One of the running jokes about ‘serious’ graphic novels is that so many seem to consist, one way and another, of comics about how lonely, miserable and socially inept comic book creators are. Adrian Tomine leans into the trend, but with great charm, in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist (Faber, £16.99). Here is an autobiographical anthology of humiliation in chronological order — a series of wan vignettes taking the artist from inadequate-feeling schoolboy comics nerd to… inadequate-feeling New Yorker-published middle-aged comics superstar.
Every time he feels he’s arrived, there’s something to remind him he hasn’t: a stinking review; a disobliging comparison to Neil Gaiman or Dan Clowes; Frank Miller not being able to pronounce his name; hopes dashed at an awards ceremony; a couple at the next table in a restaurant discussing the badness of his books. It ends in his mid-forties, when a health scare causes him to reappraise everything:
It made me think about how much of my life has been spent drawing comics, reading comics, thinking about comics! And I don’t even like comics! Okay, that’s not true, but this has been going on since I was two! That’s 42 years!
Couch Fiction gives us the inside track on why so many psychotherapists wear open-toed sandals indoors
This impassioned monologue is delivered to — it turns out — his fast-asleep wife.
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