OPTIC NERVE 453
One of the stories from this collection, “Bomb Scare,” was included in Dave Egg-
ers’s Th e Best American Nonrequired Reading published by Houghton Miffl in in that
same year, and Tomine was still publishing Optic Nerve as of early 2009, despite a
hiatus between 2001 and 2004. He has also developed a career in commercial illus-
tration work, including the creation of CD covers for a variety of bands and magazine
covers ranging from Th e New Yorker to Rolling Stone and Time. All of these include
the crisp and distinctive line work associated with his comics images. His style, both
in Optic Nerve and in his commercial work, is crisp and clean, with bold lines and
savvy detail, such as a hipster girl sitting in the back of a New York tourist bus, with
her parents arm’s length away snapping photos of Radio City Music Hall while she
reads a J. D. Salinger book.
Published in 2007, Tomine’s collection Shortcomings is made up of a narrative arc
spanning issues Optic Nerve #9 through #11, taking a total of about fi ve years to reach
publication in collected form. Th is is his fi rst work that is a multi-issue storyline; gener-
ally his pieces have tended to be more like a series of short stories and vignettes rather
than a longer related piece divided over issues and published sequentially. Th is collec-
tion is also one of the fi rst times that Tomine talks about racial issues and stereotypes
in some great detail. Earlier stories deal with quirky characters; in “Summer Job” from
Optic Nerve #2, readers learn about Eric, who is working a summer job at a photo
reproduction place; in another, the story revolves around a woman scouring the “I Saw
You” section of her local paper thinking there are ads placed there for her. Th ere are
characters who place prank phone calls, invite people they have recently met to funerals,
and are generally profoundly lonely and unusual individuals sharing odd moments of
similarity. Th ey have more in common than they think. Th ey share a sensibility about
the world, the people in it, and their own intersecting identities.
More than anything, though, Optic Nerve is a series about identity. Some of it is Tom-
ine’s own, as a Japanese American cartoonist writing about race but without making race
the primary defi ning lens of the work he produces. Some of it is simply about being in
the world: Ben Tanaka, the primary protagonist of Shortcomings , is abrasive and con-
fl icted. As a Japanese American man, Tanaka jokes about stereotypes about Asian men
but seems intent on not questioning the double standard that makes it acceptable for him
to pursue a series of blonde women, but causes him to condemn his former girlfriend
Miko when she begins dating a white man, even though Ben learns about this situa-
tion long after they have broken up and she has moved across the country to New York.
Meanwhile, what precipitated their breakup wasn’t so much that Ben simply took Miko
for granted, but more her discovery of his porn stash—focusing on imaging of white
women. Race is an issue throughout Optic Nerve , but Tomine explores it in a diff erent
way, by calling stereotypes into question or simply giving them voice, such as when Ben
says to his lesbian Korean friend Alice, who’s passing for straight at a family wedding,
“Why don’t we just tell them that I’m Korean while we’re at it?” “All Asians might look
the same to you,” she jokes, “but my family would spot your Japanese ass a mile away.”
Anne Th alheimer
