Shortcomings

“Graphic literature's most gifted realist . . . Fiercely honest.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“[Shortcomings] follows moody movie-theater owner Ben Tanaka, who struggles to hang on to his Asian girlfriend while secretly lusting after white ladies. He’s sad and somewhat despicable, and yet Tomine, being the understated virtuoso he is, effortlessly spins him into a Gen-X hero . . . Exploring race, adulthood, and ambition with exquisitely tuned humor and poignancy, Shortcomings is a graphic narrative as piercingly realistic as any prose fiction.”—Entertainment Weekly (Grade: A)

“It's a fair bet that Shortcomings will only further secure [Tomine's] title as the 'most masterful' and 'most critically-acclaimed' comics writer of his generation.”—The Believer

“One of the most gifted graphic novelists of our time.”—Wired

“Tomine's lacerating falling-out-of-love story is an irresistible gem of a graphic novel. Shortcomings is set primarily in an almost otherworldly San Francisco Bay Area; its antihero, Ben Tanaka, is not your average comic book protagonist: he's crabby, negative, self-absorbed, über-critical, slack-a-riffic and for someone who is strenuously race-blind, has a pernicious hankering for white girls. His girlfriend Miko (alas and tragically) is an Asian-American community activist of the moderate variety. Ben is the sort of cat who walks into a Korean wedding and says, Man, look at all these Asians, while Miko programs Asian-American independent films and both are equally skilled in the underhanded art of fighting without fighting . . . In Tomine's apt hands, Tanaka's heartbreaking descent into awareness is reading as good as you'll find anywhere. What a relief to find such unprecious intelligent dynamic young people of color wrestling with real issues that they can neither escape nor hope completely to understand.  Tomine . . . keeps the issues secondary to his characters' messy humanity and gains incredible thematic resonance from this subordination. Tomine's dialogue is hilarious . . . his secondary characters knockouts (Ben's Korean-American only friend Alice steals every scene she's in, and the Korean wedding they attend together as pretend-partners is a study in the even blending of tragedy and farce), and his dramatic instincts second-to-none . . . almost incidentally and without visible effort (for such is the strength of a true artist) he explodes the tottering myth that love is blind and from its million phony fragments assembles a compelling meditation on the role of race in the romantic economy, dramatizing with evil clarity how we are both utterly blind and cannily hyperaware of the immense invisible power race exerts in shaping what we call desire . . . In crisp spare lines, he captures in all its excruciating, disappointing absurdity a single moment and makes from it our world.”—Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Publishers Weekly (starred review)