Category: Shortcomings

J’s Take on Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings

I have to say the cover of this graphic novel really does nothing for me. The color is a drab sort of olive brown, black, and white. And the artwork makes it look like an adult manga. Not that there’s anything wrong with adult manga in general, but I do prefer manga that’s aimed more […]

I have to say the cover of this graphic novel really does nothing for me. The color is a drab sort of olive brown, black, and white. And the artwork makes it look like an adult manga. Not that there’s anything wrong with adult manga in general, but I do prefer manga that’s aimed more for a younger crowd. So just looking at the cover, it looks like a book that’ll bore me.

I didn’t really remember what this graphic novel was supposed to be about before I started reading it, so I was pretty much going in blind. K had warned me I should read the short little bios on the title page before I started reading. Which is good, because I’m about 50% likely to skip those. They’re usually irrelevant, useless data, or contain spoilers.

The bios do give you a hint as to the story, as well as clue you in as to who’s who. Most of the characters were born in the US, a large majority are Asian, and the names make them not uniformly Japanese. What a weird manga! :) Though it does become clear that this isn’t really a manga. The author is Asian American, as are most of the characters, and really, the art style is rather a mix of Japanese and American as well.

At first, I thought the story was really heavy on the Asian American experience thing. It sounded like the characters were preaching about it and going on and on about it. It didn’t even sound like natural dialogue to me, and I was pondering the review I’d write would include a rant on comics that just don’t get the concept of realistic dialogue. But then I read further into the story, and parts of it and some of the characters started to amuse me.

It’s still heavily about Asian American experiences, prejudices, and problems, but I came to realize that that was pretty much the point of the story. And a source of real angst for the main character. He has hangups. His largest one being that he fantasizes about white women and has trouble admitting that that’s his preference. Other characters tell him to just accept it, but it’s in conflict with the idea that American culture has indoctrinated him into believing white women to be superior and sexier.

He is, by the way, a total jerk. I don’t know why the smart and funny lesbian chick has him as a best friend. He even sucks as a beard, being Japanese in ancestry to her family’s Korean!

The story was nice to read in a ‘this is different from what I usually read’ sort of way, and you don’t hear nearly enough about Asian Americans in mainstream media, especially from the inside out. And I did find parts of it amusing, and I did rather like the lesbian character. But I didn’t like the main character at all, and I’m rather glad it was relatively short. It made its point, and then it stopped.

So, good story, and maybe I’ll read more by Adrian Tomine. I just hope he doesn’t have more books about this character. I’m not reading those.

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Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine: B

From the front flap:
Ben Tanaka has problems. In addition to being rampantly critical, sarcastic, and insensitive, his long-term relationship is awash in turmoil. His girlfriend, Miko Hayashi, suspects that Ben has a wandering eye, and more to the point, it’s wandering in the direction of white women. This accusation (and its various implications) becomes the […]

From the front flap:
Ben Tanaka has problems. In addition to being rampantly critical, sarcastic, and insensitive, his long-term relationship is awash in turmoil. His girlfriend, Miko Hayashi, suspects that Ben has a wandering eye, and more to the point, it’s wandering in the direction of white women. This accusation (and its various implications) becomes the subject of heated, spiralling debate, setting in motion a story that pits California against New York, devotion against desire, and truth against truth.

Review:
Shortcomings is the story of Ben Tanaka, a guy with no career ambitions beyond managing a movie theater, who nonetheless thinks he knows everything, is always right, and that any kind of contrary opinion is a personal attack. He is relentlessly negative (a phrase I’d been thinking even before his girlfriend used it), insincere, shallow, judgmental, and so incredibly irritating that if I met him in real life I would leave tracks trying to get away from him. So, while I respect the vividness with which Tomine was able to evoke this character, I still pretty much hate him.

Ben’s girlfriend Miko has been putting up with his crap for a couple of years, but she’s not a blameless victim, either. She instigates arguments and goads him into anger, sometimes exaggerating things just to provoke a reaction. She’s often not wrong with what she says—he does have a thing for white women, for example—but the way she says it is guaranteed to lead to a fight. They are very, very bad for each other and their arguments are painful to read because it’s easy to imagine a real couple saying the same things.

The front flap promises a “brutal, funny, and insightful reflection of human shortcomings.” The brutal territory is covered pretty well. Ben is downright mean on occasions, but can’t take it when it’s dished back at him. One of the most memorable scenes is when, after his new white girlfriend has gotten to know him better, she breaks up with him. First, she tries to give an excuse about the return of an old flame, but then admits that he’s the problem. “I could be totally, brutally honest about why I’m doing this, but I’m not sure you’d ever recover.” I actually wish she would have elaborated and that he would’ve had a moment where he realized he was all those things, but it would’ve been unrealistic for him to ever be convinced he was wrong.

