Customer Reviews

32 Stories

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you're only looking to read a comic book with high-quality printing and stunning illustration, this is not the purchase you'd want to make. I'd recommend you buy Tomine's Shortcomings instead or just appreciate the many amazing illustrations he's done for The New Yorker. But if you're an aspiring comic artist or a fan who would like to trace the growth of Tomine as an artist through these raw mini-comics, this is the book for you. I think it's targeted at specific groups of readers. I liked it, particularly after reading, but it wasn't a strong and instant appeal, as I often feel about his current work.

This is a great concept and well executed except for the cheap cardboard box. The two sides of the slipcase are not the same thickness, and due to the fact that the box is hollow, the thick side should have been on top. What happens is that you could just be picking up the box normally and suddenly it is bent and creased. In the store where I bought it, there was even one copy where, during shipping, the entire front of the slipcase had been bashed in.

Adrian Tomine is a genius. His stories and art are more realistic than life itself. It's astonishing.
I believe this specific collection was made especially for fans and admirers of Tomine's work. It's a precious opportunity to verify how a brilliant career begins. It's the origin of all his work. The first little book shows a young but serious and committed art work. The shocking part comes when you realize the gigantic evolution he accomplished in the sequential little books.
Maybe this review is not as accurate as it should be, because I'm a serious admirer of his drawing AND writing. Maybe that'll influence my view in a too positive way. His work is the closest to perfection I've seen in comics, and I'll buy every single book that contains his material.

This is a box of several reprints. The art is great, the stories are cool, and you can see progress of a great comic artist unfold before your eyes. Adrian Tomine is fantastic!

I haven't seen the fancy hardcover, but from the early softcover these are great raw early Tomine stories. They're not as perfect as his art has grown to be, but you can see in them, like in a retrospective of a famous artist, how he passed through being a good artist to being a great one.