What do you do if you are a budding cartoonist? You put your work online and hope that people will notice it of course (and if you are really good (or if someone likes your style), someone will ask you for some more work and you may have a chance of getting published). But what if this happens in 1991?

Adrian Tomine was still in high school when he decided to share his work with the reading public and in at the start of the 90s that meant producing a mini-comic - a few pages stapled together and sold for #1 (or thereabouts) - and finding comic shops interested in carrying them. You may even win enough money for a lunch once a year or something.

He produced 7 of these before Drawn & Quarterly offered to publish the comics for him and the rest is history. But those 7 issues show the growth of a young man from art which can be seen as a mish-mash between the styles of a lot of artists to what he became later - a cartoonist with his own style.

If you had never seen anything by Tomine, don't start with this one - the first issues are rough and even if you start seeing the familiar style starting to emerge in the later issues, it is still under development. Drawn & Quarterly published the collected mini-comics twice - once as a small paperback (that's how I read it for the first time) and then as a collectable edition - reproduction of the separate comics exactly as they had been published (plus a small note to ensure it is clear they are reproductions), housed in a paper box.

Each issue contains the same type of stories Tomine will continue to write for decades - stories of life as he saw or wish he saw it. They are rougher than what comes later but some of them have surprise endings and nice flows (while others are essentially juvenile attempts which could have used a lot more work).

It is a nice artifact of a career and either edition is worth checking - after you had read at least a few other books by Tomine. ( )

While I'm not familiar with the Optic Nerve comics, I'm certainly excited to read more. Starting the book, the writing and art are kinda... shit, and while it significantly improves in the latter half, it isn't spectacular, having it all come off as feeling unfinished. Regardless, reading this was interesting for me; whether the stories are autobiographical or fake, they all feel emotionally driven and very personal to Tomine's experiences as a young adult. It resonates really well with me and the angsty, teenage audience that I find myself to be a part of. Like I said, it's a flawed book, but it's got me hooked. I'm looking forward to reading more of this series :) ( )

This book brings together the comic strips from Adrian Tomine's self-produced magazine, Optic Nerve, before he was picked up by a publisher. A lot of the strips are very short - one or two pages - and there is quite a range of styles as Tomine experiments with what suits him. Many of them are episodes rather than stories - a dream Tomine had or a conversation he overheard. The fictional ones tend to be about solitary people, unhappy relationships, or strange out-of-character moments. I enjoyed them all, and will look for more of his work. ( )

It's interesting to watch as Tomine's ability to both write and draw a story improves, and impressive in many regards for the young age at which he produced them. That aside, the majority of the stories contained within are ultimately slight and show the clear signs of the aforementioned young age of their artist at the time.

An interesting historical document, and there are some real gems present, but it's really solely for those who are already fans.

(The recent re-issue gets an extra plug for reprinting the comics in the exact format they originally appeared in, ads and all, making it even more of an interesting historical document.) ( )

Watching the evolution of Optic Nerve in this slim volume is well-worth the price of admission. With 32 Stories, one can add Tomine to the ever-growing list of the slice-of-life graphic artists able to successfully capture the everyday on paper. The skill for these artists in this is knowing which portions of the mundane are worth capturing, which things are worth confessing and which dreams are worth documenting.

Not all of the 32 stories are instant classics, but there are far more hits than misses. Tomine is at his strongest when drawing either himself or Amy, but has surprising shows with Happy Anniversary, and in the final story, Grind, where a girl tries to find someone that will accept her nighttime-teeth grinding habit. Watching his stories mature through the issues is a treat. ( )