Summer Blonde is a
collection of Adrian Tomine’s Optic Nerve comic issues #5-8, following
on from Sleepwalk, which collected the first four issues.  There are some obvious differences between
the two collections.  Most obviously, Summer
Blonde features longer stories — here each of the four stories is about 30
pages long, while the stories in the earlier issues run from just 2 pages up to
about 12 pages.  The drawing style of
this collection is more consistent than in previous publications — in Sleepwalk,
Tomine experimented with different forms of shading, and in a few stories, the
artwork is a little rougher.  However,
the themes in Summer Blonde are very similar to those in Tomine’s earlier
work.  All the stories feature people
who don’t fit in, and in trying to relieve their own isolation often just make
themselves feel worse. 

"Alter Ego" is about a
socially awkward novelist, Martin, whose first book won critical acclaim.  Now, in trying to work on his second novel,
he has writer’s block and he is very frustrated.  Although he has a long-term girlfriend, he starts a flirtation
with a teenage girl, the sister of a girl he knew in high school.  "Summer Blonde" is about Neil, a
socially awkward man in his twenties who gets a new neighbor.  The neighbor is an obnoxious macho guy with
many female visitors, and Neil resents him for dating a girl from the a local
store he had a crush on.  The main
character in "Hawaiian Getaway" is Hillary, an Asian woman who lives
on her own in California.  She has lost
her job and she is socially isolated, partly because she does not know how to
start conversations with strangers.  Her
mother phones regularly and berates her for being an ungrateful disappointing
daughter, unlike her sister who has gone to medical school.  Hillary vents her anger at the world by
phoning a public call box outside her apartment window and trying to humiliate
the passing strangers who answer it. 
"Bomb scare," the final story in Summer Blonde, is
about a sixteen-year-old boy and girl who are come to befriend each other after
being becoming estranged from their different groups of friends.  Cammie has a habit of getting drunk at
parties and putting out to please boys, while Scotty is a nerdy geek who is
uncomfortable with any sexuality.  In
this longer form, Tomine is able to fill out the characters rather then simply
present the gist of an idea, giving a flavor of high school life, with bullying,
jocks, sexual coercion, and humiliation. 

All these stories feature an array
of different characters and we see interactions between them, so we see the web
of relationships around the main character. 
Tomine is an accomplished artist and he manages to convey complex
emotions and situations with great elegance. 
These new stories show him taking on richer narratives, even if the
isolation of the central characters remains constant.  Some readers will probably wish that he could expand his
repertoire to include other themes, and occasionally present a positive view of
the world — the letters published in the original Optic Nerve comics
often say this.   But it’s pretty clear
that this is how Tomine does see things, and his artwork is fundamentally
driven by his desire to tell stories that show how alienating modern life
is.  His work is remarkable in its
ability to crystallize emotionally significant moments, and Summer Blonde
is a significant accomplishment.

Link:
Drawn & Quarterly Publications

© 2003 Christian Perring. All rights reserved.

Christian Perring, Ph.D., is Chair of the Philosophy Department
at Dowling College, Long Island, and editor of Metapsychology
Online Review.  His main research is on philosophical issues in
medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: ArtAndPhotography, Fiction