Shortcomings

by Adrian Tomine

Overview

Shortcomings, Adrian Tomine's first long-form graphic novel, is the story of Ben Tanaka, a confused, obsessive, Japanese-American male in his late-twenties, and his cross-country search for contentment (or at least the perfect girl). Along the way, Tomine tackles modern culture, sexual mores, and racial politics with brutal honesty and lacerating, irreverent humor, while deftly bringing to life a cast of painfully real anti-hero characters. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Tomine has acquired a cult-like fan following and has earned a status as one of the most widely-acclaimed cartoonists of our time. Shortcomings was serialized in Tomine's iconic comic book series Optic Nerve and was excerpted in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern #13.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781770464285
Publisher:	Drawn & Quarterly
Publication date:	05/04/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	111
File size:	39 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	15 - 18 Years

About the Author

Adrian Tomine was born in 1974 in Sacramento, California. He began self-publishing his comic book series Optic Nerve when he was sixteen, and in 1994 he received an offer to publish from Drawn & Quarterly. His comics have been anthologized in publications such as McSweeney's, Best American Comics, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. Both his graphic novel Shortcomings and his memoir The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist were named New York Times Notable Books of the year. Since 1999, Tomine has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughters.

Editorial Reviews

The author is an expert at hooking the reader without tricks or obvious effort, and you'll be tempted to buzz through Shortcomings in an hour. But you'll want to slow down to take in the detailed black-and-white panels that casually document the way we live now. Tomine has always been attracted to love gone wrong among the hesitant young men and women of the bourgeois-bohemian set, but he gets his subject across in the unsentimental style of an anthropologist's report. Unlike the more playful graphic novelists who influenced him, Daniel Clowes (Ghost World, David Boring) and the Hernandez brothers (Love and Rockets), Tomine isn't given to flights of surrealism, rude jests or grotesque images. He is a mild observer, an invisible reporter, a scientist of the heart. His drawing style is plain and exact. The dialogue appearing inside his cartoon balloons is pitch-perfect and succinct. He's daring in his restraint.
—The New York Times

Jim Windolf

Meticulously observed…The dialogue is pitch–perfect and succinct. [Tomine is] daring in his restraint.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Tomine’s genius is to strip his medium of every possible type of grandiosity or indulgence, and the result is that life itself floods in. His mise–en–scène rivals Eric Rohmer’s in its gentle precision, and his mastery of narrative time suggests Alice Munro. Shortcomings, as near as he’d get to a grand statement, is as deceptively simple and perfect as a comic book gets.” —Jonathan Lethem

“Few books have dealt with racial and sexual politics—and, specifically, Asian American masculinity—as deftly as Shortcomings.” —Time

“Compelling and laugh-out-loud hilarious.” —The Washington Post

“Shortcomings is the best account ever of Asian American male angst (with some satirical takes on Asian American culture, too). Tomine is the Chekhov of comics, a master of the story form, done in pictures.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen

“Exploring race, adulthood, and ambition with exquisitely tuned humor and poignancy, Shortcomings is a graphic narrative as piercingly realistic as any prose fiction.” —Entertainment Weekly

“One of the most gifted graphic novelists of our time.” —Wired

“Graphic novels are rarely this disquieting and subtle.” —The Boston Globe

“It’s a fair bet that Shortcomings will only further secure [Tomine’s] title as the ‘most masterful’ and ‘most critically–acclaimed’ comics writer of his generation.” —The Believer

“Graphic literature’s most gifted realist…Fiercely honest.” —St. Louis Post—Dispatch

From the Publisher