The Graphic Novel You're Sleeping On

Adrian Tomine The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist is a brutally honest graphic memoir about creative insecurity, public humiliation, and the gulf between how we present ourselves and how we feel inside.

The book is designed to look like the notebook it pretends to be. Drawn and Quarterly published it in 2020 as a hardcover made up as a Moleskine: rounded corners, elastic closure, ribbon marker, faux-leather boards. Inside, the pages are ruled like a sketchbook with the panels drawn over the lines. The conceit is not decoration. It establishes that you are reading found notes rather than a memoir, which is what licenses Tomine to be as unkind about himself as he is.

The drawing style is deliberately stripped down. Simple lines and minimal backgrounds put the focus on facial expressions and body language, which is where the comedy and pathos live.

The episodes range from mundane embarrassments to deeper wounds like the disconnect between critical recognition and personal fulfillment. Tomine is unflinching about his own pettiness, envy, and neediness.

The whole thing is framed by a hospital visit. Tomine ends up in an emergency room and begins writing the notes that become the book, which recasts every earlier scene as something remembered under duress rather than complained about in comfort. That is the difference between a book of grievances and a book about mortality, and it arrives in the last twenty pages.

For creators in any field, the book resonates on a professional level. The scenes at book festivals and conventions capture the specific discomfort of putting your work into the world.

Tomine started Optic Nerve as a photocopied minicomic in Sacramento at sixteen, stapling them himself and selling them through comic shops and mail order. Drawn and Quarterly picked the series up in 1995, when he was twenty-one. That history matters here, because most of the humiliations in the book are the humiliations of somebody who has been doing this in public since he was a teenager.

Tomine New Yorker covers and his Optic Nerve series have made him one of the most respected cartoonists working today, but this book feels like his most personal and courageous work.

It is about 160 pages and you will read it in under an hour. It costs around seventeen pounds new, which is a high rate per minute and still worth paying, partly because it is a book you immediately hand to somebody else and partly because the second pass catches the drawings you skated over.

Published by Drawn and Quarterly, available at https://www.drawnandquarterly.com/the-loneliness-of-the-long-distance-cartoonist.

If you want more, Killing and Dying from 2015 is his best fiction: six short stories told in six different drawing styles, with the title story the one that does damage. Shortcomings from 2007 was adapted into a film by Randall Park in 2023, decent and considerably lighter than the book. Both are on the same publisher.

Read this graphic novel if you have ever felt like a fraud, been paralyzed by social anxiety, or wondered whether your accomplishments actually mean anything. It is the most comforting uncomfortable book you will ever read.