Shortcomings

I’m not sure if it was the use of scene cuts at random places on the pages, or how much detail Tomine gets into each scene and frame despite the sparsity of the writing and drawing – but the pacing of Shortcomings is as perfect as how each character is used isolate everything we need to know about Ben and present it to the reader. Oh and then there’s the frame where his love rival gets ready to practice ju-Jitsu on him and I absolutely

It's like an actual novel. Dialogue is realistic, characters are believable, but there's one big problem. It's Ben. At the end, he probably has the same shortcoming he started out with. I can imagine a sequel which ends identically, because he never gets it. His girlfriend explains that she stayed with him because she felt a lot of sympathy for him. We needed to have some of that sympathy. We need it to understand why she stayed with him, and we need it because, reading to the end, we're staying with him longer than we'd like to. Watching his loss isn't sufficient to reward us for reading to the end, because he'll never understand what's wrong despite Miko's spelling it out for him in explicit detail. It feels like it ended too soon, and yet never soon enough.

Depressing.

This is a straight-forward book that follows an anti-hero; the protagonist doesn't really care for his girlfriend, who tries to get their relationship to work.

It's safe to say that watching him, the torpid, vacant man, sulk and complain himself through life is a gnarly, look-yourself-in-the-mirror kind of experience.

Well written, interesting and human. Definitely makes me read more from this author.