SUBTEXTS.

Pencil these in

In the 1970s, writer and artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi bucked popular trends in manga (Japanese comic books) by crafting short stories that cast an unflinching eye on the lonely and desperate residents of Tokyo and the bizarre lengths they might go to for companionship and fulfillment. These works have recently been collected in books including The Push Man and Other Stories and Good-Bye. In the '90s and '00s, he's been toiling away on his biography, and it's finally here. We only catch glimpses of his relationships with his family, with women, and with the cities

of Osaka and Tokyo -- the book mainly covers his relationship with manga. At over 855 pages, some of his battles with editors and contemporaries get repetitive, but A Drifting Life (published by Quebec-based Drawn & Quarterly) is a warm, heartfelt biography -- and it's a fascinating journey through manga's early days.

Many people know Adrian Tomine's work -- if not his name -- exclusively from his New Yorker covers, which beautifully re the strange solitude of urban life and tell intricate stories with just one illustration. Shortcomings, also published by Drawn & Quarterly, is a paperback that collects the issues of Optic Nerve, the independent comic book that launched Tomine's career. It's a work that's deceptively simple but full of teeth. The lead character, Ben Tanaka, is a selfish and self-loathing Asian American who is utterly miserable and yet bitterly resists change. Change is thrust upon him, though, when his girlfriend and best friend leave Berkeley for New York City, and Ben flies East -- only to make things worse. If you like what Tomine does with one panel on a magazine cover, you have to see what he does with eight per page.