How fitting for an artist whose recent works include Killing and Dying (2015) and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist (2020).Īs Tomine-creator of the ongoing Optic Nerve comics and now a regular cover artist for The New Yorker-explains to the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen, in an October 2020 interview for The Paris Review: His take is unique and especially uninviting to any feel-good-read crowd. Starting with the title page, which profiles the upcoming cast of characters-name, age, height, born, occupation-with side views to match, Tomine urges us to consider how general impressions, artistic representations, and visual media, that is, different definitions of an “image,” craft how one views and is viewed as of a certain racial identity. Shortcomings pulls no punches as it broaches the idea of a racialized image.

For a work serving up issues of Asian-American identity and how individuals fall short, this motif is apt. Whether tempura (Japanese) or noodles in oyster pails (Chinese), they show ethnic groups catering to American expectations. Ubiquitous yet homogenized, these establishments present standard meals in Tomine’s expressive, black-and-white boxes.

At the outset, Crepe Expectations may be “the usual place,” but that does not mean it cannot easily be switched out with any other café. A diner, a café, a Chinese takeout joint: each is a type of restaurant, and in Adrian Tomine’s 2007 graphic novel Shortcomings, they are interchangeable as such.

Shortcomings novel