Tagged: The New Yorker

Cartoon Marriage: Adventures in Love and Matrimony by The New Yorker’s Cartooning Couple
By Liza Donnelly and Michael Maslin
Random House, January 2009, $24.00

Donnelly and Maslin are both professional cartoonists – both regularly appearing in The New Yorker – and have been married for twenty years. [[[Cartoon Marriage]]] is their paired look at modern relationships, consisting of two hundred reprinted New Yorker cartoons – divided roughly right down the middle – and some new comics-format pages to explain and introduce each section.

(The two of them have collaborated on two previous books – [[[Call Me When You Reach Nirvana]]] and [[[Husbands and Wives]]] – the latter of which sounds very similar in scope and theme to this new one. But both of those are well over a decade old, so presumably they have a lot more marriage to reflect on now – as well as more cartoons to choose from.)

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Adrian Tomine is an anomaly on the current alternative-comics scene – his stories are absolutely realistic, in both their artistic look and their mundane events, but aren’t obviously autobiographical at all. The closest comparison I can think of is that he’s a Northern Californian Gilbert Hernandez – deeply concerned with ethnicity and identity – but working more as a miniaturist. (Tomine is clearly influenced by the modern New Yorker school of short prose fiction; many of his stories could have been adapted straight from a Raymond Carver short story.)

Shortcomings is Tomine’s longest story to date – his first graphic novel-length tale at all – reprinting a three-issue storyline from Tomine’s irregular comic, Optic Nerve. But his virtues and interests are still those of a short-story writer: close evocation of character, realistic dialogue, small-scale events. None of the events are overly dramatic…but the main character certainly is.

Ben Tanaka is a young Japanese-American man living in Berkeley – managing a movie theater, in a rut with his live-in girlfriend Miko, denying that he’s obsessed with blonde Caucasian girls, and only really connecting with his lesbian friend Alice. He’s angry about nothing in particular, and frustrated about his entire life without quite realizing it himself. He’s our viewpoint character – in every scene, and at the center of most of them – but it’s hard to identify with him, since he is such a prick. He’s young and disaffected, but doesn’t think of himself that way – he thinks he’s doing all right, and doesn’t realize that he’s a complete jerk.

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