The boutique-y material object, covered in black Moleskin-like wrappings, complete with “New York Times Bestselling Author” sticker, tips the reader off (in case you didn’t know) to the highbrow graphic novel event that is the release of Adrian Tomine’s “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist” from Drawn + Quarterly.
But comics fans turned off by these literary pretensions might be missing the wink behind them. Worse, we would be needlessly excluding ourselves from Tomine’s best audience, and maybe those to whom “Loneliness…” speaks most effectively.
Written and Illustrated by Adrian Tomine
What happens when a childhood hobby grows into a lifelong career? The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, Adrian Tomine’s funniest and most revealing foray into autobiography, offers an array of unexpected answers. When a sudden medical incident lands Tomine in the emergency room, he begins to question if it was really all worthwhile: despite the accolades and opportunities of a seemingly charmed career, it’s the gaffes, humiliations, slights, and insults he’s experienced (or caused) within the industry that loom largest in his memory.Tomine illustrates the amusing absurdities of how we choose to spend our time, all the while mining his conflicted relationship with comics and comics culture. But in between chaotic book tours, disastrous interviews, and cringe-inducing interactions with other artists, life happens: Tomine fumbles his way into marriage, parenthood, and an indisputably fulfilling existence. A richer emotional story emerges as his memories are delineated in excruciatingly hilarious detail.
In his mid-forties and firmly seated in the cartoonist/illustrator pantheon, Tomine dips into comics memoir in “Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist.” For longtime Tomine readers, the autobiographical doesn’t feel jarringly different; his fiction has always felt redolent with personal and observational realness, and he’s always been stylistically multi-toned, especially in 2018’s “Killing and Dying.”
In “Loneliness…,” Tomine’s selections of vignettes date back to his childhood in the early 80s, when we kid aspiring cartoonists were all beset with benevolent misunderstanding from adults and malevolent taunts from peers. Marching forward to present day, Tomine comically and somewhat compulsively re-lives a litany of slights, embarrassments, and microaggressions endured despite an enviable career. In scene after scene, success-story Adrian is taken down several pegs by run-ins with an unimpressed public and brushes with artistic heroes who flatten him to a Japanese-American otherness. No one bothers to learn how to pronounce his name correctly.
These cold reminders of the cartoonist’s basement status in artistic and celebrity hierarchies stretch back to Tomine’s emergence in the late 90’s alt-comics scene, amidst his wunderkind status thanks to “Optic Nerve,” his mini-comics turned monthlies published by D+Q from 1995 to 2001. They continue even after “Summer Blonde” and “Shortcomings,” after Eisner Awards and New Yorker covers.
The throughline of these replayed memories is a self-disclosure of the persistent wound of disappointing fame, even after you’ve reach the comics and illustration Rushmore. Tomine seems to contemplate (with fresh wonder!) the indefatigable humiliation of comics in American society, and the accompanying tragicomic personal pains for those who make them.
The book’s other major element is Sarah, who starts as a date and winds up Tomine’s steadfast partner and mother of their children. Sarah and the kids are well-timed dashes of vibrancy, right when the repetitive snubs start to get dull, representing a sincere counterpoint to Tomine’s sad violin music of dashed dreams. In the end, that note of strong sentiment winds up the final swelling chorus here, and “Loneliness…” is ultimately a reflection that is pensive and optimistic for simpler satisfactions.
The world might do you wrong, Frank Miller might mock your name, but in the end, it’s your kids who make life worth living. If you can declare such sentiments without feeling sappy or false, then Tomine’s meditations could be just the right catharsis for these rough times.
Yet it feels like a strange privilege, granted only to meteoric risers in a young person’s game, that one gets to wax like a wizened old person at what should be a career midpoint. I read Tomine as basically a generational peer, an Asian American child of the 80s who once hung around those same Berkeley comic shops, who found the acerbic “Shortcomings” too close to home to love but much too accurate to dismiss. I think many of us who adored Tomine, for a time, did not dare to imagine him as an example but as an exception, the way Linsanity meant “one of us” could star in the NBA, not that “any of us” could.
Continued belowI note the cultural and generational identification because as a reader, I can swallow wholesale his eschewing fandom love for family love. But as a critic, I can imagine “Loneliness…” landing quite differently for a different recipient. When Tomine’s kids enter the picture, I realize that it’s my own nostalgia for those heady young parent days that saturates those brief scenes where random old ladies chide him for his parenting or children rush in the room to ruin his self-pity with their playful importance. I read myself and my own dawnings of What Really Matters into those moments, whereas I can imagine another reader ending up quite underwhelmed by Tomine’s eventual retreat into the safety blanket of kinship when demured by the fickleness of fame.
