Review of Adrian Tomine's Summer Blonde
Adrian Tomine is the California-born, comic-artist behind the series Optic Nerve that first appeared in 1991. He has done for the slacker generation in his comics what Raymond Carver did for the middle-aged in his stories. Their characters share the same desire for a happiness which comes only at the most unexpected and seemingly trivial of moments; if it comes at all.
What is usually left for the reader at the end of their stories is uncertainty or, more accurately, a surreal and pathos-ridden reminder of life's irresolvable complications. Four stories from that first Optic Nerve series are compiled in this hardcover volume. Summer Blonde is worth getting simply because of its sleek and intriguing cover alone. There is a round hole in the front jacket that focuses the viewer's eyes upon a close-up profile of a blonde peering suspiciously from the corner of her eye. In stark, black-and-white frames, Tomine has drawn nominally unattractive indivudals with every possible nuance of the human expression on their faces. This is accompanied by dialogue that rings again and again with a discomfiting sense of realism. A single frame with a boy lying on a bed alone, bearing a look of muffled anguish on his face, can achieve more in conveying an intensely private sense of regret and loneliness than a few paragraphs of prose. This is Tomine's greatest skill, and what he achieves consistently throughout the graphic rendering of these stories. In the first story, Alter Ego, a novelist, who is also a reluctant, celebrity ghostwriter, is at a loss as to what to write for his second book. A former crush from the past sends him a postcard congratulating him on his first novel. When he attempts to look for her without the knowledge of his current girlfriend, he ends up with a storyline for his second book that he never expects. The ending is a near-perfect, self-reflexive summary of the reasons for writing and the need to create stories so as to give meaning to one's life. The title story, Summer Blonde, is about a socially handicapped man whose awkward advances towards a girl at a card-shop make him seem like a stalker. Like Daniel Clowes, another comic-artist who deals with almost the same themes and character types as Tomine, the last few frames of his stories tend to take the reader's breath away. Summer Blonde ends with a powerful statement about people's inabilities to forgive themselves and others, a statement made more haunting because it is contextualised here in a familiarly urbane world of mutual indifference and emotional disconnectedness. In Hawaiian Getaway, another socially crippled protagonist, an Asian-American girl, is frustrated at her own life. She makes anonymous phone calls to anyone passing a public phone booth down the stairs from her apartment. One of her calls leads to a chance at ending her unhappiness and loneliness. But the story focuses hauntingly on her desire to flee from her problems and her personal shortcomings. A particularly eerie moment comes when she remembers herself as a young girl fitting herself into an open suitcase and sleeping in there. Bomb Scare, the last story, is a bleak, coming-of-age account of a boy on the margin of adolescense who ends his relationship with his best friend after suspecting that he is gay. He meets an older, female schoolmate who unwittingly initiates him into a confused, post-adolescent world of sexual desire and loneliness. One only wishes that more stories could have been added to this magnificent collection, which comes not very long after Tomine's pervious book, Sleepwalk And Other Stories. This had four times more stories than Summer Blonde, which might make a lot of Tomine's fans feel a tad short-changed. Nonetheless, the length of the stories in Summer Blonde and the inimitable way in which the author brings them to life will continue to shock his readers out of their complacency. He points them towards their potential to be better people than they already are. And he awakens them to the mysterious possibilities in their everyday existence for change and heartbreaking revelation.
Published in The Straits Times, Life! on 24 Aug 2002