Name: Summer Blonde
Rating: 4.222222222222222 (9 reviews)

Adrian Tomine

Presents four stories that deal with a variety of characters, including a shy novelist who seeks out the girl he was obsessed with in high school, a lonely woman who loses her job, and high school outcasts.

(stories)

Summer Blonde

Chris Dailey

Dark and darkly funny graphic novellas covering social isolation, jealously, anxiety and wanting. The collection comprises four short stories with varied central characters: a writer struggling with his second book that begins an almost affair with his high school crush's teenage sister; a voyeuristic stalker that means well...kind of; a young woman that calls pays phones for social interaction; and a high school boy struggling with his asexuality. While angsty, they are endearing with wonderfully subtle graphics.

Pranav Mutatkar

1. Hawaiian Getaway
2. Bomb Scare
3. Alter Ego
4. Summer Blonde

I'm starting to understand his style now. But is it his job to make sure we get into his rhythm or ours?

Either way, this taught me a lot about how clipped endings in themselves aren't good. Or difficult characters in themselves aren't good. Tomine seems to play the same game thinking it works and it doesn't always. But when it does it really does. I think because the clipped minimalism works when there are emotions hidden or perhaps bubbling under the surface that we can't see. Voyeurism doesn't work unless we get a hint of something underneath all that. 

I liked these stories more and more because of how much he takes time to explore his characters in this one, but they still aren't all the way there it seems. He needs to edge closer to the knowing while at the same time creating more of that depth. How do you do that? I have no idea, I can't even get to the amateur level. 

Interesting for the interweaving triptych of short films I'm thinking of making. But the hardest part is for me to actually understand and feel the emotion of the unspoken words and then hint at them. But not give it all the way. Because you can't. There is no cathartic moment, there is no monologue no deeper understanding. Like Carver, it's all somewhere there a subconscious recognizing another. 

And if I can pull that off and Tomine can. Then we will be doing almost no artist can do.

Cameron Booth

Just up my alley for sure. I ordered the few remaining issues of Optic Nerve that I didn't have after reading this.

Picking up from his earlier collection Sleepwalk, and the precursor to his award-winning Shortcomings, the four stories in Summer Blonde are quintessential Tomine. Memorably featuring characters such as Neil, Carlo and Hillary Chan, among others, these are beautiful and haunting tales that illustrate with great sympathy the loneliness and bleak humour of modern life.

Summer Blonde (stories)

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