Book Design and Adrian Tomine’s “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist”

A few weeks ago, I picked up Adrian Tomine’s latest book, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist. I read Killing and Dying last year, and Tomine’s new book immediately caught my attention, not necessarily for the illustrations or content. No, what grabbed me was the book design itself. It’s a physically gorgeous book because it is, for all intents and purposes, a grid sketchbook. Apart from the title, the cover illustration of Tomine drawing, and the backmatter blurbs, the book is a Moleskine classic notebook, and that connection immediately grabbed me because while I am not an illustrator, I use those types of notebooks (unlined for me) constantly. Today, I want to look at the ways that The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist serves as a metanarrative of itself and how the physical design, not just the illustrations and text between the covers, works within this process.

Graphic memoirs are naturally self-reflexive, more so I would say than prose memoirs because of the act of drawing and representing the action through illustrations. In this manner, the artist depicts him or herself not just through the text but also through the image of themselves. Writing about Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Jennifer Daniels Krug points out that ways that graphic texts serve as “renditions” of the historical…