Adrian Tomine's artwork is simple and realistic
If a character in a novel is lonely, then perhaps the narrator tells us so. If a character in a film is lonely, then perhaps some piano music tells us so. But if a character in a comic is lonely, then we are often given nothing more to go on than a drawing of a man or a woman sitting by themselves on a sofa. The result is a sense of great distance but also of great intimacy: distance, because we cannot ever know exactly what is going on in the character's head and intimacy, because it feels as if the artist has tactfully withdrawn from the room, leaving us to watch the character for as long as we need to draw our own conclusions.
As a result, many of the most moving achievements of contemporary comics have been those that show us the stealthy approach of desolation. And now, to join Daniel Clowes' Ghost World and Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, comes Adrian Tomine's brilliant Shortcomings about a man whose life falls apart so quietly he barely even notices.
Shortcomings, originally serialised in Tomine's long-running Optic Nerve and now republished by Faber, follows Ben Tanaka, the 30-year-old Japanese-American manager of a cinema in Berkeley, California. When his girlfriend Miko leaves for an internship in New York, he has no one to talk to but his lesbian best friend, Alice, and even she may not be around for long. Nothing tragic happens to Ben, rather, as in Ghost World, there is simply the sense that his life has not worked out quite as it should and that everyone else is having more fun than him.
Tomine's characters are overripe Gen X-ers who communicate mostly via sarcasm and allusion. "Doesn't it make you feel like you're in some nostalgic movie about being Jewish or something?" asks Alice as the two friends take a train through Brooklyn. Happiness, for them, is as easy as bumping into the right girl at a party. But it's as hard as that too.
Tomine's artwork is so simple and realistic that it sometimes resembles an airline safety leaflet, and his storytelling isn't any more experimental. But nevertheless he pushes the medium to its limits with nothing more complicated than a thoughtful precision of dialogue and timing or with just the facial expressions of his characters. (I wasn't surprised to learn that he takes five or six days to draw and letter each page.) Scenes begin and end jarringly, giving us a sense of how, for Ben, everything seems to happen before he is quite ready for it. A single unexplained panel of an electricity pylon against a cloudy sky becomes strangely resonant - is it a dream, a memory, a symbol, or merely the view from Ben's window as he wonders what to do with himself?
You may think you don't have the appetite for all this torpid male self-absorption. But that's where the unique emotional distance of comics is important. For a lot of people, the problem with Nick Hornby, for example, is that they don't want to be mates with his narrators. For novels like Hornby's, that's fatal. But you're not listening to Ben Tanaka's story over a beer, you're just coldly watching his life. Tomine's style is so meticulously honest that he doesn't even seem to care whether or not you like his hero. That's a rare thing in a writer, but then Shortcomings is a rare book - not only one of the year's finest comics, but also one of its finest works of fiction.
(Second) best new graphic novel: Last year, Mike Carey's enjoyable Sandman spin-off Lucifer ended after 75 issues. It's too early to say whether his new series, Crossing Midnight, will have the same staying power, but its first paperback collection, Cut Here, is a promising, gruesome tale of Japanese paranormal horror.