In the book’s look back at the sweep of Tomine’s cartoonist life, like with such forebears as Eisner’s “The Dreamer” or Tatsumi’s “A Drifting life,” there’s a tragicomic irony to everything. It’s tragedy that in such quotidian ways, your life dreams are shot down and laughed at as stupid and foolish. But like all good anguish, there’s comedy in that voice still in your head always proclaiming that such dreams are actually quite silly. These match the psychology of the self-serious slacker vibe one finds in “Summer Blonde” or “Shortcomings” (and so unfairly characterized as a rip off of Dan Clowes, as a younger Tomine bemoans in this book.)
Visually, Tomine is as crisp as ever, indulging neither artifice nor shortcuts in executing the book’s the graph-paper modesty. The cartooning craft on display here relies on a six-panel consistency that puts Tomine in some dialogue with moderns like Gabriel Bell or Noah van Sciver, but really harkens back to Spiegelman’s “Maus” or even Dell paperbacks of serialized comic strips. The confinement of a familiar page rhythm of six panels actually creates a freedom, like a line-ruled journal, to tell stories sans clutter, without panel-breaking distractions, focused on the subtler shifts in dialogue, moods, and movement. The scene (p. 25) where Tomine at the San Diego Eisners in 1996 listens with anticipation as childhood hero Frank Miller is to announce him as a nominee, and proceeds to give up altogether pronouncing his name, demonstrates how effectively the simple rhythms of six panels, two angles, actions-and-reactions, and the devastating interior monologue of our abashed cartoonist hero can work as a diary mode.
Yet, though the book is briskly paced, Tomine’s themes tiptoe on tiresome. Every depicted interaction seems mostly a delivery mechanism for disappointment. Some readers may even judge Tomine as disingenuous, maybe especially those (of us) whose own authorial ambitions have ACTUALLY been swallowed up in obscurity, who may curl their (our) lips at Tomine’s kvetching, Tomine who graces New Yorker covers and garners prestige and publishing deals. I sympathize that listening to the cherry-picked four hundred blows perceived by an award-winning “illustrator” and “graphic novelist” whose works you’ve repeatedly shelled out your last thirty bucks to read can feel, perhaps, even insulting.
But to be held back by such bitterness– a character flaw Tomine is eager to cop to– not only misses the more significant offerings of Tomine’s self-reflection, but serves only to reinforce the book’s suggestion that competitive envy might be the artist’s most self-defeating itch.
Where I think a fair critique could be lodged is this. Tomine’s self-location on the cultural margins ignores how much symbolic capital he’s actually been entrusted with– that WE have actually heaped onto him, with gratitude and pride in him to boot. How often have I recommended Tomine’s own books as those gateway graphic novels for the comics-curious still getting over those geek-shame aversions that Tomine poignantly portrays? He’s on “Fresh Air with Terry Gross” for goodness sakes.
Granted such respectability, is Tomine’s best contribution to the field to just rehash the unfair sullied status of the cartoonist in the cruel arbitrariness of social value? It seems facile that, rather than leveraging that prestige (illusory as it may be) to spotlight the brilliant and beset armies of fellow overlooked cartoonists, Tomine returns to navel-gazing and self-effacement.
But I’m not going to lie. I was moved to tears by book’s last chapter. Not necessarily because Tomine heaps on sentimentality, but because I could not resist resonance with how life/work feels for me personally, and I suspect for many in Tomine’s and my age/class/culture cohort. That always-startling mundane realization that your career ambitions are in direct proportion to how little you’ve stopped to cherish your kids. That huge relief when you realize your doses of failure kept you from inadvertently missing out on what really matters most.
In the book’s last chapters– spoiler warning– he narrates a scary but ultimately harmless ER trip, his wake up call. Tomine shows this reckoning as the spark for this-very-journal-comic-you-now-hold-in-your-hands. The cynical critic in me could see this coming a mile away. But the only thing more to be pitied than a cynical, once-hopeful cartoonist is a cynical, once-hopeful critic. In the end, I also lie awake in my bed in pre-dawn hours, panicked I’ve spent my life writing paragraphs like this that will be read by no one, then transcendently reassured that my life was worth its oxygen by a glimpse of my sleeping daughter.
For having company in that sacred flicker of optimism, I will inevitably end up pushing “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist” onto my friends. Especially the ones who, like the cover snapshot, lean over tables dripping with stress-sweat and laboring over disposable dreams. It may ease someone’s loneliness.
