by Jared Gardner

Adrian Tomine took two years between the completion of Optic Nerve #8and the beginning of the new story arc, tentatively titled “Shortcomings.” It took more than two years for him to finish the three issues that constitute what is his longest story to date. As someone who checked regularly on the D&Q website to see if there was news about the next issue of Optic Nerve and as a reader of Tomine’s short stories for almost ten years now, I hope I don’t come off as flip or snide when I say that it really hasn’t been worth the wait. And I say this with some sadness, as I continue to believe that Tomine is perhaps the most talented individual working in alternative comics today (and certainly the master of the short-story form as significant to the development of graphic narrative in this regard as Poe was to the literary short story). So watching him inch glacially toward the longer form, toward the inevitable graphic novel, is disappointing, and not the best use of his talents. Poe couldn’t write a decent novel to save his life, and I’m not at all convinced that Tomine could or should either.

The story that has recently concluded in Optic Nerve #11 tells of the slow and awkward break-up of Miko and Ben. Miko is growing increasingly committed to her Asian American identity and cultural connections; Ben fantasizes about white girls and finds ethnic and racial identification tedious and anti-intellectual. We learn this pretty much within the first two pages of the story. 2 1/2 years later, we haven’t learned much more about either of them.

My disappointment with the story does not extend to its narration; Tomine is a master graphic storyteller, and his ability to use silences and stillness to convey emotional and psychic drama is precisely why I turn to him to find out how the form will evolve in the future. But he needs a story worth telling, and frankly this is not it. By that I don’t mean grand themes or Big Issues (god forbid; we get perilously close to those there and to no good effect). His earlier stories were always in a sense about miscommunication and the awkwardness (bordering on violence) of desire, themes touched on here. But his very best stories—“Bomb Scare” or “Supermarket” for example—economically open up characters to contradictory impulses and shades of light and gray that remind us what a beautiful mess we all are. This story, for all its length and engagement with hot-button issues of identity and race, somehow manages to flatten the characters out over the three issues. In the end, it pushes closer to caricature (and in that sense, to Clowes’ work) than to Tomine’s usual ability to begin with caricature and end up with (often uncomfortable and even shameful) pathos.

There are some virtuoso moments. For example, the airport drop-off sequence toward the end of #10—with its awkward silences and sips of coffee, and the miserable return to the parking spot alone—provides some of the best pages Tomine has ever done. And as always, Tomine does dialogue with an icy cold precision that makes me afraid to open my mouth for hours after I finish reading him. And the scalpel line he has been developing since his freer and inkier early work continues here, although there are moments where I miss some of the background detail that made the stories collected in Summer Blonde come alive for me.

For me the only character worth knowing is Ben’s friend Alice, a witty and biting lesbian who allows him to vent but who also calls him to task for his profound emotional lameness (not that she is exactly the model of maturity, but at least she has sass). Once the story moves to New York in #11, Alice introduces Ben to her new girlfriend Meredith. Perhaps my favorite moment in the story, and one that gives me hopes for the future of Tomine’s writing, is when Alice gamely tries to cover up for one of Ben’s thoughtless remarks by saying to Meredith, “Now you see why I love this guy?” To which Meredith responds, skeptically, “I’m trying….” But she is not trying very hard, and neither by the end is Tomine, who seems to have emotionally abandoned his central characters. Like Miko and Alice, it is time for Tomine to move on.

I’m willing to cut Tomine all the slack in the world, as I am absolutely certain that his best work lies ahead—and that it will be work that will carry graphic narrative into landscapes yet unimagined. But it is precisely such purple rhetoric on my part (all deeply felt) that explains my impatience with the last couple of years. His wunderkind years behind him, it is time to step into the role he was born for. This story suggests a reluctance to make that leap, a sense of being stuck in the twentysomething nostalgia of the thirtysomething adult with too much talent and responsibility on his shoulders. But neither need be a burden. I might encourage Tomine, in fact, to find inspiration in Yoshihiro Tatsumi, whose work he has been so lovingly editing these past few years. In stories such as “Occupied” or “Abandon the Old In Tokyo,” Tatsumi addresses many of the same issues central to Tomine’s work, but he allows himself to find commonality in the hearts of people whose lives (and hearts) are radically different than his own. It is time for Tomine to take that leap, before the pathos he commands becomes simply nihilism and self-loathing and before subtlety of emotion gives way to the cardboard of caricature.