The Long and the Short of Adrian Tomine

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on June 5, 2007 Sign up now!

by Douglas Wolk, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 6/5/2007

Adrian Tomine launched his Optic Nerve series as a self-published minicomic in 1991. Sixteen years later it's a full-fledged comic book series and still running. Tomine has become a star of the illustration world and a cartoonist whose stories of emotionally numbed young Californians have attracted a devoted following. Tomine's first long-form graphic novel, Shortcomings, due this fall from Drawn & Quarterly, was serialized in Optic Nerve from 2004 to 2007. It's a telegraphic but emotionally brutal story about a young man named Ben Tanaka, whose love life is wrecked by a combination of bad choices, racism and his own self-loathing snobbery. In an e-mail interview with PWCW, Tomine discussed the new book, his idea of bad art and his relationship with his audience.

PW Comics Week: Shortcomings took you four or five years to complete, but it's incredibly consistent visually and stylistically. Did the story or your plans for it change at all between Optic Nerve #9 and #11?

Adrian Tomine: To a degree. Before I embarked on this project, I talked to some of the more experienced cartoonists I know, and I kept hearing the advice that I should leave some room for improvisation or invention, even if it's just a little bit of room. I think if I had written the entire story beforehand and then had to spend five years drawing it precisely as I'd written it, I would've gone insane. So what I did was plan out a rough outline, which was mostly just a sketchbook full of notes to myself. I had a basic idea of what I wanted to do, but then pretty much worked on each issue individually. Some of my best ideas popped up spontaneously as I was sketching out a scene, so I can definitely vouch for the idea of trying to "write" comics in comics form (as opposed to separating the writing and drawing into distinct stages).

PWCW: Did you consciously try to keep your visual style the same for the whole story?

AT: Yes, and it wasn't easy. For whatever reason, I have difficulty keeping my characters looking the same over the course of a story. I don't know what this says about me psychologically, but no matter how consciously I try to combat it, the characters just mutate as the story progresses. And I noticed this problem even when I was doing little five-page stories, so you can imagine what it was like working with the same set of characters over the course of several years. I had a few tricks to try to combat this, like drawing the first couple pages of each chapter last. There's also a lot of correcting that I do before the artwork is finally printed.

PWCW: All three chapters of Shortcomings start with Ben Tanaka looking at bad art of one kind or another, and each example has its own kind of badness: a sentimental movie, vulgar and stupid performance art, photos that are prefab clichés. How much of the construction of the story had to do with trying to steer it away from things you wanted to avoid?

AT: Quite a bit. I think as a consumer of media—be it movies, books, comics or whatever—I'm constantly making mental notes of things that worked and things that should be avoided.

PWCW: What sort of ideas or strategies in other people's art do you find yourself particularly drawn to, or so repulsed by that you actively push back against them in your own work?

AT: In terms of what I was avoiding, I think at least some of the answer can be found pretty explicitly in the sections of the story you refer to. Basically, I wanted to try my best to not alter the style or tone that I've applied to other stories simply because I was shifting (or expanding) my subject matter a bit. I think there's a certain audience that wants so-called "political art" to basically reaffirm their pre-existing beliefs, but that wasn't a tack that really appealed to me.

PWCW: You printed a range of responses to Shortcomings in the most recent issue of Optic Nerve, addressing the formal aspects of the story, but also responding to the characters and their actions, as well as your role in creating them. What do you think about the kinds of responses you've gotten to the story?

AT: Over the years, I've gotten accustomed to extremely polarized reactions to my work, ranging from the brutally critical to the overly kind. But I think a lot of readers are engaging with this story in a different way than before, and I'm happy about that. In the past, I feel like the response, either positive or negative, was directed very squarely toward me. People's comments were often very personal, and there was frequently a sense that my comics were something of an implicit collaboration with the audience. And now I think I've managed to remove myself from the equation to a degree, and people are reacting to the fictional world of the story more than me as the creator. In particular, I feel like how someone reacts to this book hinges quite a bit on how they feel about the character of Ben Tanaka. And while I'm disappointed if someone hates the book because they hate the character, I also feel somewhat gratified.

PWCW: Do you have other comics stuff in the works?

AT: Now that I finally have some time to do illustration work, I'm enjoying that for the moment. After working on one story for so long, it's a nice antidote to sit down with an assignment in the morning and be done with it that night. In terms of comics, I'm working on my contribution to the next issue of the anthology Kramers Ergot, and that's a lot of fun, too, because it's a short story, it's in color, and it's going to be printed really, really big. I have several other comics projects percolating, but I'm still waiting to decide what I'm going to dive into next.