanding of gesture and body language. Indeed, a big part of the storytelling in this book consists of body language belying actual speech, especially on the part of the putative protagonist of the book, Ben Tanaka. The story finds the stuck-in-his-ways Ben taking his girlfriend Miko for granted and not-so-secretly pining for sexual encounters with white women--his forbidden fruit.



The character of Ben is an obvious Tomine stand-in (they even share the same allergies down to olive bark), but it's a stand-in that feels almost like self-flagellation--or perhaps self-exorcism. It's a character that's a mass of insecurity, self-hatred, wheel-spinning and paranoia. His intelligence and lack of tolerance for fakeness in others (especially with regard to race) is constantly undermined by his relentless negativity and blindness to his own hypocrisy. With Tanaka, we get a character who engages in arguments with his girlfriend that have an almost painful verisimilitude, gets off hilarious and vicious one-liners but winds up being the butt of a particularly nasty joke, courtesy of fate.



The central conflict of the book is really Ben's conflict with himself and lack of willingness to embrace or even approach change. He doesn't want his girlfriend to explore her racial identity; he doesn't want his best friend to move to New York; he doesn't want to think about why he's managing a movie theatre instead of taking a hard look at his life. He not only doesn't want to think about the mire that his life has become, he wants everyone in it to stay mired with him. It's not til he comes to the final punchline of the book that he faces up to this fact, not allowing his best friend to speak ill of his now ex-girlfriend, saying "We all have our reasons".



What makes this book more than just a nuanced look at the end of a relationship is Tomine's fearless handling of race. He zeroes in on stereotypes, forbidden fantasies and desires publicly denied. Tomine plays these for awkward, uncomfortable laughs in brilliant scene after brilliant scene. His control both over his line and over character dialogue & interaction gives his comics a powerful tension between restraint and boiling-over passions. SHORTCOMINGS is proof positive that Tomine found his voice as one of the best naturalistic, slice-of-life cartoonists in comics. He's not a brilliant formalist, but rather sticks to his strengths and has refined them to a level that make every page and panel pleasurable to simply look at without reading dialogue.