Les Intrus

Formal Precision, Emotional Distance

Les Intrus collects Adrian Tomine's most recent stories from his long-running Optic Nerve series — a body of work that has always been more interested in the texture of ordinary failure than in resolution. Published by Éditions Cornélius in 2015, this French-language edition, translated by Eric Moreau, brings together pieces that range from spare, first-person postcard narratives to densely packed five-tier grid sequences where repetition becomes its own form of argument.

The formal range here is deliberate and considered. Depopulated postcard panels carry an introspective weight that is almost entirely verbal; the dense grid layouts work through accumulation, rhythm, and the slow erosion of small certainties. Tomine's use of color has grown more nostalgic with time — less a stylistic choice than a register of longing for a comics tradition he both inherits and quietly critiques. Stories open without preamble and close without relief. That abruptness is not a flaw; it is the point.

Where early work leaned toward a cooler cynicism, Les Intrus shows a more complicated empathy — one that does not soften the material but holds it with greater steadiness. This places Tomine in a lineage that runs through Japanese Gekiga, particularly the work of Yoshihiro Tatsumi, as well as American underground and indie comics. The result is a voice that belongs to neither tradition entirely and is stronger for it. Readers drawn to Surreal & Experimental Comics will find in Tomine a different register — realist rather than surreal, but no less formally exacting.