My early comics are really reflective of being kind of a befuddled, single loser in the Bay Area, and I think having kids has been by far the most profound impact on me as a person and as an artist. – Adrian Tomine
The basic work schedule for me is whenever I’m not doing anything more important, like taking care of my kids or something. So, it’s most of the day, five days a week, most evenings and sometimes on the weekends. – Adrian Tomine
To me, one of the big fears of doing a big huge graphic novel is locking yourself into one style and getting halfway through it and going, ‘Oh I made the wrong choice,’ which is a recurring nightmare I have. – Adrian Tomine
I wanted to be as invisible as possible as an artist. I wanted to differentiate between myself and who I’m writing about. – Adrian Tomine
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. – Adrian Tomine
I would honestly be elated if I could wave a magic wand and eradicate my back catalog and then have a fresh crack at some of those ideas. – Adrian Tomine
There’s never been a moment where I sat down at my drawing board and thought, ‘I’m a pro!’ – Adrian Tomine
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. – Adrian Tomine
‘Drawn & Quarterly’ has always given me complete editorial control over my books and comics, so any decision about what to include or exclude from the book was my own. – Adrian Tomine
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. – Adrian Tomine
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. – Adrian Tomine
For a long time, I was very resistant to the idea of online publication or even e-books or something like that. – Adrian Tomine
A lot of the qualities in ‘Killing and Dying’ is sort of a response to work I’d done previously. I wanted to push myself in some different directions. – Adrian Tomine
My responsibility is to present things in a way that is realistic and true to the multifaceted world I’ve known… This is how I think the world is, not how it should be. – Adrian Tomine
I was just taking my sketchbook to Kinko’s and making photocopies and hand-assembling them – folding them over and stapling them. – Adrian Tomine
When I started publishing my work, one of the biggest surprises to me was the recurring question about my background and why I wasn’t doing more stories about Asian-Americans. – Adrian Tomine
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. – Adrian Tomine
In general, daily strips were just a regular part of my childhood. So even if I wasn’t a huge fan of most of those strips, I still read them religiously every morning while I ate my cereal. – Adrian Tomine
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. – Adrian Tomine