Adrian Tomine's 32 Stories

There is something very disarming about Tomine's works. He focuses on the internal monologue, imperfect yet lovable characters, and the disfunct in everyday relationships. One interesting thing about his work is his varied use of voice. It can be narrative boxes, self-conscious thought bubbles, or various styles of speech bubbles. In the case of the following comic, there are more thoughts written out than dialogue. He focuses on the internal, the confessional, the anxiety of the protagonist. Even within the comic, Tomine’s character questions the taboo of communicating with strangers. It is a criticism of a social wall that is all too similar to McCloud’s “wall of ignorance.”(mentioned on pg. 198 of Understanding Comics).

Tomine uses the thought bubble to show his characters’ reactions to the realities within the comics. One thought spirals into another, and the reflection that goes on between each uttered speech is overwhelming!

Tomine sometimes emphasizes the personal by pushing the illustrations and text toward the picture plane. It borders on the surreal at times (Tomine also illustrates some of his own dreams as comics), and this parallels the methods of the surrealist poets--to make something strange and new in order to understand or describe it better. The figurative nature of these illustrations is well-demonstrated in the "Back Break" comics and other [semi-]autobiographical comics, such as the ones involving peanut allergies. It is interesting that Tomine seems to reserve much of this figurative vocabulary for the depiction of himself. This makes perfect sense, as the semi-surreal images act to breach the wall of ignorance, showing Tomine's internal workings to the reader.

In some of the later comics from "Optic Nerve," Tomine tends more toward the realist poetics, where the idea is to portray reality as real as possible, and let the subjectivity exist both in poet and reader. This seems to be less of a breaking through of the wall of ignorance, and more of an acceptance of the wall, and perhaps a suggestion that the wall is merely a mirror--that both sides will reflect the same reaction to reality.

Tomine does just this on the last page of "Anniversary," where he omits the internal monologue entirely. One might assume the implication of a monologue, but this deliberate omission seems to recognize that humans do not always think in words. The silence of it says so much.

The same silence exists in "Smoke," but Tomine distinguishes between the two works. "Anniversary" is neatly and meticulously, but Tomine specifies that "Smoke" came out automatically. He prefers the spontanaety of "Smoke." This reminds me both of automatic writing and of spontaneous prose--the goals and methods of both processes being strikingly similar: to take the energy of the poet and transport it in its purest form to the reader through the page. The poet must avoid self-censorship (something Tomine admits that he struggles against) and place the thoughts immediately onto the page, without stopping.

It is almost as if Tomine's style travels through modern poetic movements--I am thrilled to be able to observe these movements on a smaller level within this selection of Tomine's works.