I’d been pointed to Tomine’s work here and here, and seeing that Optic Nerve #8 was one of the recommended titles, decided to buy this, since its subtitle is “The Complete Optic Nerve Mini-Comics”.

Alas, this is “complete” as in “complete from #1 to #7”, so my curiosity about #8 remains unabated. Once I’d got over my disappointment, however, I did enjoy these 32 short vignettes of life, mainly in San Francisco, mainly with first-person narrative from Tomine himself or Amy, his fictional proxy character, published before he made his breakthrough commercially with #8.

In his introduction, Tomine admits disarmingly that he had originally planned to weed out the pieces which he is now embarrassed about, but that would have left very little, so instead he has aimed for completeness. He was right: they are none of them actually bad, and they point to someone who is capable of better. I’ll look out for more of Tomine’s work.