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I set myself up for a lot of trouble by wanting to tell a story that is fairly earnest and emotional and expressive, but to do it in the most subtle, realistic way.

Adrian Tomine

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Adrian Tomine
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: May 31
Cartoonist
Comics Artist
Illustrator
Novelist
Sacramento
California
Emotional
Trouble
Story
Expressive
Tell
Earnest
Stories
Fairly
Way
Realistic
Subtle
Wanting

More quotes by 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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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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Underground and alternative comics existed in a vacuum for years, where money really wasn't an issue. No one would get into doing a black-and-white comic because they thought it might be a route to riches.
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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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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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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 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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I think in terms of getting new artists who are not in that sort of stereotypical teenage boy demographic there's been a lot of progress recently. And I shouldn't make a definitive statement about this, but my impression is that the main impediment to progress in that regard is the number of people who are choosing to make a go of it.
Adrian Tomine
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For me, as much about being a parent as it is about being a child.
Adrian Tomine
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That partially due to the world of media and commerce, the idea of a comic book has been lost in the ghetto, whereas the graphic novel is now being held up as something to aspire to and as something that's respectable for adults to read.
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 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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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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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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Maybe you're not even in a position to really judge how good your kid is at that endeavor.
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 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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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 was just a guy who did adult or alternative comic books. And then suddenly to be, like, a New Yorker cover artist was a different thing.
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