Quote

I think there was a point in the past when I felt that my options as an artist were either to make race a nonissue and deny its impact on life and just say, Don't think of me as an Asian cartoonist. Just think of me as a cartoonist.

Adrian Tomine

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Adrian Tomine
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: May 31
Cartoonist
Comics Artist
Illustrator
Novelist
Sacramento
California
Think
Impact
Thinking
Either
Life
Race
Point
Artist
Cartoonist
Felt
Options
Past
Asian
Make
Deny

More quotes by Adrian Tomine

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You start to get nervous when the value of a comic book or graphic novel is relative to the achievements of some other medium.
Adrian Tomine
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I wanted all the responsibility to rest on the content of the story. I tried to make the visual style almost invisible.
Adrian Tomine
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I've always been really impressed with some of the longer graphic novels and thought it would be really amazing if one day I could try something like that.
Adrian Tomine
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I wanted to try to create characters that happen to be Asian but who are pretty different from those we generally see in our culture, in our commercial culture.
Adrian Tomine
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I sense a real difference in my work from the time I was younger and single and more involved in the world of music and going out to bars and all that. There were points at which I was trying to use my art to reflect positively on myself, to almost be flirtatious through the work.
Adrian Tomine
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There are certain artists and filmmakers who, I get the impression, are trying to show off how bad their characters can be, how immoral their characters can be.
Adrian Tomine
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When people see me struggling on paper, I think it invites an almost collaborative relationship with the outside world, and that includes readers and other artists.
Adrian Tomine
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When email and the Internet came along, I never publish an email address. I just stuck with this P.O. Box address.
Adrian Tomine
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When I talk to people who have teenagers now, their rooms are filled with screens. There are their phones and their DVD players and TVs and all these things to produce distractions for them, and I think it would be hard to find the time to create something. I think that's really changing something about adolescence.
Adrian Tomine
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I started publishing my comic while I was still living with my parents.
Adrian Tomine
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And also, as a consumer now, it's weird that when I used to go to a book signing I would leave with a stack of pamphlets people had made to show off their work, and now I just leave with business cards where people have the URL to their websites.
Adrian Tomine
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One of the by-products of being allowed to start my professional career prematurely is that the evolution of my work is really evident.
Adrian Tomine
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For me, like, the more interesting a letter is I just get more excited and I know that this going to be great for my friends who are looking forward to reading that in my comic.
Adrian Tomine
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I'm getting to a point in my life where my whole attitude about the relationship between myself and the audience is totally different.
Adrian Tomine
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I wanted it to be as readable as possible. I had the ambition of reaching a broader audience.
Adrian Tomine
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For a stretch of time, I got really caught up in the idea that what people liked about my work was that I was a young guy who was trying to be cool by writing about young people and a certain kind of Bay Area culture that I was tangentially a part of.
Adrian Tomine
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I think most cartoonists are solitary, lonely kids who use their work as a way to try to connect with the world. If I had any other skills that were more performative - if I could have been a musician or an actor - I'm sure I would have pursued that instead in order to get that instant feedback and to hear applause.
Adrian Tomine
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If you're changing diapers and going to the playground, any ambitions of being a cool guy have to fly out the window.
Adrian Tomine
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I certainly wasn't consciously hiding my identity in the earlier work, though a lot of people have brought up the fact that I drew myself without eyeballs.
Adrian Tomine
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It's important to make a distinction between becoming more precise and becoming better.
Adrian Tomine