Adrian Tomine's Optic Nerve 13 and One of the Best Short Stories of the Year

Optic Nerve No 13 by Adrian Tomine
new this week from Drawn & Quarterly

I brought up Optic Nerve 13 by Adrian Tomine real briefly yesterday in The Wednesday Review but I need to say a bit more about it.

The comic - and make no mistake, unlike the recent trend in alt comic anthologies, this is a good old fashioned Comic Book - has two main stories and a front piece. That front story, a one-pager depicting the author's frustrations in doing analog things in a digital world, plays with similar themes as the letters presented on the letters page on the inside back cover; people's annoyance with Tomine's lack of internet presence and insistence on making a comic comic and the like. It's a nice commentary on Tomine's current place with his art and how he wants to present it.

The main part of the comic is taken up by the story "Go Owls," about a relationship across its entire short history. Barry and and an unnamed woman meet at some kind of Anonymous meeting - it's hard to know which kind, Narcotics Anonymous or Alcoholics Anonymous, as both fall into alcohol and Barry deals pot around the neighborhood (and smokes it) as the story progresses. Maybe that's a foreshadowing of the difficulties that will ensue in the relationship and the weaknesses each character end up showing. The story quickly progresses, jumping forward in time days or weeks at a time. The relationship presented is complex. What starts out as a brief relationship turns into the woman depending on Barry for shelter and food. Her job prospects fall apart, but Barry insists on providing for them both. The woman doesn't say all that much throughout, with talkative, rambling Barry seemingly driving both conversations and the story, another foreshadowing of Barry's dominance in the relationship. Things turn abusive at points, first verbally, then physically, with Barry wanting to control the woman's life now that she's dependent on him; the woman does seem to love him (or... maybe not - she's a bit of a blank slate). Abusive relationships are sometimes needlessly complex, and while the relationship here seems to be paint by numbers, Tomine shows the emotional connection they seem to have (or at the very least, Barry has). Make no mistake, the woman is a victim here. Her general lack of talkativeness and complete lack of any kind of name (aside from "babe") reinforces her subservience and paints a troubling picture. The story closes at the apparent end of their relationship, at what seems to be their happiest moment (or at least Barry's). Throughout the entire story, it is evident she just kind of fell into this and is sticking with it because she doesn't think she has any other choice. The end leaves her standing alone, once again adrift, the blank slate of her personality now projected into an unknowable, blank future, her prior journey a symbol of a life wasted by someone now gone.

The second (untitled) story (which I'll call "Translated, from the Japanese" after the second page caption), plays an interesting counterpoint to "Go Owls." "Translated" is much shorter, and not a narrative comic like "Owls" but an astonishing visual tone poem. The first page is a letter written in Japanese, and what follows over the next eight story pages is (ostensibly) that letter from a mother to her infant son, translated and illustrated by Tomine. And what follows is beautiful, evocative, mysterious, and heartbreaking.

Tomine doesn't literally illustrate the letter's contents but shows still-lifes from the visual perspective of the letter's author: a sign at a terminal, baggage on a conveyor, a run-down apartment complex; a cityscape, towers lost in the haze. The letter opens, describing vague details of family discord, an iceberg tip of a mountain of pain hidden beneath the waves. "I wonder how old you are as you read this," she writes, so the vagueness is not one of obfuscation but in inferred familiarity with the background glossed over. She describes the trip from Japan to California, about the nice older man in their aisle on the plane, about an innocent mistake, about a pained reunion. Tomine's descriptions  (through the letter's author) are straight forward, yet vivid, powerfully accompanied by his consistently remarkable illustrations.

I'll assume this is a fiction (based on the visual setting) rather than something passed down to Tomine. As such it is a remarkable fiction - indeed, one of the finest pieces of narrative art released this year. Tomine's ability to build an expansive, detailed life and give us just hints at the depths involved in such a short space showcases a remarkable gift as a storyteller. This is not a translation of a real letter, but Tomine's translation of the terror of parenthood and the indescribably difficult paths family life can take. I haven't felt this absorbed into a character, since Chris Ware's Building Stories. (And Tomine did it in eight pages.) His draftsmanship, design and coloring in this piece is just flawless. "Translated, from the Japanese" will easily stand as one of the best short stories of the year - prose or comic.

"Go Owls" and "Translated" both depict women lost in moments of transition. Where "Go Owls" is specific and omniscient, "Translated"'s subjectivity lends it a startling power that is not present in "Go Owls." I can't really connect to either lead in "Go Owls" but the connection to the mother in "Translated" is total. Tomine inhabits the mother's character, and we as readers inhabit her, too. I've heard comparison's between Tomine and Daniel Clowes in the past couple of days, a comparison that makes no sense to me in light of Optic Nerve 13. Clowes seems incapable of writing a sympathetic, genuine character. Here, in just a few pages, Tomine gives us a snapshot of a whole human life, one we are intimately connected to. In "Translated," Tomine takes his place in league with the likes of Ware and Los Bros Hernandez.

