Shortcomings
 Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel Shortcomings is his only work that fully deals with themes of being a young Asian-American male in American society. Ben Tanaka, the story’s protagonist, lives in Berkeley, California with his politically active girlfriend Miko Hayashi. Ben is uninterested in Miko's participation in the Asian-American cultural community, but he possesses a wandering eyespecifically for Caucasian women. When Miko begins to resent what she interprets as a rejection of both her Asian heritage and of herself, she moves to New York, at which point Ben disastrously attempts to pursue the type of woman he feels he really wants. The title Shortcomings relates to the main theme of the graphic novel which revolves around the tragic shortcomings of the human condition. In Sandra Oh's essay "Sight Unseen: Adrian Tomine's Optic Nerve and the Politics of Recognition"., published by The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS), Oh writes that Tomine, like his character Ben Tanaka, is more or less "pessimistic about the possibility of escaping the limitations of socially inscribed identities." Throughout the novel we see this pessimism manifest in Ben's general rejection and resentment of things that attempt to, in Ben's words, "make some big 'statement' about race." At the same time, Shortcomings does deal with racial issues, but it attempts to do so without resorting to clichés.