Khoosheh Salas
Professor Hyesu Park
ENGL 101
November 19th, 2014
Verbal and Non-verbal Communications in “Shortcomings” by Adrian Tomine
Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine, is a disputatious, gloomy, topped up with maddening characters, thus far it is unbelievably and remarkably a realistic book. Tomine’s strengths lies in two perspectives. The first perspective and strength is the verbal communications between characters of his book and the dialogues between them and the way they communicate with each other, which most of the time is discussions, yells, debates or verbal modifications. Tomine’s second strength lies on the artistic point of the book which is the pictures, panels or to be more detailed is facial expressions and body gestures of…show more content… He tries to show/describe his frustration by saying “I mean, she didn’t give a shit about any of this community…political…whatever, when I met her” (Tomine 17). Tomine is trying to show/tell us that Ben doesn’t have the ability to choose or find a “Right Word” to describe his frustrations against his girlfriend. He is also trying to tell us that Ben, other than having the inability to find “The Right” word to describe his frustration, has the inability to communicate with his own emotions. He uses two different words “community” and “political” and afterward he says whatever, which shows his frustration, inability to understand his own emotional status and also giving up on his frustration about his girlfriend at the same time. The second way to look at Tomine’s graphical novel is, looking, reading and understanding what is going on in the story by using the non-verbal communications which is simply looking at pictures/panels and understanding what they mean or why they meant to be there. With the great use of facial expressions, body gestures, psychology of colors and repetitive scenes, Tomine helps us to have a vivid image of the story.
Visual elements play the main role in “shortcomings”, and it becomes realistic while you keep reading the book. The visual elements/imagery plays an important role due to the detailed body gestures, realistic facial expressions and empty