Adrian Tomine’s Summer Blonde; or how everyone you will ever be romantically involved with is a creep
browsing through old book reviews, reposting and whatnot. continue.
As I read Summer Blonde earlier this week, my mind kept returning to something I had written a few months ago, Love Notebook #5. These lines specifically repeated themselves over and over again in my head:
This is a love story for the creeps and the stalkers and the freaks; for the people who call you 46 times in a row when you don’t pick up the first time; for the ones who convince you that it’s totally normal that they watch you sleep; for the people who think all your friends want to sleep with you; for the people who don’t know when to let go; for the people who delete all the photos of your exes from your computer when you’re not home; and for the people who will only know how to love in their own fucked up ways.
I loved you, too.
I know about creeps. We all do, really. At some point or another, we’ve been the creep or the creeped upon in a given situation. This is the common thread in Summer Blonde, that all of these characters, all of us really, are weirdos. They exist in isolated states whether they are involved romantically with another person or not. The comics are not only drawn subtly and in great detail but the stories are as nuanced yet realistic as the accompanying art. As in his acclaimed graphic novel Shortcomings, Tomine creates characters whose small worlds teem with the everyday insecurities and neuroses that are almost uncomfortably familiar for the reader. Tomine is successful as an artist because he is almost preternaturally aware of what people are thinking and doing behind closed doors.
Summer Blonde is a collection of four stories, each loosely linked to the other by the overwhelming feeling of awkwardness and loneliness that accompanies so many interactions between humans. The first story, “Alter Ego”, deals with Martin, a writer in his mid-twenties who has received a decent amount of praise for his first novel and is now unable to meet the deadline for his follow-up book. He is bored and distracted with his life when he receives a postcard from the girl he was in love with in high school and decides to track her down. The girl is long gone from his hometown by the time he comes around but Martin befriends her high school-aged sister and they begin a tenuous friendship as the rest of his relationships begin to crumble. “Alter Ego” is a study in getting the things you thought you wanted and then finding that you’re still not sure what you want. Martin feels like that friend who continually complains about his life but only so those around him can remind him of how lucky he is. With people like this, does that ever matter? Don’t they still find ways to see how awful their lives are regardless of reality?
Indeed, reality, or relative ideas of reality rather, is an idea that every character in Summer Blonde struggles to define and live in. The title story, “Summer Blonde”, centers around Neil, a lonely man who is jealous of his casanova neighbor, Carlo, and besotted with the Vanessa, the girl who works at the greeting card store he visits often. Neil is a nebbish in the classic sense and spends hours in therapy discussing his inability to have relationships with women and his awkward crush on Vanessa. His obsession with Vanessa grows when he sees that she is involved with Carlo. This leads Neil down a road where he becomes directly involved in Vanessa’s life in irreparable ways. Reality is not only an issue for Neil, who can only see himself as a guardian of sorts towards Vanessa, but for the other characters who delude themselves in their own perceptions of their romantic relationships. All involved are left to question whether they can ever really know the person they’re sleeping with any more than they know the person who stands next to them on the street.
Hillary Chan, a lonely, somewhat angry phone operator, is the focus of “Hawaiian Getaway”. She is fired for an error involving William Shatner (no lie) but doesn’t seem to really care. Now unemployed, she sits in her apartment all day, avoiding awkward phone conversations with her pushy mother and overachieving sister. She has little contact with the outside world and has difficulty connecting with other people. She begins to get her kicks by calling the pay phone on the street below her bedroom window when people pass, harassing and berating the people who answer. Hillary is unable to vent those frustrations towards the people in her life so she lets herself relieve her own anger by hiding behind the anonymity of a phone call. This feels familiar, not only the feelings of inadequacy and frustration with the direction your life is heading, but the feeling of needing to vent and finding yourself unable to to the people closest to you. Why else have humans kept journals for thousands of years? What about the internet, with its faceless barbs and bickering on message boards and the comment sections of websites and blogs? We all have mediums where we lash out without the repercussions of being known. Of course, the double edged sword of technology is that it’s now that much harder to remain faceless forever.
The final story in the collection moves from the awkward world of twenty-somethings to the truly tragic realm that is high school. “Bomb Scare” centers around Scotty, a lonely high schooler who has one friend, Alex, who is constantly tortured at school for possibly being gay. Scotty’s friendship with Alex ends as Scotty tries to befriend Cammie, a girl who is only well liked because of her sexual willingness. Scotty turns his back on Alex in order to impress Cammie only to find that he doesn’t really know that he wants to be close to anyone. This story seemed to be the most painful, perhaps because high school, while different for everyone, is such a singular experiment in not only hurting each other but ourselves. It feels as if we are going through the motions of being almost adult while blindfolded, having no idea how to go about the simple things.
This is a collection of stories for the voyeur in all of us. Tomine is a master at creating the most relatable and alienating images of loneliness in comics, literature in general even, these days. This of course comes back down to perception: what are we supposed to be looking at or for? Reading this gives you the feeling of looking through your lover’s drawers when he or she isn’t home. You’re expecting to find something you don’t want to see but then you find something else entirely and you’re never sure how to feel about it. This of course makes you as much of a weirdo as the significant other you were suspicious of. Welcome to the club; nothing but love can turn you into a total creep.