Rutu Modan's The Property

The Property by Rutu Modan
Drawn & Quarterly, 2013

The Property is the first full-length graphic novel by the Israeli cartoonist Rutu Modan since Exit Wounds, her 2007 debut that made her a bestselling critical darling. She released one short story collection and had a serial in the New York Times in 2008, but aside from a Toon Books comic for young readers, she hasn't released anything since. The Property is thus a highly anticipated test if whether or not Modan, who started cartooning in earnest in her 40s, is a one-hit wonder or a rising star.

Like Exit Wounds, The Property isn't spectacular, but it is quite good. It is simply the straightforward story of one Israeli-American family's possible inheritance of a property in Poland long thought lost. Under Polish law, land taken from Jews during the Second World War remains the property of those individuals or their descendants regardless of the amount of time that has passed. Mica and her grandmother Regina, a colorful and realistic elderly expatriate Polish Jew, travel to Warsaw to reclaim land apparently taken away from their family decades ago, land that could be worth a fortune. But Regina has alternate motives for visiting Warsaw, reasons that involve a secret from her past and a recent loss coming back to haunt her now. And in her one week in Warsaw, while unraveling the mysteries of her family's past and rebuffing the machinations of a scheming relative, Micah falls for a local, a tour guide slash cartoonist very interested in Micah's family story.

Both Exit Wounds and The Property deal with the legacy of loss that can be so specific to the Jewish experience, Exit Wounds in the nearly daily exposure to terrorism in Israel, The Property in the quickly disappearing generation of survivors' losses from the Holocaust. Both deal with the societal expectations Jews have for each other. And both deal with the universality that familial secrets play in all of our lives. Modan's accessible ligne claire art and the simplicity of the story make this a light, easy read. This has art-house trappings to snag the NPR crowd, but rest assured this is the opposite of the intellectual or aesthetic challenge the packaging suggests. This is no game-changer, Modan no master, but it is still a quality, interesting read. I don't mean to damn this with faint praise, but this is alright, a nice, light summer read. If you've got twenty-five bucks and an hour to kill, go for it. There's worse you can do, but there's far better, too.

The Poetry of Childhood: Gilbert Hernandez's Marble Season

Marble Season by Gilbert Hernandez
Drawn & Quarterly, 2013

The Year of Beto continues. Marble Season by Gilbert Hernandez came out last week from Drawn & Quarterly, and it is another brilliant book from the Love and Rockets creator. Ostensibly an autobiographical work, the novel is not a comprehensive retelling of his life and career or even a specific short period from his life, but a plotless tone-poem about the little moments that represent the very experience of childhood.

Hernandez presents the novel as a roman a clef, with the central character Huey representing Gilbert (and his brothers Mario and Jaime represented by Junior and Chavo, respectively). His decision to give the proceedings a fictionalized veneer is more rooted in the work's grander purpose as a meditation about childhood rather than an autobiography about Gilbert's specific childhood (though it's that, too). Though rich in cultural and historical details from his childhood in Oxnard, California in the 1960s, fictionalizing the proceedings gives Hernandez free reign to tell the story without necessarily worrying about the specific factuality of the story (because how specific can anyone get about events from the time they were ten years old forty or fifty years after the fact?).

Hernandez's illustration style here is ever so slightly different from his previous work. Gilbert has drawn children many times before, notably throughout his Palomar-Luba cycle. But where the style there was reflective of the maturity of the work (even in the all-ages Venus comics), his style here seems to take cues from brother Jaime's almost whimsical flashback stories. To say that the work is "cute" seems to pigeonhole it into a category it doesn't belong, but there is definitely a quality of inspired charm to his cartooning.

There is no plot, no central conflict driving the story, though there are threads woven throughout that come along, drift away, and come back (or not). The story (such as it is) ambles and wanders among the moments and feelings of Hernandez's childhood, and by extension every childhood. There are comic books and games of marbles and neighbors on the stoop; big brothers helping make a Captain America shield, and little brothers never really talking but chilling out and meandering around; stickball and girls and secret clubs and more comics and fights in the alley; there are bullies and the "Beatos" on the radio and making muscles like the ads in the comics and dunking G.I. Joe in the sink; and more comics and plays about comics and teevee shows about comics; trading baseball cards for Mars Attacks cards and elaborate games of pretend and new neighbors fleeting in and out; and discussions about Captain Marvel and Godzilla and what it would be like to be grown up. So unlike Gilbert Hernandez, the work doesn't have a pervasive sense of dread or the weird, but a sense of wonder and the awesome power of the possible and the lack of responsibility where the toughest decision is what comic to read today.

