adrian tomine the loneliness of the long distance cartoonist

Hillary Brown: Hi, Adrian, we chatted over email about five years ago for Paste, and I asked you a bunch of questions about things like how you organize your home library. Anyway, Adrian chatted with me over a couple of emails, and here’s what resulted.

You wouldn’t think it would be funny over and over and over again, but it’s a solid way to construct a joke, and the repetition in some ways makes it funnier. Mostly, the book is a series of well-constructed jokes or, really, variations on the same joke, which could be paraphrased as: “Adrian is an asshole.” I don’t mean “asshole” as “mean person,” here, but instead as “schlemiel.” Each short story in the book can be graphed as a curve that starts low (“I can’t do this”), gently slopes up (“Sure I can! Why not?”) and then jumps off a cliff as reality smacks him in the face. Maybe Tomine feels that way about the game, or maybe it’s just a catchy title. It’s not a hefty book in any way, but that’s what I needed, and although it takes its title from a play on Allan Sillitoe’s short story “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,” I’m not sure that it has much in common with that work, which features its title character stubbornly refusing to play a game he’s been forced into.

Features “I’ve Got Decades Worth Of Suppressed Emotions”: An Interview with Adrian TomineĪdrian Tomine’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Cartoonist made my pandemic times far better than they would have been otherwise, at least during the hour I spent reading it and laughing helplessly.

Adrian tomine the loneliness of the long distance cartoonist