GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Shortcomings
Adrian Tomine is an anomaly on the current alternative-comics scene – his stories are absolutely realistic, in both their artistic look and their mundane events, but aren’t obviously autobiographical at all. The closest comparison I can think of is that he’s a Northern Californian Gilbert Hernandez – deeply concerned with ethnicity and identity – but working more as a miniaturist. (Tomine is clearly influenced by the modern New Yorker school of short prose fiction; many of his stories could have been adapted straight from a Raymond Carver short story.)
Shortcomings is Tomine’s longest story to date – his first graphic novel-length tale at all – reprinting a three-issue storyline from Tomine’s irregular comic, Optic Nerve. But his virtues and interests are still those of a short-story writer: close evocation of character, realistic dialogue, small-scale events. None of the events are overly dramatic…but the main character certainly is.
Ben Tanaka is a young Japanese-American man living in Berkeley – managing a movie theater, in a rut with his live-in girlfriend Miko, denying that he’s obsessed with blonde Caucasian girls, and only really connecting with his lesbian friend Alice. He’s angry about nothing in particular, and frustrated about his entire life without quite realizing it himself. He’s our viewpoint character – in every scene, and at the center of most of them – but it’s hard to identify with him, since he is such a prick. He’s young and disaffected, but doesn’t think of himself that way – he thinks he’s doing all right, and doesn’t realize that he’s a complete jerk.
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is an original GN and apparently the first published comics work of its creators, Christian Westerlund and Robert Nazeby Herzig. (By the way, I’m tentatively assuming that the two are writer and artist, respectively, but the book itself doesn’t specify their roles.) It’s a dark afterlife fantasy, beginning with the suicide of our young protagonist, Joshua Barker. He then finds himself in a gloomy city that is, in most respects, identical to the world he lived in before his death.
