When you feel adrift, go back to what you know, the sage advice goes — and on paper, that makes pretty good sense. Granted, it’s an inherently stifling way to approach life, particularly if your life revolves around creative pursuits, but it’s also inherently practical if you want to keep making a living. Ideally, I suppose, one would adhere to it and blow it off in equal proportion — pushing yourself to try something new, then refining the fresh set of skills that this step out of the nest requires before returning to the tried and true with a fresh set of eyes.
Certainly with his last collection, Killing & Dying, one-time cartooning phenom Adrian Tomine seemed well and truly adrift, adopting a stripped-down illustration style in service of “slice of life” stories that, more often than not, revolved around some kind of cheaply-arrived-at “twist” ending that frankly seemed beneath his talents. At heart, though, Tomine remained something of a deadpan humorist, albeit one who was determined to branch out in new directions both to relieve the tedium of doing the same kind of thing over and over, sure, but also for purposes of, pretentious as it no doubt sounds, growing as an artist.
That book’s tepid critical reception appears to have struck a chord, however, and so with his latest, The Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Cartoonist (Drawn+Quarterly, 2020), Tomine is back to the tried and true, even if his scope is more ambitious: a memoir of his entire artistic life, from childhood to present day, filtered through a lens of befuddlement and bewilderment. On the one hand, yeah, I get it — I’m roughly the same age as Tomine is, and when I look back at my own past it seems as though it really is, to dredge up and old cliche, another country. On the other, though, I have to actively question whether or not an exercise in navel-gazing is really what we need when the goddamn world’s on fire.
Granted, when Tomine — who is hardly what you’d call prolific at this stage of his career — started this project, he had no way of knowing a raging pandemic would necessitate an economic slowdown and its attendant social, psychological, and political miseries, nor that nearly nine minutes of a psychotic police officer with his knee in the neck of an unarmed black man would trigger a round of entirely-justified civil unrest and prompt a long-overdue accounting of this nation’s overtly racist past and present, but shit: it’s not like times weren’t plenty turbulent prior to all of that. We still had a would-be dictator in the White House, we still had rampant income inequality, we still had a corrupt and prejudiced legal system, we still had widespread environmental devastation on a global scale — you get the picture. Introversion is fine and dandy, absolutely, but it’s been a good decade or more since a project approached from a point of view this inherently privileged seemed in any way appropriate.
“But wait,” you may be saying to yourself, “Tomine clearly shows he was bullied as a child in this book. He’s socially awkward. He’s perpetually nervous and self-conscious. Where’s the ‘privilege’ in all that?” To which I respond “news flash — if you have the time and financial stability required to spend a few years doing nothing but writing and drawing a series of vignettes illustrating those very character attributes, you’re in a hell of a lot more comfortable place than anybody who’s actually gotta go out and hustle for a living.” So, yeah, this is a work that’s entirely dependent upon a certain amount of privilege for its very existence.
That being said, there are still points at which I feel privileged as a reader for the insights Tomine offers. They’re not as frequent as they used to be, but when he’s on, as they say, he’s on — and in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, he’s mostly on when he’s looking back at the early years of his career when he was a critical darling and very much in a creative “groove.” There’s plenty of “inside baseball” going on that only long-time comics readers are likely to appreciate, but the fact that Tomine still feels stung, all these years later, by an early negative review and by Frank Miller not even trying to pronounce his name correctly at an Eisner Awards ceremony at least goes to show that stardom (even small-scene stardom) hasn’t gone to Tomine’s head and that he’s not afraid to show himself as being petty and insecure. In other words, as with most of the best memoirists out there, he’s in no way looking to sugar-coat his own shortcomings, which is all well and good.
Unfortunately, much of the rest of the book isn’t. I applaud Tomine for getting back in touch with his humor roots, certainly — and definitely appreciate the fact that he’s putting forth the effort to do full-figure drawing again — but, by and large, we don’t come out the other end with any greater understanding of who he is as a person than we have by about page 20, and too often the fine line that separates self-deprecation and an obvious play for the sympathy of the readership is crossed here. We get it, Adrian, you’re a little neurotic — now tell us something we don’t know and that might give us some genuine insight into what makes you tick rather than trying to convince us this whole cartooning thing is a touch racket and that balancing creative concerns with commercial ones is such a dreary imposition on the life of an artist.
And then, finally, there is the “cleverness” — the last trick up the sleeve employed by those without a ton to say who are still desperate to convince audiences that they do. Sure, the fact that the book apes the format of an actual journal is thematically apropos and fun to look at, but when you pair it with an obvious and cloying title and an authorial viewpoint best summed up as “the general public will never understand how hard this is unless I show them,” well — the end result comes off as calculated marketing dispatched in service of covering up creative bankruptcy. We know Tomine is better than this, though, because he’s done better than this — and, while he seems torn between being embarrassed at his notoriety and still bummed that his previous work hasn’t received what he considers to be its due accolades, there’s little herein to suggest that he’s used either the “fame” he achieved or been deprived of as motivation to elevate his craft. He seems to feel that he’s had quite the journey one way or the other, and I suppose that he has, but, rather than coming full circle, with The Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Cartoonist he’s returned to the well only to find that it’s mostly dry.
