Catching Up With... Adrian Tomine

Gradually gaining notice for his Optic Nerve comic series, Adrian Tomine's first long-form graphic novel, Shortcomings, is published today. Tomine recently spoke with Paste about working on record covers, the difficulty of writing a graphic novel and addressing race in his comics.

Paste: In your work outside of comics you’ve designed record covers. How did you come into working on those?
Adrian Tomine: As with most of my commercial illustration work, it’s just a case of someone calling me up out of the blue and asking, “Do you want to do this?” If you look at the music-related work I’ve done, you might think that I specifically sought out bands that I liked, but for the most part, that part of my resume is a combination of being lucky in terms of who contacts me, and also the fact that I turn down things that don’t really appeal to me. I think I’m a lot more laissez-faire when it come to my magazine or advertising work... my snobbery rarely intrudes on my greed. But with music, I struggle sometimes because I feel like doing an album cover might be perceived as some sort of implicit endorsement. I’m sure in the future I’ll be counting my pennies and thinking, “Damn it…why did I even care if people thought I liked [band name redacted]?”

P: The art in your comics seems to have grown sparser with fewer lines defining characters and less expressionism in the drawings, more realistic characters etc. Has this been a conscious choice of yours?
Tomine: I don’t think that my drawing style is like this one-way street of evolution. Some of the things you’re describing were conscious stylistic decisions on my part—decisions I made because I thought they would be right for this particular story. I wanted Shortcomings to have a feeling of taking place in the real world, and that necessitated some pretty detailed and specific backgrounds. I also wanted a lot of the characters’ thoughts and emotions to be conveyed visually (as opposed to using thought balloons or narration), so that kind of required me to pay some attention to how I drew facial expressions and gestures. But I’m working on a couple different projects now, and I’m drawing much more cartoony and scratchy because it seems appropriate for the content.

P: Why did you decide to write your first long-form story?
Tomine: I think I was feeling a little complacent with regards to writing short stories, and I wanted to push myself. Also, I’ve always been kind of awed by and envious of the longer-form stories that other cartoonists have created. They just have a certain power and weight that short stories don’t—that feeling of getting sucked into the plot, or becoming familiar with the characters. I didn’t feel a lot of confidence in my ability to pull it off, but I told myself, “At worst, people will probably applaud the fact that I least aimed a little higher this time.”

P: Shortcomings is also your first story to really take on race in such a direct manner. Was there anything that lead directly to this or was it something you’d been thinking about how to incorporate into your work for a while?
Tomine: Around the same time I decided I wanted to attempt a longer story, I also decided that I wanted to make some conscientious efforts towards finding my own “style” or “voice.” That sounds pretty pathetic when I say it out loud, but I guess I reached my breaking point in terms of every review of my work, whether positive or negative, listing my very apparent influences, and usually describing the ways I came up short in comparison. I’ve found that shaking off or absorbing my influences with respect to the visuals is quite a tough task for me, and I’m sure it’s something I’ll struggle with forever. So I think that’s what lead me to this subject matter. I kind of wracked my brain and tried to come up with a premise that maybe some of my cartooning heroes wouldn’t write—something that was very personal and specific to my own experiences. And that kind of dovetailed with my interest in creating a longer story. I felt like this idea and these characters that I was developing in my mind might be strong enough to be stretched out over 100 pages or so.