The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist by Adrian Tomine

It’s a subjectivity similar to that of, say, Ben Lerner or Karl Ove Knausgaard, in which the artist both is and is not the character. Think of Joe Sacco, reporting from Sarajevo or Gaza, scaling his panels toward intimacy or distance, choosing what goes into and stays out of the frame. Interior page of 'The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist.' (Adrian Tomine / Drawn & Quarterly)Ĭomics, after all, are inherently fictionalized, if only in the sense that they are drawn. I’m so mortified, I just want to disappear forever.” It’s telling that we don’t actually get to hear the conversation, just the monologue in Tomine’s head. “Who am I kidding? I choked!” he laments in this new work after an interview with Terry Gross. If Tomine’s last book, “ Killing and Dying,” represented an attempt to push beyond the personal, inventing an array of divergent characters - “I was sick of one way of working,” he told me in an interview - the material here brings us directly in touch with the cartoonist’s obsessive point of view.

“Haven’t we seen a little too much of the hip, muted, fragmented, overly-short short stories that this moron is trying to pass off as fresh and original?” The question appears in a 1995 review of Adrian Tomine’s mini-comic “ Optic Nerve.” I don’t mention it to be snarky but to quote Tomine himself, who recites the review at length in “ The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist,” a new graphic memoir that, in loose chronological vignettes, returns to the self-lacerating sensibility of his early work. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores. Self-portrait of Adrian Tomine for 'The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist.' (Adrian Tomine / Drawn & Quarterly)

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist by Adrian Tomine