In the summer, you will often catch me binge-reading comics to the complete exclusion of all other reading plans. The availability of comics in public libraries has increased immensely since I was a teenager; it is a gift and a curse.
This year, I read three of Adrian Tomine’s works: Killing and Dying (2015), The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist (2020), and the much earlier Summer Blonde (2002). In the last of these, I was gratified to find a certain Easter egg.
The first story, “Alter Ego”, concerns Martin Courtney, a writer who has failed to successfully follow-up his promising first book, Sheltered Life, “a rambling, largely autobiographical account of his teenage years.” Though “published to moderate acclaim and surprising popularity,” the book failed to provide the impetus for Courtney to take his next major step as a writer. In the comic’s third frame, we see Sheltered Life, and we can see from the dust-jacket in the preceding frame that Courtney was fortunate enough to have his debut in hardcover.
Instead of having set to work on the Great American, Courtney has “ghost-written the debut novel for a young Hollywood heart-throb” and dabbled in short fiction and magazine articles. This is where we meet Courtney, and it doesn’t get better for Courtney, as he spends the rest of the story more distracted from his writing than anything else. Beginning to end, Courtney fits a certain archetype of writer, one who has squandered their potential through indecision and inaction.
In the course of the story, Courtney is visiting the home of a new acquaintance (it’s complicated) when his own book catches his attention. It caught my attention too.
What Tomine has so thoughtfully included here is a little detail that thoroughly leavens the character of Martin Courtney — he is a Vintage Contemporaries author! The detail is certainly apropos: Vintage Contemporaries was a landmark on the cultural horizon of Tomine’s own Generation X, and many authors debuted or otherwise had their work published in VCs, never to rise much further in prominence or fame, fated to the mid-list.
To read far too far into this: since, as we saw, Courtney’s Sheltered Life was first published in hardcover with a dust-jacket, this edition must be the paperback reissue. That, or if Tomine is intending for Courtney to have had his debut in a Vintage Contemporaries paperback, there is a slight historical inaccuracy with the dust-jacket.
And there is more. Courtney ghost-writes The Last Lost Chance for actor Evan Elliott, and I think there may be some VC lore lurking behind this plot-point too. It could have hardly escaped Tomine’s knowledge that Vintage Contemporaries published Gen-X “heart-throb” Ethan Hawke’s own early-twenties angsty romance, The Hottest State, in 1997. Hawke was already a well-established Hollywood star by that point, and the novel’s publication was surely greeted with a groan, as all actors-turned-novelists’ literary efforts are. The title of The Last Lost Chance is also too near to Richard Bausch’s The Last Good Time (VC 1994) to not raise my eyebrows; both titles are vague, suggestive, and ultimately devoid of their own meaning — so, good titles to prop up mediocre offerings! (Sheltered Life, I think, is both ambiguous and meaningful — is Courtney a better author than Tomine is letting on?). I’m not suggesting that Hawke’s novels aren’t Hawke’s, but I do think the few details may add up to reveal the literary milieu Tomine had in mind for Courtney when he was writing “Alter Ego”.
Tomine invokes a literary history here that paints Courtney…how? As as a once-promising but solidly mid-tier writer published by Vintage Contemporaries in the mid-to-late 90s? To be sure, the late 90s was not the high-water mark for Vintage Contemporaries. As an author unfulfilled but full of potential? If Courtney never raised himself higher than VC publication, that would certainly suggest a rather incomplete career.
The meaning of this one detail gets to some of my central questions the imprint: what did it mean to be published in Vintage Contemporaries, both personally for the author at the time of publication as well as in hindsight when we consider the imprint as a whole? There in black and white, I don’t think it’s a stray detail without significance. I think what we’re meant to see in Courtney, especially as a VC author, is a writer with talent who is nonetheless overestimated, or at least, prematurely estimated. Partly as a result, I think, of Bright Lights, Big City‘s runaway success, Vintage Contemporaries developed a “best of a new generation” insistence on the instant-classic status of its books. But for every McInerney worth publishing alongside a Carver, you had a Courtney who — though talented — doesn’t hit the culture in the right way at the right time and fails to leave a lasting mark.