This is an enchanting, absorbing work, a window into the childhood experience. Build into this handsomely designed hardcover is a space-time machine, a portal to Gilbert's past and to all of our pasts and to the present of every kid who is, ever was, and ever will be.

For my definitive guide to Love and Rockets and all things Los Bros Hernandez, click here.

A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

This article originally appeared on JHU Online in slightly different form in May 2009.

I've come to expect the unexpected working at JHU Comic Books, but I was still floored when I walked into work one recent Friday, and sitting at our back counter, sketching and signing a bunch of copies of his latest English Language releases, was none other than manga master Yoshihiro Tatsumi!

Yoshihiro Tatsumi is credited with creating gekiga, a revolutionary form of alternative, mature manga in the 1950's. He was long regarded as one of the most significant figures in the history of manga in Japan, but until recently, his many works were out of reach to most western audiences. Beginning last year, however, our friends at Drawn & Quarterly started an ambitious new program of releasing much of the master's best works in new, gorgeously presented English language editions, starting with last year's release of the red-hot critically lauded Good-Bye. As part of their new initiative to re-introduce the world to Tatsumi, D&Q has just released A Drifting Life, the astonishing new graphic memoir and cultural history of Tatsumi's rise to prominence in post-World War II Japan, through the advent of gekiga at the end of the tumultuous 1950s.

I don't have a lot of experience with manga: my to-do list is exponentially larger than what I've read, and at 850 pages A Drifting Life is no slim undertaking. But I took a stab in the dark and read the book last week on the strength of the many, many positive reviews that have been coming from all corners of the world for this remarkable work, and I was not disappointed in the least. While reading the book, there were points that seemed repetitive and in some small spots a bit slow, but these are few and far between and are frankly obliterated while reflecting on the work afterwards. Indeed, it was after I finished reading it that the book's many strengths began to appear to me: this is an astonishing achievement in not just manga, but in comics. A Drifting Life is a memoir in comic form about one of the most significant periods in comics history - really, a new development in the form, not just for manga but for comics, period. While there is no lack of autobiographical comic works, how many of them focus on the creation and revolutionizing of the form the story itself takes? There are many excellent histories of the comic medium (Men of Tommorow being the best), but how many of those are comics? Imagine if Jack Kirby or Will Eisner had crafted an epic, brutally honest comic memoir about their experiences in the Golden Age of American comics, and you can start to understand the significance of this work. [Update, 2013: I have long since read Eisner's The Dreamer, a roman a clef of his experiences in the Golden Age. While entertaining, it is a very slight work and too overfictionalized, and doesn't compare to Tatsumi's monumental accomplishment with A Drifting Life.]

Tatsumi signing at JHU Comic Books in New York City, May 2009

A full decade in production, A Drifting Life opens at the end of World War II and follows an oh-so-slightly fictionalized version of Tatsumi as he turns his love of comics to the work of his life. We follow Tatsumi as he struggles with money and editors, colleagues and women, and his explorations and reinvention of no less than the very idea of what manga, what comics can be. There are fascinating passages recounting Tatsumi and his peers discussing the language and theory of comics, and their subsequent role in revolutionizing the form forever. This is a stunning work about one creator's role in completely changing comics, that, in itself, is playing a role in completely changing comics. Tatsumi is, naturally, at the top of his game here. He mixes in his own recollections of the history unfolding around him with snapshots of that moment's place in Japan's cultural and political history, from the first bottle of Coke sold in Japan to the riots over the US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty. And the art is certainly top-notch, a mix of cartoonish simplicity and striking, page stopping detail.

One of the most fascinating elements of this book, for me, is certainly the look into the burgeoning comics culture of Japan. Not unlike the development of American geek culture in the 1930s, the nexus of Japanese geek culture was with the fans, getting together, forming clubs and interacting with their wonderfully accessible heroes. Equally fascinating and revelatory to me were the differences in the method of delivery for many comics in Japan versus their American counterparts. In the United States, comic strips were syndicated in newspapers, longer-form comic stories published in the magazine format still largely dominant today. In Japan, strips appeared largely in specialty magazines, and long format and anthology series were published in square-bound magazines and hard-bound editions that were sold largely to manga rental (!) outlets. At the same time that EC was revolutionizing the art and content of comics amid a firestorm of controversy and legislative investigations, Tatsumi and his peers were revolutionizing the art and content of manga with their own share of heat from the press and legislators. This is a must read for anyone wanting to learn about the history of comics in Japan, post-war Japanese culture, or a look at the creative process from one of the masters.

Review and photo c) 2009, 2013 Jeffrey O. Gustafson