GROWING
PAINS
In his new graphic novel, Park Slope-based cartoonist Adrian Tomine contemplates
the twisting changes of life and work.
Story by CRAIG HUBERT
Adrian Tomine had a problem. The artist, known for his
popular graphic novels and illustrations for The New
Yorker, needed to figure out a new way of working for
his next book. The last one, 2015’s “Killing and Dying,”
while one of the most well received books of his career,
had taken a long time to finish. It was a book that he
started after moving to Park Slope in 2004. In the process
of completion, he got married and had children. The
freedom he had to focus on his work, along with the methodical,
time-consuming methods of drawing he had
developed over a number of years, had been interrupted
by more pressing matters: familial responsibilities.
“It definitely was a grueling setup I found myself in and
I was happy to move away from that as soon as that book
was finished,” Tomine said. So when beginning “The
Loneliness of a Long-Distance Cartoonist,” his latest
graphic novel, he needed to find a way of working in
harmony with his new life.
“There was a very conscious attempt to almost trick
myself into working in the way that I had worked in the
early days,” Tomine said. “Some of it was a complicated
mental trick of blocking out thoughts of a readership, or
critics, anything like that. And some of it was as simple
as getting rid of any extensive or fancy or delicate tools.
I found that just using cheap paper and pens, things that
if they broke I could throw away and get another one
easily, really freed me up. The new book is an intentional
regression, in a way.”
Despite the difference in approach, readers of Tomine’s
previous work - including his comic Optic Nerve, which
he started publishing in 1991 at the age of 17, and the
graphic novels “Sleepwalk,” “Summer Blonde,” “Shortcomings,”
“Scenes From an Impending Marriage,” and
“Killing and Dying” - will quickly find a familiar vision.
Few working in any medium are able to combine the
same level of self-effacement and tender emotion. Loneliness
takes this to greater extremes, his pen trained to a
series of moments throughout his life that, together, tell
the story of an artist coming to terms with his profession
and the strange twists of modern life.
Has the way you make your work changed over time?
It’s been a crooked path to get to the point I’m at now.
The earliest comics of mine that are in print were done
when I was a teenager, and they were done with a completely
unselfconscious approach. I wasn’t thinking of
an audience in any way. Over the years, when I started
working in a more professional capacity and having my
work distributed more widely, I certainly got more self
conscious, more perfectionistic, and very focused on how
the work would be received. So I think that really started
to slow me down. In “Shortcomings,” I was doing about
a page a week, going out and taking reference photos for
the backgrounds, doing layers of pencils on tracing paper
and then tracing it back before inking it. I don’t think all
that work even shows up. Nobody ever says, “Oh, that’s
the book you spent a lot of time on.”
Is each book created as a response to what came before?
It’s always a bit reactionary to what I did just before, in
terms of content and style. But also “Killing and Dying,”
and definitely this new book, are influenced by the
practical matters of my life—having kids, how much
time I’m going to have to work, what level of interruption
I’m going to have to expect. Most of “Killing and
Dying” was made just as my kids were being born, and
it was tough. It was a hard book for me to get done, but
at least it was short stories. So I felt like, “I just need to
get through these eight pages and then this chunk will
be done and I can move on to something else.” With this
new one, I knew I wanted to do one complete book, but I
wanted to have a style where I could get a page done in a
day and work with distractions. Basically, I was freer to
be a parent.
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