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It’s safe to say the US cartoonist is ambivalent about his own success. His latest book charts the everyday humiliations of his trade in hilarious detail
As a novelist of my acquaintance once observed, writers tend mostly to moan about their humiliations – the book signing for which no one turned up; the festival at which they could barely be heard over the sound of the audience cheering a more famous author in the bigger tent next door – to each other. Even as they flinch at the memory, they know in their hearts that there are worse things in life than mistaking the snaking line of bodies at an event for your own fans when in fact they’re Neil Gaiman’s, even if your new girlfriend was there to witness the pitifully brief flaring of your excitement. As their non-writer mothers/sisters/friends will inevitably remind them should they be tempted to complain that they overheard someone slagging off their book in a pizza joint (“pure writers’ workshop bullshit…”), sweetie, at least the guy read it.
But this doesn’t mean that these things aren’t, in the right hands, delicious to read about. In his latest book, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, Adrian Tomine turns himself into the everyman of writerly mortification, cataloguing all of the above indignities and many more besides in such brilliant and toe-curling detail that, post-pandemic, you can imagine publicists quietly placing it in the hotel bedrooms of touring authors, the better that they might find succour among its pages late at night. The readers who like to politely inform him (“I don’t mean this as a critique”) that his work is derivative; the writers who blithely refer to his “little” pictures; the “fans” who mistake him for his fellow cartoonist Daniel Clowes. Here they all are, though quite how cathartic drawing them has been remains a moot point. “Like all my work, this is an attempt to make my life not feel so useless,” he says, without too much conviction, when he speaks to me via Zoom from his home in New York. Continue reading...