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I haven’t read this book yet—just excerpts released for publicity—but Ryan, I feel the need to point out that I think you missed some pretty critical elements of who Tomine is and what this work is about by not acknowledging that he’s an Asian American author, and a lot of his memoir seems to be about the Asian American experience.
Describing Tomine feeling “stung” at Frank Miller not attempting to pronounce his name isn’t “petty and insecure”—that anecdote actually felt like a concise description of one of the core traumas of anti-Asian racism. Tomine has ascended just about as high as you can go, and still, Frank Miller makes a joke of the obvious foreignness of his name. That’s central to the experience of anti-Asian racism in the US: No matter how ardently you work to excel and be accepted, you are always on the outside. No matter how fully it feels like the white establishment has invited you in, your status is always one joke away from being revealed as obviously, laughably foreign.
(It’s worth noting on this point that Tomine is a fourth-generation Japanese American, and both his parents were interned in concentration camps by the American government during WWII. While Frank Miller making a joke about Tomine’s name being laughably difficult to pronounce might feel small to an uninformed white reader, it actually reflects the larger assumption of perpetual foreignness, and it’s that same assumption of perpetual, untrustworthy foreignness that prompted the US government to force Japanese American citizens into concentration camps. Tomine’s pain isn’t petty—it’s generations-deep trauma.)
There is also a flipside to anti-Asian racism: When race is reduced to a Black-white binary, violence and discrimination against Asian Americans is erased. Ryan, I have to notice that you acknowledge COVID & the uprising for Black liberation, but suggest that Tomine persists in a place of “privilege” relative to that. While it’s true that Tomine has plenty of privilege (and I wish I had the time and resources he has to make comics), violence against Asian Americans is actually a crisis right now—the white house has been stoking hate crimes against Asian Americans since COVID began. It seems strange to say that the thoughtful memoir of an Asian American man is a tone-deaf in its privilege, especially now. Tomine is a neurotic, insecure navel-gazey comics guy in the great tradition of neurotic, insecure, navel-gazey comics guys, but I think this work seems actually very timely, and I’m excited to read it.
All my best,
Madeleine
(For the record: I’m white, and am probably missing or mischaracterizing some things—I’d appreciate correction from others in the comment section if there’s anything I’m misrepresenting here.)
(Also just a taste thing, but: I loved Killing and Dying. I thought it was Tomine’s most interesting, generous work.)
Well said, Madeleine. I also enjoyed Killing and Dying (and don’t remember many twists, much less cheap ones).
Aside from the points brought up about the erasure of Tomine’s race in this review, the privilege argument here is hollow. Maybe a little petty. Every non-political piece of art is a result of privilege. A lot of political pieces are, too. The anger here could just as easily be pointed toward anything else Drawn and Quarterly has published in the past twenty years. You go down this rabbit hole and the only projects worth your time are by destitute artists powered by grants. I like that work, I’m just not going to throw the rest of it away because it’s frivolous or because the writer is a full-time illustrator.
Excellent points all around, and I appreciate being held to account when my own privilege inexcusably blinds me to the struggles of others. I certainly should have done a better job of making more clear that the privilege I was speaking of vis a vis Tomine was entirely economic in nature and nothing to do with his race and ethnicity. In point of fact, the incorrect pronunciation of his last name is a constant theme in the book. I do, in fact, think that many of the cartoonists on the D+Q roster have been constructing works in recent years from an inherently privileged point of view, whether that be Seth’s “Clyde Fans,” which is ultimately about a guy who has the financial means to withdraw from the world while the rest of us have to work for a living, or Chester Brown who — well, that would require more time to parse than I have, and those discussions have been going on for years already, but an overall critique of a publisher’s output is not what anyone’s here for, and by and large D+Q still publishes really good stuff, on the whole. I still stand by my assertion that this is an inherently self-absorbed work and its primary failure is “letting us in” on the mindset of the “self” in question beyond a rather safe level of self-deprecation, and that my reading of it is generally a fair one, but it’s only MINE, of course, and by and large most critics do seem to be enjoying it, from what I’ve seen. That being said, I own up to my own failures and blinders, and it’s incumbent on me to recognize the shortcomings (pun only SLIGHTLY intended) in my own point of view, and subsequent communication of it, in future.
[…] Long-Distance Cartoonist. Ryan has written an incisive review of the comic, and I invite readers to check it out as well. Published in July by Drawn and Quarterly, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist is a […]
For anyone puzzled by this pompous, posturing review, I’d like to reassure you that Tomine has written a charming and hilarious book about his personal pain and its tendency to haunt him. I’ve already read it twice, enjoying it more each time, and nonreaders in my household plowed through it. It’s a book I will happily reread annually. This is a timeless book about the human experience which has no need to genuflect to flavor-of-the-month political trends.
[…] Cartoonist (Drawn and Quarterly) okay, certainly more than my pal, this site’s Ryan Carey did. But while well-crafted and funny–I laughed out loud a few times—and I do relate as a […]