Written and Drawn by Adrian Tomine
$9.95 from Drawn and Quarterly Press
Adrian Tomine's lives play out across the page like direct transfers from his brain, sometimes his lives are someone else's.
Amy is a chain-smoking insomniac who likes her sleepless condition very well; she haunts the giant bookstores at night, reading a little bit more of favorite fat novels with each visit. She hangs out in coffee shops until the young people who run the place anxiously shoo her out the door ten minutes to closing. She hangs out in the all-night bowling alley, at first just to have a place to be, but lately she's taken to the game.
Mike is a high school hep cat, a shade-wearing mod whose smart mouth gets him blamed for petty crimes he didn't commit. The narrator watches Mike drop out and turn up again, some time later, as a completely different human in whom the light has gone out.
Another man, unnamed, is a small-time thief, addicted to lifting cigarettes and liquor. His girlfriend, Cathy, loves him but threatens to kick him out if he doesn't stop stealing. Nightly he plays a game of brinkmanship, *will I get caught? Will Cathy kick me out? *
Rodney is a nighttime warrior like Amy, who finds in Amy the perfect coffee-swilling foil. She hangs out with him and they whine about relationships together, under no pressure to move their own relationship any further. But when Rodney gets a girlfriend, he begins to drift before Amy notices she's being replaced in a role she never though to seek.
The narrator, a young comic book artist, wanders in and out of comic book stores to see if anyone's bought his latest issue. No. He wonders whether he should have put turtles on the cover, and why his back is bothering him at such a young age. He hates his job, but then most of the other people in his brain hate their jobs, too. Except Amy.
These are the black-and-white fever-dreams of Adrian Tomine, young (born in 1974) author of *Optic Nerve*, an independent comic now published by Drawn and Quarterly. The trade paperback *32 Stories: The Complete Optic Nerve Mini-Comics* collects the earliest of Tomine's stories together in one compilation that is simply a delight to read.
Some of the stories really are dreams, downloaded straight from Tomine's head, such as the barber who half-finishes cutting the author's hair, then goes on strike. Some are "true stories," with the author in a starring or supporting role, as he wanders through his unpleasant diner job. Some are post-modern self-referencing stories, like the one in which two of Adrian's friends try to influence what he'll write in his next "true story."
Such real people wander through these stories-- stories that rarely run more than three or four pages, and often run two-- that as I eagerly moved to the next and the next that I realized I was a bit starved for genuine people in the comics I read. Mind you, I'm a hero comics fan. I'm not sure where the middle ground between "Amy and her boyfriend who won't give back her leather jacket" and "Peter Parker and the secret identity of the Great Pumpkin" lie. Maybe Kurt Busiek is the answer. But it's wonderful to read Tomine's answer, which is that the stories of real people are gripping enough.
Some characters Tomine uses are clearly himself: Tomine explains in his introduction that Amy is a flip side of himself, allowing him to stretch real events into something slightly truer. Others are complete strangers, part of the circus of life, skin-heads and fry cooks and people driven to insanity by the smallest things. Homeless people, lonely people, and happy people. My favorite's still the tenacious Amy, who just might finally cement her happiness on one of those late nights. I recognize these people, or like to think I do. I can't remember another comic I read recently where I could say that.
The medium itself is unkind to Tomine at first, as he struggles to find his hand at drawing, and like George Perez, you can read through his work and see him improving by leaps and bounds. The final stories are as sophisticated in their visual style as they are in the thought behind them.
You want to know, finally, why I enjoyed *Optic Nerve* so much? Not because it "challenged" me; I get tired of that old chestnut, which usually means, "It was hard to read." I loved Tomine's *Optic Nerve* because it challenged me to pay attention to the world around me. It challenged me to be a better writer, and made me want to answer it.
Pure joy. Pure joy.