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famous, richest cartoonist of all time. To the end, he
seemed like a lonely guy. I think that’s sort of a chicken
and the egg thing: It requires that sort of personality
to do the work of a cartoonist but doing that work only
reinforces that emotion.
And doing that work also requires forced sociability—book
tours, conversations like the one we’re having right now.
If I were born 20 years earlier I probably wouldn’t have
had a career as a cartoonist. I probably would have had a
job and drawn comics in pure isolation. No book tours,
no interviews. No photos taken or anything like that.
Now, the upside is that I get to make a living doing this;
I get to live in an expensive city. There are aspects of it
The cover of Tomine’s
latest book, published
by Drawn & Quarterly
in 2020.
that you can’t avoid. You have to promote a book when
it comes out, and if your books sell the right amount
you’re inevitably going to have to field phone calls from
people about the rights to adapting it. I guess you could
cut that off if you wanted too, but if you’re a father who’s
struggling to support his kids in Brooklyn, you have to
take those calls and take those meetings. There’s a lot
of face-to-face stuff involved in being a cartoonist that
never existed before.
Now that this book is coming out, do you have any idea
what the next thing will be?
Something where I don’t have to draw myself over and
over again. I got that out of my system for the time being.