Product Description

Picking up from his earlier collection "Sleepwalk", and the precursor to his award-winning "Shortcomings", the four stories in "Summer Blonde" are quintessential Tomine. Memorably featuring characters such as Neil, Carlo and Hillary Chan, among others, these are beautiful and haunting tales that illustrate with great sympathy the loneliness and bleak humour of modern life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #112252 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 136 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Adrian Tomine, creator of the critically acclaimed comic series Optic Nerve, has been called the comics voice of the twentysomething generation, but it's a title he rejects, and for good reason. The tales of disconnection and alienation collected in Summer Blonde--a selection of the best of Optic Nerve--aren't expressions of youthful angst so much as they are meditations on the discontent we all feel with contemporary life.

The four stories here have echoes of Raymond Carver in their minimalist style and focus on dysfunctional relationships, but Tomine's real strength lies in his identification of the "undercover craziness" in us all--the damaged selves that we hide beneath facades of normalcy. In "Hawaiian Getaway," for instance, a woman's inability to navigate office politics or family expectations leads to a breakdown, and she begins calling the pay phone outside her apartment and talking to the strangers who answer. Other stories are sharp indictments of the madness of modern society. In "Bomb Scare" the brutality and disregard high-school students direct at each other reflect the casual violence of the first Gulf War playing out on their televisions. In the title story, a stalker's interference in the life of a woman exposes the empty voids that lie under our social rituals and leads to an eruption of violence.

Some readers may wonder how to interpret the ambiguous endings of the stories in Summer Blonde, but this ambiguity is the whole point of Tomine's work. The world he creates is just as confusing and uncertain as our own lives. While his characters are often unlikable, simultaneously creepy and pathetic, they remain understandable because Tomine always ensures that we see ourselves in them. --Peter Darbyshire, Amazon.ca

About the Author
Since self publishing his first issue of Optic Nerve at the age of fifteen, the Japanese-American Adrian Tomine has established himself as one of the leading lights of the next generation of graphic novelists, in the wake of such breakthrough artists as Daniel Clowes (Ghost World, Ice Haven) and Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth). A regular contributor to the New Yorker - and previously Time, Esquire and Rolling Stone - he is the author of the collections Sleepwalk, Summer Blonde, Shortcomings and his ongoing series Optic Nerve. Tomine is currently published in Canada and the US, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Japan.

Customer Reviews

Four Very Similiar Stories
I really liked Tomine's first collection (32 Stories), and loved his last one (Sleepwalk and Other Stories), so shelled out for the hardcover edition of his latest. The four stories are beautifully drawn in Tomine's instantly recognizable precise style, but the storytelling is rather disappointing. His stuff has always been somewhat similar, focusing on loss and loneliness, but here here four protagonists (three male, one female) are little more than subtle variations of each other. Each is a kind of lonerish social outcast type who has deep problems relating to others and whose imagination is fertile territory for spawning sad obsessions. So you get a hipsterish writer who never got over high school and thus neglects his beautiful girlfriend due to his fascination with the younger sister of "the hot chick" from high school. Then you have the pimply-faced production designer at the alternative paper who seethes at his neighbor's casual sexual prowess and turns quasi-stalker in a surge of misguided imagination. There's the stoic Asian woman who simply cannot manage even a normal conversation. The last story is a totally banal high-school loser story which veers into a loser version of a John Hughes movie with a totally ridiculous ending. I still dig how Tomine just jumps into his character's lives, and manages to convey their whole life with a minimum of exposition, and then stops the story right when they're at a kind of emotional fork. The problem here is that the four stories are simply far too similar, almost as if he's stuck and has nothing else to say but further riffs on the same material he's been doing for ten years. I sure hope this isn't the case and that his next book will show a new maturation of his storytelling, 'cause he is a talented artist.

Ignore the Review above
The stories in Summer Blonde are just less snappy and murkier/ more complicated. This is where those loners in Sleepwalk turn acidic and slightly nastier in reaction to the world that rejects them, inspiring a broader section of emotions as Tomine expands on his life-snapshot technique.

As for the last story, it is simply one of the most moving, sympathetic and potent renditions of youth....pretty much ...ever! Forget Breakfast Club, provided you were on the right side of the meathead social circle at school, it should resonate for a couple of days at least.

In short, buy this and Sleepwalk, because Tomine, along with Dan Clowes and Chris Ware, is finally maximising the potential of the comic book, putting the medium on the same level as any art form.

Tomine's empty, beatiful realism
I bought this book after reading Sleepwalk. The narrative style and subject matter is quite similar, but the stories are so original in their dry way that I really enjoyed it.
Highly recommended.