The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist

Tomine offers a look inside his head, sharing his anxieties and documenting the "embarrassing gaffes, the small humiliations, the perceived insults" of being a professional cartoonist and low-level celebrity. The navel gazing is mostly humorous and self-deprecating, and to get outside his head once in a while, he offers a few cameos of celebrities from the comic book industry and lots of anecdotes from conventions, book tours, and signings.

Its an amusing trifle, but I have to say the decision to reproduce it as the grid-pattern journal in which he apparently drew it annoyed me. The little blue squares on every page constantly drew my eye away from the art or left me spending too much time judging how crooked his panel lines were when show more they didn't cover the blue lines perfectly. I occasionally started looking too close and found the text difficult to read if each line did not run exactly through a line of squares. It's all unnecessarily distracting. show less

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It's a set of vignettes from Tomine's life, most of them incidents of toe-curling embarrassment or micro-aggression, told in confessional or self-deprecating tone. Tomine's main subject is himself, though also the people he loves and the people he works with, and he makes us sympathetic and perhaps even understanding of the lifestyle of the self-employed artist. Some of the stories very funny indeed (eg the date where the people at the next table are disparaging his work, not knowing that he is in earshot; and the incident with his daughter's kindergarten class). Recommended.

A friend recommended another of this author's works but this was the first the library could get for me - I loved it! I am a visual artist but I could very well relate to Tomine's awkwardness, obsessions and phobias. It felt good to laugh with him and at myself simultaneously. Looking forward to reading more.

I'm not always into graphic novels but I actually liked this one a lot. Good art and he captures the challenge of being an artist and the artist's need for solitude, but also, the challenge of solitude.

Well honed comedic self deprecating critique of the world of a graphic novelist. The drawings easily pass unnoticed. The internal dialogue is perfect.

I wish the author let himself go a little more, when he does there is something of magic.

Adrian Tomine documents years of funny-awkward moments in the life of a shy and insecure lifelong cartoonist. I chuckled quite a bit. The book looks like a moleskine and has graph paper inside, which initially I found disconcerting, but it suits the conceit of the cartoonist's notebook.

A good collection of painful anecdotes, with some useful insights into Tomine's psyche I hadn't much liked the last Tomine book I had read, but this was great.