Starred review from August 3, 2015
Plenty of graphic novelists mine the seam of modern anxieties and alienation. Only a tiny handful do so with as much perceptive humanity as Tomine (Shortcomings). These half-dozen short stories are drawn with a cool, dry, Chris Wareâlike style that heightens the emotions packed within their rigidly uniform blocks rather than muffling it. Many of the stories track relationships in which the women are lost and the men lash out. The men react in fury to their thwarted creativity (like the wannabe sculptor in "A Brief History of the Art Form Known as âHortisculpture'â") and to any acknowledgment of their shortcomings (like the rage-filled middle-aged pot dealer in "Go Owls"). Some of those same damaged and defensive men also appear in "Amber Sweet," a Paul Austeresque fable of disorientation, in which a woman must come to terms with her resemblance to a popular porn star. But the title story is a simpler and more riveting construction. In it, an awkward, stuttering 14-year-old girl pursues an unlikely career as a stand-up comic, while her mother overpraises her and her father undermines her from the sidelines, though none of the three addresses the tragedy looming ever larger in their lives. Tomine has created a deft, deadpan masterpiece filled with heartache interspersed with the shock of beauty.
November 15, 2015
Tomine's (Shortcomings) stories, most from his Optic Nerve minicomics, deftly invite reader empathy for ill-at-ease characters you might not want to meet. A gardener feeling unappreciated devises an art form he dubs "hortisculpture" but attracts no aficionados. A young woman is mistaken for a porn star. Two marginally functioning people bond at a 12-step meeting, with complicated results that do not end well. An estranged mother addresses a diary entry to her absent son. A veteran at loose ends gravitates to an apartment he shared with his former wife--but while trespassing must deal with an actual burglar. In the superb title story, a father and daughter warily negotiate her foray into stand-up comedy while mother dies of cancer. Tomine's clean-line realism varies, some stories full-color, some halftones, others having a brushwork feel. Several times he runs one narrative via text and another via drawings. VERDICT With deadpan rather than dramatic art, Tomine's tales show off his mature skill with storytelling, dialog, and character. Those fond of slice-of-life comics will like this, and teachers of narrative techniques will find it helpful. Adult situations and language but minimal explicitness.--M.C.
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
August 1, 2015
A collection of six previously published graphic stories of life's bittersweet struggles, from illustrator/writer Tomine (New York Postcards, 2014, etc.). The true magic of sequential art comes in the spaces between panels-where readers draw connections between separate, evolving images to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts-and here Tomine proves himself a wizard. In the title tale, a stuttering teenager pursues a dream of professional comedy while her supportive mother subtly progresses from unremarkable to brittle hair to bandanna and cane to absence-cancer running its course via signifiers and suggestion. The elegiac "Translated, from the Japanese" follows a mother and son's journey from Japan to California to rejoin the boy's estranged father, and while the panels-hewing closely to the mother's point of view-contain no more than an arm of any central character, the averted gaze makes the mother's discomfort palpable. Most playful is "A Brief History of the Art Form Known as 'Hortisculpture, ' " in which a dissatisfied landscaper dreams of taking the world by storm by growing plants inside bulky sculptures-an idea met with underwhelming support from his wife and outright derision from everyone else. The story appears as a series of comic strips, including periodic "Sunday funnies" installments, as though the urbane wit of the New Yorker had infiltrated daily newspapers. The put-upon, schlubby landscaper and the regular punch lines of the comic-strip format serve as a nice counterweight to the (beautifully, hauntingly depicted) angst and melancholy pervading much of the collection, which is rounded out by an adult-film star's unwitting doppelganger, two addicts wrestling with love and damage, and a brooding brute who gains regular, secret access to a stranger's home. Graphically, Tomine excels at imbuing every figure-big or small-with individualized traits (hands on hips, cocked shoulder), giving the sense that the story's focus could shift deep into the background and still find rich, full life. Achingly human and divinely rendered.
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September 15, 2015
Tomine, who began publishing comics while still a teen in the 1990s, became known for his hard-eyed yet sympathetic portrayals of his generational peers. But of late he's broadened his outlook to encompass a far more diverse range of characters: the protagonists include a father who struggles to be supportive when his wallflower daughter pursues stand-up comedy, a young student whose life is upended by her resemblance to a porn star, and a woman who passively falls into a relationship with a low-level drug dealer she meets at a substance-abuse support group. Tomine also extends his visual approach. While retaining his understated, almost mundane drawing style, he modifies it to telling effect: an account of a troubled veteran trying to recapture his former life is drawn with a thick, inky line, while a story about a middle-aged landscaper who invents a newand widely disparagedart form is told in a series of daily and Sunday newspaper strips. Killing and Dying confirms Tomine's place among the most literary of first-rank graphic storytellers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)