Comic books are respectable enough now that it is no longer necessary to attempt to burnish their image by renaming them "graphic novels." Neither is it necessary to remind readers that comics can be art and, as such, can be as rewarding (or dull) as paintings, novels and songs. We can move beyond such fretting to consider more interesting questions such as one that is sure to arise for those readers who purged illustrated books from their libraries at about the same time they boxed up their baseball cards and Barbie dolls.
The question that will nag at those who have spent the bulk of their lives deciphering unadorned text is: How does one read a comic book? Clearly, racing through the words does not do justice to the pictures, and just as clearly, focusing overmuch on the illustrations can hobble the narrative's momentum. Adrian Tomine's excellent "Shortcomings" gives us an opportunity to consider how text and visuals work together, and how we might best process the two components of this, and other, comics.
The story Tomine tells in "Shortcomings" is one that could be (and has been) told in other forms. A precis of the narrative — depressed and cynical sad sack loses his love interest and ends up with nothing — could, one is certain, fit any number of the short stories churned out by graduates of America's better writing programs. For two reasons, however, Tomine's tale does not read like a rehash of something we have paged through several times before.