Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s Influence on Adrian Tomine’s Short-Story Cycle Killing and Dying

Abstract

ABSTRACT Adrian Tomine’s Killing and Dying (2015) is one of the most celebrated graphic novels of the twenty-first century—although that genre designation is misleading inasmuch as the book is actually a short-story cycle composed of six seemingly autonomous short stories linked together by shared topics and motifs. This essay examines how Tomine achieves overall narrative unity despite the individual stories’ heterogeneous settings, plots, and characters. In particular, this analysis examines how Tomine employs the theme of “striving and failing” to link the texts: each entry is united by a character’s need to connect, to be seen, to be understood. Protagonists suffer from worries and fears they are unable to articulate, their anxieties rarely fully framed on the page. Additionally, this reading of Killing and Dying explores how Tomine sublimates the influence of 1960s manga artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi (1935–2015), whose work Tomine helped bring to English-speaking audiences after decades of neglect, in organizing the cycle.