The wait for the next issue has been getting longer every year, perhaps because Tomine's exacting standards keep getting higher. Over time, after he moved to Berkeley to major in English, and as the issues of "Optic Nerve" were collected in the books "Sleepwalk" and "Summer Blonde," the stories grew longer and more subtle. As a teenager in Sacramento, Calif., he began to hand-distribute his "Optic Nerve" series of comics about young Bay Area loners. Stereotypes aside, Tomine must also be feeling his own pressure to measure up. At one point, as he is considering dating a lesbian in the hopes that she'll be less "size-conscious," he repeats a riddle he heard in college: "What's the main difference between Asian and Caucasian men?. It's a gentle nod to a recurring joke that reveals the insecurities of the book's main character, Ben Tanaka, a chubby, grouchy movie theater manager recently abandoned by his girlfriend. Under the dust jacket of Adrian Tomine's first graphic novel, "Shortcomings," printed along the bottom edge of the front cover, lies a ruler.
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