Tomine Gets Serious About Comic Art

Adrian Tomine is a critically acclaimed cartoonist best known for his comic book series “Optic Nerve” and his soulful illustrations, which have appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, and Rolling Stone. His graphic novel “Shortcomings” is listed among The New York Times’ “100 Notable Books of 2007.” Tomine, who dicussed “Shortcomings” at the Brattle Theatre yesterday, sat down with The Crimson to talk about education and inspiration, comic book aesthetics and culture, and representing race and gender in his art.



The Harvard Crimson: Considering your upcoming visit to Harvard, what role did your college experience play in your work?



Adrian Tomine: Distracted me and slowed me down probably. I wasn’t going to art school. I was going to Berkeley as an English major and I basically had to keep the two aspects of my life separate at that time. I would go to class and do what I had to [do] to get through my classes and then I would go home and stay up late working on my comics.



THC: Do you ever have characters pop into your mind having a conversation and have to draw something on a napkin?



AT: That does happen sometimes. That’s why I generally carry around a little sketch book...There will be things that I observe or overhear and I don’t know what I’m going to do with it but I feel like I gotta jot it down for future reference, and there will be times when I go back to sketchbooks from years ago and stumble upon some note I made and integrate it into something presently.



THC: Your work has been described by some as being “angsty.” Is that a reputation you embrace or reject?



AT: I don’t sit down and think, “Let me invent some story that’s gonna put people in a bad mood”...I’m trying to depict the range of experience in everyday life, so sometimes there’s humor and happiness, and sometimes there’s struggle.



THC: You emerged from the underground comic scene and have your own devoted group of readers but also are among the few who have been accepted into the main stream. Do you feel any conflict between the two?



AT: It’s not like being in high school where I’m torn between my nerdy comic book friends and going out to the football game with all the beautiful kids. No matter what, I’m just sitting here in my studio by myself doing these drawings...It’s not like I had to turn my back on people who used to buy my comic books at little specialty stores in order to get my artwork in The New Yorker. The things can exist concurrently and hopefully play off of each other.



THC: Is there a reason for your ability to create such interesting female characters?

AT: One aspect of it is just my experience growing up. For big chunks of my childhood I was being raised by a single mom who was working and putting herself through school. I think also one of the inspirations I had was a comic book called “Love and Rockets” by Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez. They were the first guys to get compliments in terms of female characters. I immersed myself in their work so deeply that when it came time to write my own stories it wasn’t even a conscious effort to say, “Now I need to develop these female characters.”



THC: “Shortcomings” is your new book dealing with race and racial identity. Why at this point in your life or career did you decide to tackle these issues?



AT: Personally, it only could have happened because up until recently I was overly concerned with how the work that I produced would reflect on me as a person...Working on this book I had a turnaround where I decided I wanted to not feel compelled to do fiction that would make the hypothetical reader think, “Oh, the guy who wrote this must be so sensitive or cool.” It may have even swung too far in the opposite direction where I was almost challenging readers to dislike me and that ended up being very liberating.



THC: Some say your race was hidden in your previous auto-biographical work. Do you agree?



AT: It wasn’t the fact that I was hiding my own identity so much as choosing not to make that the focus of every creative thing that I did. I was sort of surprised and a little put off at first when I started getting published that there was this expectation that the reason I learned to become a cartoonist was because I had to express my feelings about what it meant to be Japanese-American, and that for me was not the case...What ended up happening was, while I tried to focus on more universal types of storytelling, that there was still that seed of an idea planted in my brain about trying to tell a story that would address some of these broader issues, but to do it in a way that was still consistent with my interests and my work.

—Interview conducted, condensed, and edited by Kerry A. Goodenow