My Thoughts on Adrian Tomine

I recently went on an Adrian Tomine reading binge and I have to say, I'm impressed, but not blown away. I initially bought a copy of Shortcomings after purchasing a bag at The Strand that Tomine designed. After reading all of his work, I'm not so sure I'd recommend reading Shortcomings first - it has a slightly whiny, kind of annoying storyline, and I didn't sympathize with the main characters at all. It follows Ben Tanaka, who is in the process of falling out of love with his longtime (and beautiful) Japanese girlfriend Miko. She constantly accuses him of lusting after white girls and eventually moves out of their shared apartment in San Francisco to work in New York. The story takes an interesting turn at the end, but for the most part is pretty dull. So why am I even mentioning this book? Because Tomine is an excellent writer, and you should not judge him based on Shortcomings, even though it is, for some reason, his most popular work.

Lucky for me, I didn't give up on Tomine altogether. I went on to read Summer Blonde which is a collection of four stories. My favorite was called "Alter Ego" about a once successful but now washed up novelist who, while in pursuit of material for his second book, seeks out the girl he was obsessed with in high school (and winds up dating her sister, who IS still in high school).

After Summer Blonde, I made my way to Sleepwalk (another story collection). This book is rather depressing - the main themes in here are loss and loneliness. My favorite stories were "The Connecting Thread", where a woman believes she is stalked through personal ads and "Summer Job" which shows a slacker middle class kid who is on summer vacation from UC Berkeley (As a resident of Berkeley, Tomine sets many of his stories in or near the Bay Area.) working as a delivery man for a small, crappy company and has absolutely no concept of how important having a job is to the other employees (who don't get to ship off back to college or have their mom pay their bills). This story reminded me of my brother.

Recently, I just finished reading my last book on my Adrian Tomine list - SCRAPBOOK, which is a collection of random comics, illustrations, magazine covers, doodles, posters (he did a famous Weezer poster that I used to have) and actual excerpt from his personal sketchbook. This was cool to see, but unless you're a huge Adrian Tomine fan, I'd say there's absolutely no need to purchase this. My favorite comic inside was "A Rock and Roll Dream", where a girl continuously keeps getting dumped, but misses the music from the old albums she used to listen to with the ex-bf, rather than the guy himself.

While I do agree with Vibe magazine that "Adrian Tomine captures the pathos of young adulthood with vignettes exquisitely rendered in a sharp, comic-noir style", I'm still not 100% convinced that he's the "Boy Wonder of comics" that Daniel Clowes referred to him as.

See for yourself - and post a comment!