Quote

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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Adrian Tomine
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: May 31
Cartoonist
Comics Artist
Illustrator
Novelist
Sacramento
California
Responsibility
Almost
Visuals
Story
Visual
Stories
Content
Wanted
Invisible
Make
Tried
Rest
Style

More quotes by Adrian Tomine

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A lot of the kinship that people notice is not coincidental. I was very impressionable and trying to find my role models when I was twelve or thirteen.
Adrian Tomine
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I think there's a lot of evolution that's happened in intangible ways, in terms of how I think about the work or how I plan it out.
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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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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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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For me, as much about being a parent as it is about being a child.
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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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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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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I do think it's getting more and more rare in this country to raise a kid with the attitude that creativity is something valuable. The idea of trying to make the effort to produce something, to put something out into the world, rather than just taking in all the stuff the world's putting out at you.
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 never go home and take out those business cards and go to those websites. But if there was a mini-comic here in my hand, I'd read it while I ate my lunch. I'm also probably one of the few remaining holdouts who hasn't consented to making the e-book versions of all my work, which is annoying to some of my publishers.
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.
Adrian Tomine
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If something's a little weird, it's Kafkaesque.
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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There are some people who may not like precision in their art. They may like it to be grittier and more gestural, more of a direct expression in the way that a painter would put his strokes on canvas.
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 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 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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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