Tomine offers four stories in this second A lonely woman tries to find the man leaving cryptic messages for her in the Personals section of the newspaper in "The Connecting Thread" (4 pages); in "Summer Job" (15 pages), a teenager reluctantly applies for a job at a photocopy shop and then proceeds to waste the following two months; "Pink Frosting" (2 pages) provides a vivid and unsettling glimpse at the suggestion of violence murmuring beneath the surface during a traffic altercation; in "Layover" (4 pages), a missed flight forces a man to ponder his strained relationships with his lover and friends as he discreetly walks through his neighborhood waiting, afraid to announce to anyone that he has not left yet.
I was shocked when I read the letters page in “Optic Nerve” #2. It seemed like a lot of readers felt that his work in the debut issue of the Drawn & Quarterly series reboot was sterile and lifeless and I couldn’t disagree more. Maybe it’s the benefit of hindsight, but I thought “Optic Nerve” #1 was some of Adrian Tomine’s warmest work, both art- and writing-wise, a trend that developed even more in this second issue. Tomine’s work today is extremely crisp and efficient whereas the four stories in this comic are a little more spacious and emotional. Each one deals with yearning in some fashion - for love, for a purpose, for a connection - and each one is a gem (although, if I had to pick a favorite, I’d go with “Layover,” which hit my heart just a little bit deeper than the others).