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Shuffled! is a weekly column appearing every Thursday here on BPRLive. Each week, we welcome an APA artist to share some thoughts about the music they listen to. Check out the Shuffled! archive for past articles.

This week’s Shuffler: Adrian Tomine

Adrian Tomine had something of a head start working in comics. At 16, when he was still in high school in Sacramento, Tomine started writing and drawing a combination of fictional and autobiographical stories, self-publishing them in his mini-comic Optic Nerve, which he sold through local stores and mail order. At 17, he was hired to produce a monthly comic strip for the Tower Records store magazine Pulse!

In 1994, at age 20, Tomine began producing Optic Nerve as a regular comic book series for Drawn & Quarterly. After earning a degree in English Literature from the University of California at Berkele, thanks to his cool, clean, and very distinctive style, Tomine quickly found himself in high demand and his work has graced numerous CD and album covers as well as magazines like The New Yorker, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Time.

In 2004, D+Q collected the complete run of strips that was originally published in Pulse Magazine, along with comics originally published in Details and a host of other magazines from the past decade, in Scrapbook. A large section of Scrapbook is dedicated to Tomine’s extensive illustration and design work, featuring his best material over the years from virtually every major publication in America including the New Yorker, Details, Esquire, and the late JFK Jr.-edited George.

From 2004 to 2007, Tomine completed his most lengthy story arc thus far, Shortcomings, originally serialized in Optic Nerve issues #9-11, excerpted in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #13, and published as a graphic novel in Fall 2007. The racially-charged, volatile dialogues delineated in Shortcomings are unlike anything in Tomine’s previous work or, for that matter, comics in general.

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Recently as I clicked around the internets, I came across an excerpt of Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings. I was hooked. I’m not really a comic book graphic novel person, but after reading Persepolis I and II and American Born Chinese, maybe I am a graphic novel person. These books rock, and not only because I can finish the book in a weekend and feel like I’m actually reading something. I think the combination of snippets of conversation and some simple imagery can go a long way in conveying a message. Maybe the fact that it’s so bare bones makes the message that much more obvious. But that can’t be *it*, because some of the stuff in Shortcoming or American Born Chinese is so complicated.

In one of my favorite scenes, Ben Tanaka and his girl friend Miko are leaving an Asian American film festival. Ben, king of pessimism, attacks the film and everyone who cheered for it because it was an Asian American film… because to him, it was just a bad movie that they applauded simply because it was about Asian Americans. Hmmm. Have I ever been part of that?

I laughed and cringed all at the same time through all of the bits about interracial dating. About the “right” kind of person to bring home, whether it be about gender or ethnicity. Is it wrong for a person to have a “type?” What if this type happens to be white girls? Or white guys? How politicized should we be in our dating choices? We think we know the whole story when we see a “white” guy walking down the street with an Asian American girl. But do we? Maybe it’s the familiarity of the images, but the newness of the stories lie a little deeper.

I don’t know. Check it out for yourself. Or, find me and I’ll lend you my copy. =)

Tags: Commentary, inter-racial dating.

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