Adrian Tomine

I read this first in 2018 as I was getting into comics. 5 years later, with the anticipation of going into doing some of my own, I wanted to come back and study this masterpiece and note down some thoughts.

"Translated, from the Japanese," is my personal favourite story of the five. Each desaturated panel looks like it could be a front cover - gentle, muted, precise. Tomine does not illustrate a single face as he tells this story, and this choice lends itself to the liminal, melancholic atmosphere of the piece. Very few details about our characters are given, but the second person perspective and microcosmic plot finish a beautiful story that has me feeling exactly the way this master craftsman must have intended for me to - deep longing and sadness for a life that is not mine.

I think I've learnt via other cartoonists that when it comes to panels, less is more. Tomine really shakes this philosophy, not afraid to use multiple similar panels to show expression changes and silent panels for effect. The perfect balance is going to be difficult to achieve for each individual artist, but practising in this style has greatly enhanced my ability to determine that cutting a lot out isn't necessarily a perfect method to make a page powerful.… (more)

Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings focuses on Ben Tanaka, a movie theater manager in Berkeley, California who rejects the racialized identity that America proscribes for him. As a result of this, Ben never quite feels that he fits in with white America nor does he feel himself in spaces created by Asian-Americans and those of the Asian diaspora in the U.S. He grows increasingly hostile toward those around him, dismissing his girlfriend Miko Hayashi’s political art based on Asian-American identity and ignoring her both emotionally and sexually. Instead, he stares at white women, fetishizing them and spending his nights with pornography focused on white women. At the same time, he reacts violently when he sees white men dating Asian women, viewing them as sexual colonizers. Ben’s only friend, Alice, also struggles with identity as a queer Asian-American woman in grad school, trying to balance her own identity against that her parents, colleagues, and community expect of her. Though all three characters struggle to find a balance between internal and external pressures of identity, Ben fails to reach any form of comfort and catharsis while Miko and Alice find a way to move forward for themselves amid the uncertainty of the future.

The visual medium works particularly well as it requires seeing. Ben refuses to see race, but Tomine’s art shows how Ben is always observing the people around him and where they fit. He uses a security camera to watch a woman employee at the movie theater that he later tries to date. He watches pornography featuring white women, often of white women with other white women. He feels hostile when he overhears Alice with another woman since their activities are not for his consumption. Ben becomes hostile after Miko leaves when he finds out that she posed for another art student’s photography, so the she was seen by another man in the form of the photographer and subsequent men who viewed the picture. The visual style of comics and graphic novels render races differently based on visual cues, even using Japanese and Korean text for some of the word balloons, drawing the reader into the act of “seeing” race. Tomine’s graphic novel encourages the reader to sit with the discomfort of how we “see” race in the U.S.… (more)