Saturday, March 08, 2008

Adrian Tomine "Shortcomings" signing pictures

Here's some photographs from Adrian Tomine's signing of Shortcomings at Politics and Prose. He spoke for about 45 minutes and you can buy a cd recording from the bookstore.

100_4718 Adrian Tomine
This slide shows a page of original art that he sketched and then changed when inking it. Previous to "Shortcomings" he wrote a full script before drawing anything.

100_4718 Adrian Tomine
This and the next slide show real buildings he drew.

100_4720 Adrian Tomine

100_4721 Adrian Tomine

Tomine's been asked if this is autobiographical, partly due to the resemblance you can see between him and his main character Ben Tanaka, "who's a prick".

100_4722 Adrian Tomine

There have been a lot of Tomine interviews done lately (list available on request) and you can see a link to Scott Rosenberg's on this blog. Tomine specifically singled out an NPR one as asking him a question he hates - why he hasn't done more "Asian-American experience" comics. That would probably be this interview -

Gross, Terry. 2008.
Adrian Tomine, Drawing Delicately from Life.
National Public Radio and WHYY's Fresh Air (January 31).
online at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18571923

Movie-theater owner Ben Tanaka is having relationship issues; his girlfriend, Miko, suspects he's secretly attracted to white women. (She's right, but he won't admit it.)

In Shortcomings, Asian-American graphic novelist Adrian Tomine (Scrapbook, Summer Blonde) has finally done what many fans and critics have suggested he should: addressed race in his work.

Tomine is celebrated for the grace and sophistication of his work; novelist Jonathan Lethem says that "his mastery of literary time suggests Alice Munro," and Junot Diaz says Tomine's "dramatic instincts are second-to-none."

- and of course, one of the four or five questions he got at P&P was this question too.

No comments: