Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #149764 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-02
• Released on: 2007-10-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 104 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781897299166
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Amazon Significant Seven, November 2007: Adrian Tomine draws his mid-twenties slackers with an impeccable, exact line for every slumpy gesture and cultivated rumple. In Shortcomings, this ex-wunderkind tackles a book-length comic for the first time after three collections of stories, and his maturity shows not so much in the ages of his characters, who are still slackly wandering, dropping out of grad school or managing a movie theater, but in his calm and masterful handling of his story, in which vividly individual characters wander through the maze of imposed and self-generated stereotypes of Asian and American identities (the title is a wry allusion to one of the most enduring of those assumptions). Never has that old commonplace that the personal is the political seemed more paralyzing, and more true. --Tom Nissley

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. SignatureReviewed by Junot DíazTomine's lacerating falling-out-of-love story is an irresistible gem of a graphic novel. Shortcomingsis set primarily in an almost otherworldly San Francisco Bay Area; its antihero, Ben Tanaka, is not your average comic book protagonist: he's crabby, negative, self-absorbed, über-critical, slack-a-riffic and for someone who is strenuously race-blind, has a pernicious hankering for whitegirls. His girlfriend Miko (alas and tragically) is an Asian-American community activist of the moderate variety. Ben is the sort of cat who walks into a Korean wedding and says, Man, look at all these Asians, while Miko programs Asian-American independent films and both are equally skilled in the underhanded art of fighting without fighting. As you might imagine, their relationship is in full decay. In Tomine's apt hands, Tanaka's heartbreaking descent into awareness is reading as good as you'll find anywhere. What a relief to find such unprecious intelligent dynamic young people of color wrestling with real issues that they can neither escape nor hope completely to understand.Tomine's no dummy: he keeps the issues secondary to his characters' messy humanity and gains incredible thematic resonance from this subordination. Tomine's dialogue is hilarious (he makes Seth Rogan seem a little forced), his secondary characters knockouts (Ben's Korean-American only friend Alice steals every scene she's in, and the Korean wedding they attend together as pretend-partners is a study in the even blending of tragedy and farce), and his dramatic instincts second-to-none. Besides orchestrating a gripping kick-ass story with people who feel like you've had the pleasure/misfortune of rooming with, Tomine does something far more valuable: almost incidentally and without visible effort (for such is the strength of a true artist) he explodes the tottering myth that love is blind and from its million phony fragments assembles a compelling meditation on the role of race in the romantic economy, dramatizing with evil clarity how we are both utterly blind and cannily hyperaware of the immense invisible power race exerts in shaping what we call desire. And that moment at the end when the whiteboy squares up against Ben, kung-fu style: I couldn't decide whether to fold over in laughter or to hug Ben or both. Tomine accomplishes in one panel of this graphic novel what so many writers have failed to do in entire books. In crisp spare lines, he captures in all its excruciating, disappointing absurdity a single moment and makes from it our world. (Oct.)Junot Díaz's first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, has just been published by Riverhead.
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Review

Customer Reviews

Masterpiece of Flawed Yet Sympathetic Characters
Written in 3 "chapters," which are more like 3 film Acts, Shortcomings tells the tale of cynical, lust-soaked Ben Tanaka, a 30-year-old movie house manager in Berkeley. Even though his girlfriend Miko is a gorgeous Japanese cultural activist with sensitivity and intelligence, Ben's wandering eye for Anglo girls and his surly attitude cause friction in his relationship with disastrous consequences. Ben finds solace in his only friend, Alice, a spunky, sharp lesbian who attends Mills College. In this context, Shortcomings explores with sadness and hilarity sexual and racial stereotypes and the painful search for an authentic identity. The characters are painfully realistic, beset by misguided desires, raging egos, and intense selfishness. But Tomine's brilliance as an artist is to give his characters complexity, believability, and, yes, our sympathy. I was sad after I finished the book in 90 minutes of reading because I loved the characters and wanted to spend more time with them and found myself fantasizing a long-running TV show about them or a series of more graphic novels so I could follow their lives in more depth. Such is the pang this great book left me.

Funny, and Dead-on
I'm probably not an objective reviewer. I'm a white woman married to an Asian man, and we lived in the Bay Area for many years, so the subject matter was a bit close to the bone for me. At several points in the novel, I felt as though someone had been eavesdropping on my conversations. Tomine also does a great job of conveying subtle emotions through facial expressions. I loved it, and not just for the local references and jokes about Asian identity politics.

More of the Same
I loved Tomine's early collections, 32 Stories and Sleepwalk, but his last one (Summer Blonde) was a bit of a disappointment, feeling like a rehash of earlier material. This latest book collects issues 9-11 of Optic Nerve into a single narrative arc following a single protagonist. Despite this move from short story to novella-length, Tomine largely fails to take advantage of the space afforded to move into new thematic territory.

His work has always focused on loneliness, and yet again the main character is a socially awkward semi-hipster who tends to alienate people. Ben Tanaka is a 30-year-old manager of an art house cinema in Berkeley (presumably the UC Theater, which like the one Ben manages, was forced to close to due seismic retrofitting regulations), living with his beautiful Japanese-American girlfriend Miko. The story follows Ben's dying relationship with Miko and subsequent rebound attempts with various cute Anglo girls. But Ben is so plagued by insecurity and bitter snobbishness, and is so grumpy and cynical that it becomes increasingly hard as the book progresses to understand what any woman would see in him.

The one new theme Tomine introduces to his work is the struggle to define identity and identity politics among Asian-Americans. Ben, Miko, and even Ben's moxie-laden Korean-American lesbian pal Alice (who tend to steal any scene she's in), all grapple with various stereotypes and self-imposed expectations. However, none of this seems particularly inventive or fresh, and some scenes, such as Alice taking Ben to a family wedding as her beard feel particularly recycled. Then again, I'm not Asian-American, so maybe it has more resonance for that audience.

As usual, Tomine's art is amazing -- his attention to framing, line, and composition are second to none. That said, sometimes his faces tend to drift into similarity -- in a story where race is so central, it's not a good thing when an Anglo guy key to the story looks Asian. As with his other work, those familiar with the East Bay will recognize a lot of the backgrounds (Rockridge, the Durant food court, Cody's, etc.).

On the whole, the book is a disappointment -- it's just way too similar in tone and subject matter to his previous work. Tomine clearly is comfortable in the Berkeley-to-Brooklyn world of 20-30something hipster creative singletons and their friendships and relationships. But that's a pretty insular world, and I'd love to see him break out of it and turn his sharp observational gaze elsewhere. He got married last year, so maybe that'll lead to new directions in his storytelling.