50books_poc | #11. Shortcomings, by Adrian Tomine (Reply)

#11. Shortcomings, Adrian Tomine
2007, Drawn & Quarterly

I keep trying to like Adrian Tomine, and he kind of just keeps leaving me cold. Cool, anyway. I'm not really sure what else to say about it.

I read Shortcomings in the space of about an hour; and thought about it; and then I reread it, trying to be sure to catch whatever I might have missed. Tomine's work is much more technically accomplished now than it used to be, and sometime he even gets daring or lyrical in his framing. But his characters are kind of... they leave me untouched. What can I say? I know plenty of people who love his work. But I keep comparing his spare, skillful black-and-white comics about humans in relationships to the spare, skillful black-and-white comics about humans in relationships of Jaime Hernandez, and I'm like, "Man. One of these artists I keep going back to and his characters live in my imagination. And the other one... I close the book and they're gone."

Which is probably just as well, because they were assholes anyway. Nobody in Shortcomings is very likable, including the protagonist -- which is, I suppose, one of the strengths of the book. Ben, who (like Tomine) is Japanese-American, is having a rocky time in his relationship with his girlfriend Miko. Miko, also Japanese, suspects that Ben has a wandering eye for white women (by which both she and he appear to mean "blonde and blue-eyed," which apparently describes all the eligible Caucasian females in California). Ben denies it... and then concedes that maybe, yeah, he's been culturally conditioned to find that sexy, but it that his fault? Ben is intensely defensive, and never seems to give a moment's thought to Miko's well-being. Which is why, when the relationship gets rocky, it comes as no surprise...

An interesting book about interesting issues, and certainly a protagonist and perspective we don't see much -- or enough -- of. I just wish... I wish I could find an emotional heart in Tomine's work. It's so cool and cynical, it stands so far away while it dissects, that it's hard for me to care. A story about emotions that refuses to become emotionally engaged is... it's not something that can really become meaningful for me.