Flawed to perfection

>> Cartoonist Adrian Tomine on his definition
of likable, Philip Roth’s fearlessness and
why Ben Tanaka is not a prick

RACE RELATIONS: A panel from Shortcomings

by SACHA JACKSON

Adrian Tomine got his start self-publishing his mini-comic Optic Nerve while he was still in high school. By the time he was 20 it was being regularly published as a series by Drawn & Quarterly.

Shortcomings, the first long work by Tomine, was published by D&Q last September to critical acclaim. It follows Ben Tanaka, a grumpy, navel-gazing Japanese-American as he breaks up with his Asian girlfriend, dates a white girl and turns his overly-critical eye on himself. Tomine spoke to the Mirror last week from his home in Brooklyn.

M: Among the praise there’s been some criticism about the portrayal of your characters. Was it a conscious decision to make them hard to like?

AT: I try to make my characters multifaceted, or at least to show them in various lights, in the way that we generally experience people in real life. I’m also learning, through the reaction this book is getting, that my tolerance, or my sense of what makes people likeable, might be out of synch with other people’s.

M: For me, it was the characters’ flaws that made them so believable.

AT: Yeah, that’s a quality I look for in other media, whether it’s movies or books or comics. There are so many times when I’ve seen a movie and been like, “That person was so good I just wanted to see them kick a little kid when they thought no one was looking.”

But I think I was a little off the mark with Ben. In my mind he was complicated, not necessarily lovable, but I was surprised by this unanimous, vehement distain that he was met with. You can find several reviews that say, “Ben Tanaka is a prick.”

M: Will the reaction you had to Shortcomings make you rethink the direction of your next book?

AT: I don’t think I’ll do the exact opposite. I’m not going to create a sitcom with lovable characters and a feel-good message, but I’m going to aim towards obscuring my own connection to the characters even further. I did a few things in the book that lead people to infer more of an autobiographical content than was there.

On the most superficial level it was a mistake to make the main character look somewhat like myself. Ninety per cent of the people who read the book aren’t going to have these kinds of thoughts, but there are people who try to decode the book and ask things like, “Are these horrible thoughts really Adrian’s thoughts?”

M: Are there any authors that inspired your work?

AT: I was reading a lot of Philip Roth when I was working on Shortcomings. It wasn’t the kind of thing where I thought, “I’m going to try and do my version of this kind of writing,” but subconsciously I think some of the material he delved into and the way he did it—with such fearlessness—encouraged me in the direction I was going, which was to rid myself of thoughts of how I as a person was going to be perceived.

I think that’s a quality that’s missing from artists’ work today, a sort of abandon and a lack of concern about their own image. I feel like so much art, whether it’s comics or movies or whatever, is created with the notion of how the person behind it will be perceived and it’s generally that they want to be liked.

It’s obviously a human impulse and I can’t say I’ve completely banished it, but I think it interferes with creativity and it’s getting worse. This time that we’re in with the Internet and celebrity obsession, the creative people are often more significant in our culture than the work they create.

M: Are there any Montreal graphic novelists you like?

AT: Julie Doucet is one of my favourite artists. If I could I would buy everything by her. My publisher, Chris Oliveros, is also a very good cartoonist, which most people don’t know. I think he’s pretty hesitant to promote himself as an artist because he feels it would be a conflict of interest. The irony being if he wasn’t the best publisher in comics he’d probably be one of the most prominent cartoonists.

Adrian Tomine is at the Drawn & Quarterly
bookstore (211 Bernard W.) this Tuesday,
Feb. 26 at 7 p.m. for a slide show and signing.