summer blonde

I’m sorry, very lazy today, and I have lists of genes coming out of my ears. At least they pay me to be that way.

Summer Blonde by Adrian Tomine was my most recent comic book recommendation. The four stories contained within each encapsulate a little slice of California Gen X life in all its urban loneliness. In fact, what I liked most about them was that there weren’t tidy endings to any of the stories. Additionally, anyone who is at all Chinese or knows anything about (migrant) Chinese culture may identify very much with Hillary in ‘Hawaiian Getaway’.

I found a surprisingly good review of the book by Time magazine’s Andrew D. Arnold, so I’ll leave you in his good hands for this one.

Adrian Tomine’s ‘Summer Blonde’

Some people hate Adrian Tomine’s work. All they see are cute girls and angsty-guys in short, enigmatic portraits of the West Coast’s slowly-aging Generation X. But they don’t get it. Eleven years ago Tomine (pronounced TOE-mean-ay) began self-publishing his comic, “Optic Nerve” when he was just sixteen, stunning the comixcenti with his mature style. It was soon picked up by the classy Canadian publisher Drawn and Quarterly, and the company has just collected the last four issues into a gorgeous hardcover, “Summer Blonde” (132 pp.; $24.95). The dust jacket, with its cut-out circle that lets a pretty girl peek through, should clue you in on how to read these stories: look underneath.