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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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Adrian Tomine
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: May 31
Cartoonist
Comics Artist
Illustrator
Novelist
Sacramento
California
Young
Liked
Writing
Cool
Trying
Caught
Work
Guy
Kind
Idea
Really
Culture
Time
Part
Stretch
People
Certain
Area

More quotes by 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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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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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 wanted it to be as readable as possible. I had the ambition of reaching a broader audience.
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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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 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'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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It's important to make a distinction between becoming more precise and becoming better.
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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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
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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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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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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 started publishing my comic while I was still living with my parents.
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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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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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 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'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