With a deft and romantic touch, Adrian Tomine portrays the emotional ambivalence of drifting, urban twenty-somethings in stunning black and white. His stories are appealingly naturalistic, stylishly cinematic, and emotionally rich. His fans accuse him of eavesdropping on their most intimate moments, exhibiting their insecurities with both forensic detachment and surprising compassion.
From
TIME magazine:
What makes Tomine's work difficult for some is the naturalism. He tells stories that feel more like short exposures of ordinary people's lives, rather than plot-heavy adventures or overt comedy. These stories don't begin and end so much as fade in and out. Tomine explores nuance of character as revealed by life's more typical crises: losing a job, having an annoying neighbor or flirting with someone you shouldn't. The best of the four tales in this collection, "Hawaiian Getaway," features Hillary Chan, a twenty-something child of Asian immigrants who loses her job and starts a downward spiral of guilt and self-loathing. Driven to distraction by a demanding, critical mother and a patronizing, "successful" younger sister, she begins making increasingly nasty prank calls to the payphone outside her window. Strangely, one of these results in a date with a decent guy. Will she see him again? It ends as she waits to find out.
Bianca Isaki writes in the
Image Text Journal at the University of Florida:
Adrian Tomine’s graphic story collection, Summer Blonde (SB hereafter) traces the urban landscape of the young middle class in the modern San Francisco Bay Area. What prevents these stories from becoming unhappy, banal episodes about the personal problems of a few individuals? In conjunction with SB’s focus on the operations of everyday life, I find one suggestion in Adrienne Rich’s insight: “A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us” (981). In SB, the perversities of everyday life are performed in the space opened by the fictive. As fiction, SB activates an imaginative ‘grappling’ with the production of social aberration as anomaly. Put otherwise, SB “keys to” (Bal 1997) the mediating codes of everyday life, “ways of operating,” [1] to create space in which to postpone identification of social perversity as aberration.
If you are looking for a non capes-and-tights, reality-based graphic novel that as the
Village Voice put is "Immaculately rendered... Emotionally adroit, with expediently detonated epiphanies and silences," then give Tomine's Summer Blonde a read.
Prices starting at just $8.00 at
Death Ray Comics.
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