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I think when I finally got it in my head that I was going to do the story, I wanted to avoid doing what I thought people wanted me to do.

Adrian Tomine

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Adrian Tomine
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: May 31
Cartoonist
Comics Artist
Illustrator
Novelist
Sacramento
California
Thinking
Finally
People
Head
Story
Stories
Thought
Wanted
Going
Think
Avoid

More quotes by 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'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'm always pointing things out to native New Yorkers that I think are weird about this place and their culture and all that. But I feel like my friends and family from California feel like I've totally become a New Yorker.
Adrian Tomine
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It's important to make a distinction between becoming more precise and becoming better.
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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It's cold water in the face to realize you're not nearly as special and as unusual as you might have thought when you were an alienated teenager.
Adrian Tomine
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I get nervous about the effect that the high speed of everything will have on creativity. It's already sad for me to see that a lot of young aspiring cartoonists are putting stuff on the web, doing animation on the computer rather than making zines or mini-comics, which seem to be going the way of the dinosaur.
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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I get the impression from some people that unless they get direct access to characters' thoughts and realizations, either through thought balloons or narrations or some sort of showy action, then those thoughts and realizations never existed.
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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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 think a lot of the criticism had to do with disliking the characters - which, again, I take as something of a compliment.
Adrian Tomine
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Especially for people of our generation, who really celebrated certain attitudes - the outsider, the loner - it can have a real impact on the art when they realize, I have friends, I'm married, or I have kids. That's certainly happened to me.
Adrian Tomine
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There were certainly some people who wanted me to do a feel-good story that affirmed a lot of very commonly held beliefs.
Adrian Tomine
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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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I think, to its credit, this is one of the last forms of popular entertainment that I don't sense to be discriminatory in any way. I think there's this general hunger for greater diversity, where publishers are really excited about finding different voices than what has been done.
Adrian Tomine
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I think a lot of the bells and whistles that become available to you would be impossible to resist for some people, so it's just never going to be a real stand-in version of your comic. People will have to take advantage of the ability to have sound, or zoom in and out, whatever it is.
Adrian Tomine
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If something's a little weird, it's Kafkaesque.
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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I was very aware of the fact that there are a lot of comics out there that I love, because I've grown up my whole life reading comics and I know every little nuance of the language and all the implications.
Adrian Tomine