What a relief to find such unprecious intelligent dynamic young people of color wrestling with real issues that they can neither escape nor hope completely to understand.Tomine's no dummy: he keeps the 'issues' secondary to his characters' messy humanity and gains incredible thematic resonance from this subordination.

In Tomine's apt hands, Tanaka's heartbreaking descent into awareness is reading as good as you'll find anywhere. Ben is the sort of cat who walks into a Korean wedding and says, 'Man, look at all these Asians,' while Miko programs Asian-American independent films and both are equally skilled in the underhanded art of 'fighting without fighting.' As you might imagine, their relationship is in full decay.

, His girlfriend Miko (alas and tragically) is an Asian-American community activist of the moderate variety. , Shortcomings, is set primarily in an almost otherworldly San Francisco Bay Area its antihero, Ben Tanaka, is not your average comic book protagonist: he's crabby, negative, self-absorbed, ber-critical, slack-a-riffic and for someone who is strenuously 'race-blind,' has a pernicious hankering for whitegirls. SignatureReviewed by Junot D azTomine's lacerating falling-out-of-love story is an irresistible gem of a graphic novel.

Shortcomings novel