Syracuse Symposium and The Soling Program will present "An Evening With
Adrian Tomine" Thursday, Oct. 16, at 7:30 p.m. in Watson Auditorium of the Light
Work/Community Darkrooms (316 Waverly Avenue) on the Syracuse University
campus. The award-winning cartoonist and illustrator will discuss and show images
from his best-selling graphic novel "Shortcomings" (Drawn and Quarterly, 2007).
The event is free and open to the public. Paid parking is available in the Marion Lot
(intersection of Walnut and Waverly avenues) and in the Booth Garage (Comstock
Avenue, between Waverly Avenue and Marshall Street).
Known for his signature clean style, Tomine is a widely sought-after artist whose
work has graced the covers of The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine,
Esquire, RollingStone and Time. He also is a prolific graphic novelist.
"Shortcomings," his most ambitious work to date, tells the story of Ben Tanaka, a
grumpy Japanese-American living in Berkeley, Calif., who leaves his Asian-American
girlfriend to date "white" American girls in New York. "[Ben] is self-deluded and
blind to a lot of things, but, unlike a lot of people, he's as honest as he's capable of
being," Tomine recently told New York magazine. "A lot of his story points out that
... all the political stances and pontificating fall a distant second to whomever strikes
your fancy."
Featuring racially charged, volatile dialogue, "Shortcomings" is a rarity among
Tomine's work and literary comics, in general. The novel earned a solo review in The
New York Times Book Review, drawing literary comparisons to Philip Roth, and was
selected as a "Notable Book for 2007." It also topped many bestseller lists, including
those for Amazon, Entertainment Weekly and Publisher's Weekly. "Tomine's genius
is to strip his medium of every possible type of grandiosity or indulgence, and the
result is that life, itself, floods in," writes novelist Jonathan Lethem, evoking
comparisons with filmmaker Eric Rohmer and author Alice Munro. Adds New
Yorker critic Dan Raeburn: "[Tomine's] stories are appealingly naturalistic, stylishly
cinematic and emotionally rich."
Like his protagonist in "Shortcomings," Tomine is a 30-something Japanese-
American who made the move from California to New York. But that's where the
comparison ends. In addition to being happily married, Tomine sports a thriving
international career. His semi-autobiographical "Optic Nerve" comics series, which
he began writing and drawing as a teenager in Sacramento, remains a bestseller for
Drawn and Quarterly (D+Q), publishers of literary comics and art books. Many of
these early comics, including ones Tomine created as a 17-year-old for Tower
Records' in-store magazine, have been collected in book form: "32 Stories" (D+Q,
1998) and "Sleepwalk and Other Stories" (D+Q, 1998). His extensive illustration and
design career, which began while a student at the University of California, Berkeley,
is summed up thus far in "Scrapbook" (D+Q, 2004). "Shortcomings" is arguably his
finest work.
"There's this certain level of intimacy that some of my readers seem to feel
comfortable with," Tomine said in a recent Mother Jones interview. "I think there's
just something about the nature of the medium. It creates this illusion of intimacy just
because it's a work that's created completely by one person, and it's digested or read
in isolation. It's not like sitting in a movie theater with a hundred other people and all
laughing at the same moments."
Syracuse Symposium, whose theme this year is "migration," is a semester-long
intellectual and artistic festival that is presented by The College of Arts and Sciences
for the SU community. More information on lectures, performances, exhibits and
other special events is available at http://syracusesymposium.org.
The Soling Program is a University-wide program, administered by The College,
emphasizing experiential, collaborative and interdisciplinary learning. More
information is available at http://soling.syr.edu.
