Quote

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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Adrian Tomine
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: May 31
Cartoonist
Comics Artist
Illustrator
Novelist
Sacramento
California
Trying
Musician
Cartoonist
Work
Skills
Applause
Would
Actor
Pursued
Think
Instead
Feedback
Thinking
Hear
Solitary
World
Sure
Connect
Order
Instant
Performative
Kids
Lonely
Cartoonists

More quotes by 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 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 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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It's psychologically a weird experience to be so aware of the fact that the real time of your life is moving much faster than the fictional time you're trying to depict. You start to feel very weighted down sometimes.
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
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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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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 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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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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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 think it's harder for each generation. Even I just feel completely separate from teenagers today who have access to the Internet. And I'm amazed that this interest in video games has never gone away. It just keeps growing.
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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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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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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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 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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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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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 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