Tomine’s lines are so clean and precise, his compositions so natural-looking, that it’s easy to treat his images as transparent vessels of meaning, the cellophane wrapper enfolding the tart, bright candy of the plot. But even his smallest, plainest panels are heavy with subtext, thick with unstated emotion and full of the kind of information that can never quite be conveyed in language.
If I had to describe Adrian Tomine to someone who didn’t know his work, I would call him – I can’t possibly conjure any higher praise – the Alice Munro of comics. But not even this quite does it.
