Black and White Ben: A Review of Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings
by Alex Paternostro
July 30, 2021
A diner, a café, a Chinese takeout joint: each is a type of restaurant, and in Adrian Tomine’s 2007 graphic novel Shortcomings, they are interchangeable as such. At the outset, Crepe Expectations may be “the usual place,” but that does not mean it cannot easily be switched out with any other café. And it quickly is. Ubiquitous yet homogenized, these establishments present standard meals in Tomine’s expressive, black-and-white boxes. Whether tempura (Japanese) or noodles in oyster pails (Chinese), they show ethnic groups catering to American expectations. For a work serving up issues of Asian-American identity and how individuals fall short, this motif is apt.
Shortcomings pulls no punches as it broaches the idea of a racialized image. Starting with the title page, which profiles the upcoming cast of characters—name, age, height, born, occupation—with side views to match, Tomine urges us to consider how general impressions, artistic representations, and visual media, that is, different definitions of an “image,” craft how one views and is viewed as of a certain racial identity. His take is unique and especially uninviting to any feel-good-read crowd. How fitting for an artist whose recent works include Killing and Dying (2015) and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist (2020).
As Tomine—creator of the ongoing Optic Nerve comics and now a regular cover artist for The New Yorker—explains to the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen, in an October 2020 interview for The Paris Review:
If you nose around at the bookstore a little bit, you’ll see that for every Maus or Persepolis, there’s like a hundred hideous books about a historical event or social protest moment or something that should be treated with great reverence, and it’s disgusting—like it actually denigrates the subject matter with its horrible aesthetic.
Tomine’s Shortcomings is anything but. It is unsanctimonious. It asks us how and why we make assumptions that may fall apart once we are face-to-face with more complete, complex pictures of others. At a time when conversations with and about Asian-Americans are increasingly prevalent, spurred in part by recent anti-Asian-American violence in the US, this makes the graphic novel ever more pertinent to flip open now.
The first scene in Shortcomings focuses on a neat, corny fortune cookie—that Chinese-American restaurant staple of complicated Japanese immigrant origins—as its message closes out an Asian American film festival to much applause. Until the credits roll, we do not know the distinction between the book’s plot and the film’s internal one. This initial blur destabilizes what is real and what is not, eventually bringing us out of one fiction, the film’s, to enter another, the graphic novel’s, which feels much less fake.
There, in Tomine’s frank and drily humorous hand, we meet the incredibly realistic yet unpleasant Ben Tanaka. As we know from the title page, this man is thirty years old, 5’8”, born in Corvallis, OR, and the manager at a university theatre. However, who could tell that although tactless, Ben would cut right to the kinds of conversations which Tomine invites? With brutal honesty and a touch for imparting emotion, Tomine even gives us an example of such a talk. After the event, Ben asks his girlfriend Miko Hayashi, “I mean, why does everything have to be some big ‘statement’ about race? Don’t any of these people just want to make a movie that’s good?” Miko, who helped organize the festival, replies, “God, you drive me crazy sometimes. It’s almost like you’re ashamed to be Asian.” “What? After a movie like that, I’m ashamed to be human!” “Okay, let’s just…drop it.” “<Sigh> I was in such a good mood…,” Miko utters as they drive away into darkness. As Nguyen notes, ” Tomine has “said [he’s] not interested in statements or didacticism in [his] work, just honesty and realism. [He] also [has] said [he’s] not interested in identity politics.” But as Shortcomings depicts, reasons and outcomes are never clear-cut.
Navigating the messiness of lust (for white women), love (if that’s what he feels for Miko after they start “taking some time off”), and race (which he prefers to ignore), Ben has difficulty confronting change. Good thing he has one friend, Alice Kim, who starts out twenty-nine years old, 5’ 2”, born in Incheon, South Korea, and as a graduate student at Mills College. An out and proud lesbian to everyone except her Korean-American parents—for whose church-going pleasure she totes Japanese-American Ben hand-in-hand—Alice never minces her words. “I try to study,” she tells Ben, “but all I can think about are the incoming freshwomyn.” While Ben confronts his own sexuality, which is intimately associated with race, Alice’s circumstances change. She departs Berkeley for New York, and Ben flies out to where Miko also happens to be staying…What ensues is not to be spoiled, but what stands out is the deepening significance of that “racialized image” and why Shortcomings should be read today.
Part of the beauty of Tomine’s work is how its form relates to reality. In daily life, race is a lens through which we all look, whether consciously or not, and we often judge others by mere snapshots. The shot-by-shot setup of the graphic novel thus reflects and amplifies this quotidian process, and the extra cognitive work the book forces us to undertake—using incomplete information to make decisions about what is happening—matters. When characters show up through various lenses, including CCTV and photographs, moreover, the defining aspect of each format is the inability to record the story in full. They capture snippets that invite Ben and us, the readers, to make certain interpretations, which may unravel later on. The gaps, lacks that linger in our minds, encourage us to think about what is missing and why. They show that no representation is perfect or whole and that black-or-white interpretations can only be unstable.
Without question, Tomine recognizes the power of comics as a way of seeing and thinking. In that aforementioned interview, he explains:
The easiest way for me to create art or to express myself, really, is through making comics. The times when I’ve given myself the challenge of isolating one element and just creating an image or just writing have always been more of a struggle. I think that has to do with how I learned to process the world. From a very early age, I was always thinking of the world in terms of comics.
The importance of comics as perception, as life, to Tomine makes it all the more relevant to read Shortcomings before watching the upcoming version on the big screen. Although a collaboration between director Randall Park and the author, like any adaptation, it will add but inevitably take away. In a May 2021 Vanity Fair interview with the two, Anthony Breznican writes:
Shortcomings always took place in the present day, but Tomine had to update it from 2007 to take place in the present present day. That meant changing some of the dialogue, which was edgy then but over the line now. “Those are pretty significant 14 years in our culture,” Tomine said. “That definitely called for some adjustments in a lot of back-and-forth. Randall has been right in there with me in terms of getting granular about, ‘Let’s look at this one sentence, and let’s think about the repercussions of how strong this guy comes on.’”
The film will be a work of art with its own merits, but I do not wish to see Shortcomings’ potency whitewashed. Why tone Ben down, especially when Asians have historically been stereotyped as passive and meek? The graphic novel is lasting since it was not written to fit a cultural moment or attitude. Like the restaurants Tomine points at with mere snapshots—“Jose’s Place Mexican Food,” “Japanese Snax Vietnam House Bear’s Noodles Korean BBQ,” “Hunan Deli…,” “…erican Food / Sushi,” “CAFÉ,” “O’Daly’s”—his images, when most wanting, can force us to examine our own wants instead of worrying about the crudeness by which we express them.
Is Ben bound for nowhere and/or no one? Shortcomings is a work worth reading to find out, and think about, yourself.
Alex Paternostro is a writer, culture critic, and food photographer based in Chicago. He is a co-founder of Our American Cuisine and graduated with an A.B. in English from Princeton University. You can learn more about him here.
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