Killing and Dying

by Adrian Tomine

Overview

"[Adrian Tomine] has more ideas in twenty panels than novelists have in a lifetime.” —Zadie Smith

After enjoying over six months on the New York Times Bestseller list and receiving a rave review from the same institution, acclaimed cartoonist Adrian Tomine’s Killing and Dying is now available in paperback, with an updated cover and French flaps. With this work, Tomine (Shortcomings, Scenes from an Impending Marriage) reaffirms his place not only as one of the most significant creators of contemporary comics, but as one of the great voices of modern American literature. His gift for capturing emotion and intellect resonates: the weight of love and its absence, the pride and disappointment of family, the anxiety and hopefulness of being alive in the twenty-first century.

“Amber Sweet” shows the disastrous impact of mistaken identity in a hyper-connected world; “A Brief History of the Art Form Known as Hortisculpture” details the invention and destruction of a vital new art form; “Translated, from the Japanese,” is a lush, full-color display of storytelling through still images; the title story, "Killing and Dying," centers on parenthood, mortality, and stand-up comedy. In six interconnected, darkly funny stories, Tomine forms a quietly moving portrait of contemporary life.

Adrian Tomine is a master of the small gesture, equally deft at signaling emotion via a subtle change of expression or writ large across landscapes illustrated in full color. Killing and Dying is a fraught, realist masterpiece.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781770463097
Publisher:	Drawn & Quarterly
Publication date:	02/06/2018
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	180,942
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Adrian Tomine was born in 1974 in Sacramento, California. He began self-publishing his comic book series Optic Nerve. His comics have been anthologized in publications such as McSweeney’s, Best American Comics, and Best American Nonrequired Reading, and his graphic novel Shortcomings was a New York Times Notable Book of the year. Since 1999, Tomine has been a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughters.

Editorial Reviews

“Pocket epics of romantic, creative and social frustration set in recognizably drab, drably picturesque American landscapes.”?New York Times

“[Tomine] is an emotional x-ray machine. All-seeing, all-knowing."?Guardian

“Deft and subtle, with a bittersweet understanding of the tension between aspiration and loss."?Los Angeles Times

From the Publisher

…there is some category confusion when it comes to a book like Adrian Tomine's Killing and Dying. "Graphic short story" doesn't sound quite right, but how else to describe the half-dozen vignettes in this collection, each one bristling with acute observations and piquant ironies? These tales—pocket epics of romantic, creative and social frustration set in recognizably drab, drably picturesque American landscapes—certainly invite comparison to the work of words-only short-form masters like Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie and Mary Gaitskill, and for that matter O. Henry himself. You can almost forget you're looking at drawings. Which is of course testimony to the skill of the draftsman. 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.

The New York Times Book Review - A. O. Scott

★ 08/03/2015
Plenty of graphic novelists mine the seam of modern anxieties and alienation. Only a tiny handful do so with as much perceptive humanity as Tomine (Shortcomings). These half-dozen short stories are drawn with a cool, dry, Chris Ware–like style that heightens the emotions packed within their rigidly uniform blocks rather than muffling it. Many of the stories track relationships in which the women are lost and the men lash out. The men react in fury to their thwarted creativity (like the wannabe sculptor in "A Brief History of the Art Form Known as ‘Hortisculpture' ") and to any acknowledgment of their shortcomings (like the rage-filled middle-aged pot dealer in "Go Owls"). Some of those same damaged and defensive men also appear in "Amber Sweet," a Paul Austeresque fable of disorientation, in which a woman must come to terms with her resemblance to a popular porn star. But the title story is a simpler and more riveting construction. In it, an awkward, stuttering 14-year-old girl pursues an unlikely career as a stand-up comic, while her mother overpraises her and her father undermines her from the sidelines, though none of the three addresses the tragedy looming ever larger in their lives. Tomine has created a deft, deadpan masterpiece filled with heartache interspersed with the shock of beauty. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

11/15/2015
Tomine's (Shortcomings) stories, most from his Optic Nerve minicomics, deftly invite reader empathy for ill-at-ease characters you might not want to meet. A gardener feeling unappreciated devises an art form he dubs "hortisculpture" but attracts no aficionados. A young woman is mistaken for a porn star. Two marginally functioning people bond at a 12-step meeting, with complicated results that do not end well. An estranged mother addresses a diary entry to her absent son. A veteran at loose ends gravitates to an apartment he shared with his former wife—but while trespassing must deal with an actual burglar. In the superb title story, a father and daughter warily negotiate her foray into stand-up comedy while mother dies of cancer. Tomine's clean-line realism varies, some stories full-color, some halftones, others having a brushwork feel. Several times he runs one narrative via text and another via drawings. VERDICT With deadpan rather than dramatic art, Tomine's tales show off his mature skill with storytelling, dialog, and character. Those fond of slice-of-life comics will like this, and teachers of narrative techniques will find it helpful. Adult situations and language but minimal explicitness.—M.C.

Library Journal

2015-07-16
A collection of six previously published graphic stories of life's bittersweet struggles, from illustrator/writer Tomine (New York Postcards, 2014, etc.). The true magic of sequential art comes in the spaces between panels—where readers draw connections between separate, evolving images to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts—and here Tomine proves himself a wizard. In the title tale, a stuttering teenager pursues a dream of professional comedy while her supportive mother subtly progresses from unremarkable to brittle hair to bandanna and cane to absence—cancer running its course via signifiers and suggestion. The elegiac "Translated, from the Japanese" follows a mother and son's journey from Japan to California to rejoin the boy's estranged father, and while the panels—hewing closely to the mother's point of view—contain no more than an arm of any central character, the averted gaze makes the mother's discomfort palpable. Most playful is "A Brief History of the Art Form Known as ‘Hortisculpture,' " in which a dissatisfied landscaper dreams of taking the world by storm by growing plants inside bulky sculptures—an idea met with underwhelming support from his wife and outright derision from everyone else. The story appears as a series of comic strips, including periodic "Sunday funnies" installments, as though the urbane wit of the New Yorker had infiltrated daily newspapers. The put-upon, schlubby landscaper and the regular punch lines of the comic-strip format serve as a nice counterweight to the (beautifully, hauntingly depicted) angst and melancholy pervading much of the collection, which is rounded out by an adult-film star's unwitting doppelgänger, two addicts wrestling with love and damage, and a brooding brute who gains regular, secret access to a stranger's home. Graphically, Tomine excels at imbuing every figure—big or small—with individualized traits (hands on hips, cocked shoulder), giving the sense that the story's focus could shift deep into the background and still find rich, full life. Achingly human and divinely rendered.

Kirkus Reviews