For almost 30 years, graphic novelist Adrian Tomine has created some of the most beautiful graphic art work you will ever see, including his covers for The New Yorker.
Tomine started his career when was only 16 years old.
In 2021, Tomine joined WPR’s “BETA” to talk about his graphic memoir, “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist.“
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As best-selling, award-winning author Zadie Smith has written about his work: “Adrian Tomine can draw, think, write and feel. He sees everything, he knows everything; he’s in your apartment, he’s on the subway, he’s in your dreams … He has more ideas in twenty panels than novelists have in a lifetime.”
Tomine’s latest book is “Q&A.” As the title indicates, Tomine is answering the many questions that his devoted fans have asked him about his working methods over the years.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Adrian Tomine: The book came about as a result of the evolving nature of my profession, which is that I started out publishing my work in comic book format, like a serialized publication.
And that opened up a very lively line of communication with the readership I published — an address, a P.O. box. And people would write to me there, and I would print letters in the comic and I would respond to them directly sometimes.
And then as the the nature of publishing comics in North America evolved and moved more towards this graphic novel book format, that was one of the casualties of it.
The letters column from comic books, at least the kind of work that I do, it sort of disappeared. And I was sort of missing that and realizing what a profound impact that relationship I had with an audience had on me as a person and as an artist and on the work.
And so that was the germ of the idea of how to structure a book that would be nonfiction, personal essays, advice about the craft of being a cartoonist and a screenwriter and an illustrator, but to also make sure that I focused on things that people cared about, not just what interested me.
Doug Gordon: Let’s talk a bit about your tools of the trade, specifically pens. What kind of pens do you use for sketches?
AT: That is a very frequently asked question. And what I always say is that I’m happy to answer it. And in the book, I’m happy to even show photos and go into detail about the tools that I use. But I hope no one takes it as this right answer. These are the tools that are the best for me.
It was a long process to break myself of that sense that what other artists use was the right way and that everything else was wrong. And I think it’s very important for people to find what works best for them.
Having said that, the tools that I use most now that I describe in the book are a dip pen from Japan made by a company called Tachikawa. And that’s a very old-fashioned kind of pen. And I also use a brush a lot, which again is sort of hard to comprehend for people who’ve grown up in the digital age. But I do use a sable hairbrush. It’s actually made for watercolor, but I use it for inking. And if you look at the covers that I do for The New Yorker, most of that is drawn with a brush.
DG: You adapted your graphic novel, “Shortcomings,” into a screenplay for the major motion picture of the same name. What was that experience like?
AT: That was surprising. I think that that’s the main word. Every aspect of it was surprising. And most surprising was how much I enjoyed it. I went into the process with a sense of skepticism, almost hoping that it would go so badly that it would confirm the way I lived and worked for the previous 30 years, which is sitting at a desk working alone in a bedroom.
And to my great surprise, I really enjoyed the writing process. Working on the screenplay was really fun and invigorating to me. And then the whole process beyond that — the production and post-production and the promotion, and even when there were aspects of it that were frustrating or infuriating or not going the way I wanted — I still had this strange sense of gratitude to be having those experiences because I’d grown up such an obsessive movie fan.
To really be a part of that process, every little element of it, no matter how insignificant to the greater project, I felt like, “My God, I can’t believe I’m going and getting gummy bears from a craft services truck,” or something like that. It was very, very exciting for me. And I really loved the people that I got to work with and just enjoyed every minute of getting to know them.
