Summer Blonde

Canadian cartoonist Adrian Tomine’s Summer Blonde (2003, Drawn & Quarterly) collects four of his quietly devastating short stories, originally serialized in his Optic Nerve comic. The book captures lonely, twentysomething urbanites in the Bay Area, navigating awkward social encounters and unspoken longings with Tomine’s trademark clean linework and detached, observational tone. A seminal early work that helped define the alternative-comics scene of the early 2000s, it remains a key entry in his acclaimed body of work.