You've Escaped

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another new yorker cover by adrian tomine

Adrian Tomine’s Summer Blonde; or how everyone you will ever be romantically involved with is a creep

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.

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New Yorker cover by Adrian Tomine

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Oh, just some things in drafts that I’m currently working on.

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Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine

This is my first book review and it comes on the absolute perfect day. Last night, I answered my cell phone as I was buying ice cream and chips at the grocery store. My friend who had called me asked me what kind of chips I was buying.

“Salt and vinegar,” I answered.

“Every time I eat those I feel like a black person,” she said.

“Oh god.” I groaned a little bit at this common stereotype.

“No, really, it’s true!”

It’s weird to have a conversation like this, especially when people who are generally liberal and very accepting of people of all creeds and races say this. It always feels uncomfortable and awkward but do we all have our little bits of racism? How much does racism and ethnocentrism really affect our lives? Do we miss out on opportunities and people in our lives because we’re so focused on our own little rules and misconceptions about people of different races and ethnicities?

This is the crux of Shortcomings, a subtle and beautifully inked black and white graphic novel by Adrian Tomine, best known for his graphic novel series Optic Nerve and of course, his illustrations in The New Yorker. Ben Tanaka, our central character is a 30-year-old Japanese-American movie theater manager living in Oakland who has been dating his girlfriend Miko Hayashi for a while. Miko is very active in the Asian-American community and this causes strife between the two as Ben is almost uncomfortable with identifying too much with his Asian heritage. Their relationship further disintegrates as Ben’s obsession with the ideal Western white woman pushes a wedge between the two. When Miko is offered an internship in New York City with an Asian-American film institute for four months, she eagerly takes it and leaves Ben uncertain of their relationship status.

This is where things begin to get interesting. Ben, free of Miko, pursues the white women he has fetishized and felt inferior to for so long; he attempts to date a young performance artist who works at his theater and then a flighty graduate student he meets through a friend. Suffice to say, Ben doesn’t get what he expects from these relationships and he is left pining after Miko, long gone to glamorous Gotham. He goes after her and is shocked as things unravel on the other coast.

Shortcomings realistically conveys the awkwardness of dating, especially when race comes into play. Ben treats the white women he asks out on dates like trophies, feeling smug when other Asian men look at him with what he calls “white-girl envy”; his date looks disturbed as he reveals this feeling to her. Ben discusses his feelings of inadequacy when it comes to white women with his best friend, Alice Kim. Alice, a lesbian, deals with her own kind of sexual politics as she navigates relationships with different women while trying to remain closeted to her Korean family. Ben’s ignorance of tenuous ethnic relations is made evident when Alice brings him to meet her parents as her “boyfriend”; he wonders at why Alice’s Korean relatives always sound like they’re arguing.

Everyone in Shortcomings seems to be unaware of their own role in the fetishization of identity politics. Ben worships white women to the point where he can’t date one without treating her like an object; Miko exploits her own Asian identity to attract men sexually; and Alice bedhops among the women in her graduate student circle but shuns a colleague who is unsure of her sexual identity as a “fence sitter”. The hypocrisy evident in each character’s actions hits close to home as each plays out their own role in the complicated dance that is romance. Nothing is resolved at the close of the graphic novel, each character continuing blindly to go through the motions, convinced that they are above the identity politics they play into.

What does this mean in what’s being called post-racial America? We have elected a black president who embodies the melting pot that the United States is supposed to be. Racial barriers and prejudice shouldn’t exist in theory but they still do, of course. After all, I have my liberal friends telling me how eating salt and vinegar chips makes them feel like a black person not to mention other people I know telling me that they would never date a person of _________ background because they just aren’t attracted to them. Is this a legitimate statement or are we just culturally socialized to be attracted to certain kinds of people? Asian women yes, Asian men generally no, the list goes on.

Not to mention what is socially acceptable in being attracted to gender wise; effeminate men and butch lesbians and anyone whose gender is not in the binary male or female get the short end of the stick while traditionally masculine gay men and lipstick lesbians are appropriated by straight culture and seen as desirable. Alice’s movement through lesbian circles as well as another character’s, Sasha, dating history reveal more about Ben’s own insecurity about his own masculinity and his relation to gender identity.

Shortcomings is one of the most honest books about race and gender and sexuality that I have read in a long time. The characters are flawed and cringe worthy at times but absolutely easy to relate to. Despite our best intentions, we all have our built in prejudices that sometimes lead us to snap decisions and quick judgments based on a first reading of a person. I won’t reveal my prejudices here, this is not the forum for it, but I will say that we have to be aware of how we see others so perhaps we can see individuals and not just triggers that turn us on or off.