Catching Up With... Adrian Tomine

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.

P: The project took you several years to complete, spanning through multiple issues of Optic Nerve. Did you truly work serially for the three parts or did you have it completed but undrawn before?
Tomine: I had the whole thing loosely planned out in my mind before I started drawing, and then made all the hard decisions as I worked on each chapter. When I was preparing to work on this story, I asked a few of the more experienced cartoonists I know if they had any advice about creating these longer stories, and one of the things I kept hearing was, “Don’t completely lock yourself in from the start—leave some room for improvisation.” And that was really useful to me. One of the big challenges for me with Shortcomings was just the level of focus and endurance required, so I think if I had completely written the whole thing out like a movie script in advance, the drawing phase would just seem like mind-numbing drudgery.

P: Was there a reason you chose to forgo thought bubbles in the narration in Shortcomings?
Tomine: I guess it was just one of the challenges I set for myself. I think in the past I might’ve relied a little too heavily on thought bubbles and especially narration, and I wanted to see if I could convey things like emotion and decision-making and whatnot from a purely external point of view. But like I said with regards to the artwork, it’s not like I’ve sworn off those other devices. The story I just finished has all of that: thought bubbles, narration, etc.

P: Your works have always seemed autobiographical, and perhaps this is why you’ve connected so much with your audience. Has this caused problems with friends misinterpreting your stories or characters as your own point of view?
Tomine: Not so much with my friends, because I think anyone I consider a friend would have a pretty good sense of what’s autobiographical and what isn’t. But as far as readers misinterpreting fictional stories as autobiographical, or, especially in the case of this book, assuming the characters’ views are my own…it does happen. And I’m obviously somewhat to blame for this—I put a lot of details into Shortcomings that were almost intentionally misleading some readers in this way. But the truth is, this is a work of fiction, and all the characters, while connected to my own personality to varying degrees, were made up to serve the story.

P: When you read comics today do you still get the same enjoyment out of them that you did when you were younger?
Tomine: I guess it depends on what you mean by “when I was younger.” If you’re talking about, like, a few years ago, then yeah…I get excited and very inspired when something really good comes out, but that’s not very often. But if you want to talk about the enjoyment I had when I was a kid, then no... I honestly doubt that any comic book will ever be able to replicate that feeling of sheer bliss I had when I was a kid and I’d bring home my brown-paper bag of new comics.

Click here to read Sean Gandert's review of Shortcomings.