I'm not the kind of person who would throw himself into some exciting or dangerous situation just to get material. So I tend to go about my normal, boring life and just try to look at things a little more closely.
— Adrian Tomine
I think that artists, at a certain point, can either become defiant and say that the audience is wrong, readers don't get them, and they're going to keep doing it their own way, or they can listen to the criticism - and not necessarily blindly follow the audience's requests and advice.
The most impactful comics that I've read are the ones where the artists swung for the bleachers and tried to immerse you in their world.
I'm sometimes a cartoonist, and there's an audience for that, and I'm sometimes an illustrator, and there's an audience for that.
Ninety percent of the time when I'm working, there's this very palpable sensation that I'm doing everything wrong and should just give up.
When I first started drawing the earliest incarnation of 'Optic Nerve,' I hadn't even been on a date; I hadn't had a romantic relationship of any kind yet, so in a way, I was almost writing science fiction.
It's a strange thing to be a so-called alternative cartoonist, because in the early part of my career, I was really tethered to the superhero world.
I don't pick up my work at all. If it's something that's still in progress and I have the chance to make some edits on the material or think about the order, little things like that, I'll keep those stories at hand and go through them. But once it exists as the book, it's locked away in a vault, and I kind of put it behind me.
Most of my work - including everything from my own comics to the covers I've drawn for 'The New Yorker' - is the result of taking some personal experience or observation and then fictionalizing it to a degree.
I've always published a range of responses to my work in the letters section of my comic book.
For a lot of the time I was in Berkeley, I was single. I was living in a kind of collegiate apartment by myself - it was like a protracted summer vacation. So at least in hindsight, I have gloomy emotions attached to Berkeley, whereas I started coming to New York because I was dating someone, and it was very exciting and romantic.
I think the response I get to one 'New Yorker' cover outweighs five books that I publish.
There's never been a moment where I sat down at my drawing board and thought, 'I'm a pro!'
I'm not the best person to analyze any kind of evolution in my work, but I do feel like it's been an ongoing struggle to basically teach myself how to tell the kinds of stories that interest me in comics form.
Readers often bring a different set of criteria to the work based on the format.
When I started creating my work for publication, I just assumed that the focus would be on the work itself and that there wouldn't be a lot of interest in who was creating the work.
I was just taking my sketchbook to Kinko's and making photocopies and hand-assembling them - folding them over and stapling them.
The art editor in charge of the covers at the 'New Yorker' is Francoise Mouly. She's very familiar with the eccentricities and personalities of cartoonists, so working with her is very easy.
The comics work is very slow, and it basically involves working for sometimes years in isolation and not knowing how the work is going to be received.
I've always liked the tradition of publishing work serially in the comic-book 'pamphlet' format and then collecting that work in book form, so I've just stuck with it.
It's absolutely chilling to think that I've been working on a comic-book series called 'Optic Nerve' since I was sixteen.
I had relatives who would go to Japan and bring back random stuff they bought at the airport or whatever - 'Ultraman' and 'Speed Racer,' stuff like that.
