The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist

by Adrian Tomine

Someone mentioned on Twitter that this book existed, and I bought it within 30 seconds.

I haven’t been into Adrian Tomine all that much since I read the Optic Nerve comics in … college? (Could I have read some of them in high school? It’s possible.) And every time I buy a comic or graphic novel lately, I don’t even end up reading it, or I read 5 pages and get bored or busy. So I figured that would happen again.

But I read this enter book today and liked it. It’s autobiographical and mainly about awkward moments throughout his career. He basically never tells a story in which he is the hero. It’s very much like the stories in Optic Nerve, but these are all (presumably) true. At the end, he gets chest pains and his heart rate increases. He goes to the ER and eventually learns that it’s just anxiety and acid reflux. But when he thought he might be about to die, he never thought about comics or his career, only his wife and two daughters.