I suppose there’s some insight, too, even though Ben doesn’t experience a personality transplant. He does get what he deserves, though, and ends up alone and left behind. Will he learn? I sincerely doubt it. He’ll just go on blaming others for what they did to his life, never realizing all the crap he did to them in return.

What’s utterly missing is the promised funny. Looking back, I can’t remember a single thing that even made me smile, much less laugh. Depressing and cringe-inducing? Yes. Funny? No.

The art is pretty interesting. It’s nothing flashy, but there are some good subtle moments when Ben’s disgust or derision is well portrayed. It adheres rigidly to a rectangular panel shape throughout, and if I were writing this for English class, I’d postulate that this is a metaphor for Ben’s inflexible worldview. Some of the parts I like best use repeated panels to indicate the passage of time, such as the view of the parking lot while Ben is seeing Miko off on a trip to New York, or the last page, where he mulls over all that has happened while gazing out of an airplane window.

While I certainly didn’t like the characters or situations they put themselves in, I still must give Shortcomings kudos for invoking such a reaction. I’d be interested to read more from Tomine, but hopefully something with a slightly more sympathetic protagonist next time.

The material collected in Shortcomings was originally published as issues 9-11 of a comic series called Optic Nerve (Drawn & Quarterly). Issues 1-4 and 5-8 can be found in the collections Sleepwalk and Other Stories and Summer Blonde, respectively.

More reviews of Shortcomings can be found at Triple Take.

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Shortcomings (Adrian Tomine)

The Plot
Ben Tanaka, 30, a movie theatre manager, is currently living with his girlfriend, Miko. Their relationship is not the best, but inertia is keeping them going for now. Miko announces that she’s moving to New York for an internship, and that the two of them should maybe take a break during that time. […]

The Plot
Ben Tanaka, 30, a movie theatre manager, is currently living with his girlfriend, Miko. Their relationship is not the best, but inertia is keeping them going for now. Miko announces that she’s moving to New York for an internship, and that the two of them should maybe take a break during that time. Ben’s friend Alice, a perpetual grad-student lesbian, eventually decides to head to New York as well, after the San Francisco area starts to wear on her.

My Thoughts
This 2007 graphic novel comes from author Adrian Tomine, who is apparently known more for short stories than longer fiction. This means little to me, since I had never heard of this person until now and have read nothing else written by them. [I had to stop here and look the author up, because the androgynous name made me uncertain of his gender. It’s a guy.] The subject matter is not really my cup of tea; I can’t say I’m a fan of whiny slackers, regardless of their race, gender or sexual orientation. If this hadn’t been a graphic novel, I probably wouldn’t have agreed to read this in the first place.

The graphics of the graphic novel are not really that groundbreaking. The artist has chosen to stick strictly to panels and keep all of the art within each panel. The size shifted between a 1/6th size box and a 1/9th size box. Your average Calvin & Hobbes strip showed more dynamic art and experimentation with the form than you’re going to find here. There were, at least, no giant deformed hands showing up in the panels, and everyone was pretty much proportional.

I found the characters themselves as lackluster as the graphic depiction of them. Ben, the main character, always behaved and looked as if he was sleepwalking, no matter what the situation he found himself in. Everyone else generally sported a tired and slumped air as well. An aura of boredom with life just oozed from every situation and conversation.

There’s very little plot to support these situations and conversations, unfortunately, as we become spectators in a short period of the life of Ben. He drifts from home to work to hanging out with Alice and back again without really making any connection at all with the reader, either to engage their sympathy or to rile them or anything. He is as blah as his existance, and the only real emotion he can create is impatience with his passivity.

There were a couple of positive points amidst all this mediocrity, however. I like the author’s choice to include several conversations in non-English (one in Korean and a few bits in Japanese). I’m not crazy about the fact that translations don’t seem to be readily available, because though I was able to ferret out more or less what was going on in the Japanese, the Korean was beyond me, and I’d like to know what was said. Another choice I liked was the author’s tendency to skip through time without waiting for it to be a new page or creating a new chapter or even feeling the need to put up a little tag in the next panel stating “Later”, like so many others might have done. It was made clear through the conversation or the art that time had passed. There was also no forced exposition describing what we’d missed — everything was not spelled out, so the reader was left to draw their own conclusions about the resolution of several situations.

In Short
Overall, I didn’t find this graphic novel to be anything special. It was decidedly middle of the road in terms of the drawings and the plot. The artistic effort was adequate, but I don’t feel like it broke any new ground or dazzled me with its brilliance. The writing ditto. I find it ironic that the complaint of one of the characters — about bad movies being praised simply because they were created by an Asian American — may also apply to this graphic novel, because I don’t quite understand why it’s considered so great. The relationship issues explored here have been done before, if not with this particular cast of characters. I definitely would not call this a must read, but neither do I feel annoyed that I spent the time to read it.

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