Adrian Tomine is most famous for his semi-autobiographical comic book which is put out by Drawn & Quarterly. But over the years he has done a lot of commercial work such as portraits and magazines strips and also the movie poster for Bob Odenkirks directorial debut Melvin Goes to Dinner.
Recently Tomine released Scrapbook: Uncollected Work 1990-2004 which collects a good chunk of that commercial work.
Check out Drawn & Quarterlys website for Adrian Tomine
Daniel Robert Epstein: Whose idea was it to do the scrapbook?
Adrian Tomine: Well for many years my publisher, Chris Oliveros, was trying to get me to do something with all the strips I did for Pulse Magazine that ended up at the beginning of the scrapbook. He was thinking wed do a booklet of them or maybe a special issue of Optic Nerve but by that point I was feeling a little reticent about releasing those to the world again. It felt like really old work to me. Then at some point I thought that if I publish in the midst of a whole bunch of other stuff it would remove the emphasis from them a little bit. That was sort of my purpose, to put together a bunch of stuff that I wasnt too focused on right now and have the cumulative effect of it being an entertaining book.
DRE: What was Pulse Magazine?
AT: It was a free magazine that Tower Records put out for many years. It was like a promotional thing in disguise with a lot of reviews and things like that. It was a good way to get customers to pick up a giant stack of advertising and learn about new records hopefully. The offices were in the same town I was living in as a teenager so the editor just stumbled upon my very early mini-comics work at a local comic shop and looked me up in the phonebook.
DRE: It seems like they gave you a lot of freedom.
AT: They really did. The editor that contacted me was named Marc Weidenbaum and he kind of spoiled me as far as freelance work goes for the rest of my life. I was 17 and my first job for a magazine was basically do a comic strip once a month, make sure it sort of relates to movies and music and they would give me freedom. Its been all downhill from there in terms of how much freedom I get from commercial work.
DRE: I think the stuff in the scrapbook is pretty good but what do you think when you look at your older work?
AT: I dont like to look at it. Putting together the whole book was an arduous experience because no one handled the production work for me. I basically created and laid out the whole book. It sort of necessitated a reviewing and revisiting of my past which is rarely fun for an artist. The best I can say is that some of the stuff in there is so old that I almost feel detached from it now. Maybe five years ago I would have been cringing at some of those things and now I just feel its cute stuff that a really young and enthusiastic artist did.
DRE: Enthusiasm is not exactly the word I would use for your work in general. Thats a compliment I swear.
What elements of this work made its way into Optic Nerve?
AT: A lot of things. There were a couple of pages in there I intended for Optic Nerve then I cast them out because I wasnt happy with the direction they were going in. You can see that one of them is the original first page of what would become Optic Nerve #6 a story called Hawaiian Getaway. There is another aborted story that sort of mutated into a story that was published in Optic Nerve #4 called Six Day Cold. The plot changed but the characters kind of looked the same and there were some similar thematic elements as well. There was a fair amount of recycling because I mistakenly thought that people who read the strips in Pulse were not the same people who read Optic Nerve once it started getting published by Drawn & Quarterly. For example the first story I did for Drawn & Quarterly was called Sleepwalk and then there is an ongoing strip I did for Pulse with the same title. Completely different stories but I just reused the title.
DRE: There is story in the scrapbook about when you interviewed Gedde Watanabe [Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles]. What did you do that for?
AT: It was for Giant Robot.
DRE: Did the interview come out good?
AT: The interview came out really good. Not so much because of my ability but because of the interview abilities of my friend Claudine Ko who is an editor at Jane Magazine. Shes very experienced so she took the lead and I chimed in here and there. Then I used that as an inspiration for the comic strip.
DRE: Are you of Asian descent?
AT: Yes both of my parents are Asian which Im sure is fascinating information for SuicideGirls [laughs].
DRE: Do you meet women that know of your work?
AT: I tried that for a little while. There was a period when my comics started to get widely read that I thought it would be a smart thing to do but I soon realized it was not such a great idea.
DRE: Why is that?
AT: Lets just say that I dont think that is a healthy way to begin a serious relationship. It has kind of a pseudo celebrity/fan dynamic which is kind of creepy.
DRE: Thats how Joe Matt meets his girlfriends.
AT: At the stage he is at his life hes just taking any chance he can get.
DRE: What is your favorite piece that appeared in the scrapbook?
AT: I guess you can correlate my appreciation for the work with how current it is. So the older it is the less I like it. The stuff that appeals to me the most are the more recent illustrations for The New Yorker and some of the sketchbook stuff at the end of the book.
DRE: When did you first meet Bob Odenkirk?
AT: I first met him many years ago when a bunch of Drawn & Quarterly cartoonists including myself did a signing at a comic book store in Los Angeles called Meltdown. Afterwards we had a party over at someones house and both Bob and David Cross were at the party.
DRE: Were you a fan of theirs?
AT: Yes I was a fan of Mr. Show so its always exciting when I bump into those guys. Then when I started doing the poster for Melvin Goes to Dinner with Bob we were already corresponding a lot.
DRE: What kind of input did you have into the poster?
AT: I was actually in LA at the time so he showed me some raw footage of the film then sent me a bunch of still photos. He had a basic premise of what he wanted in the poster with the people sitting around at a table. That was the only instruction he gave me then I designed the whole poster including the layout of the text.
DRE: Do you do much commercial work?
AT: I do something for The New Yorker at least once a month. Before I had anything like that I would never know where my next paycheck was coming from so a lot of times I would end up taking a job that wasnt that appealing to me. But now that Ive got this consistent situation with The New Yorker Im a lot more selective.
DRE: Where do you live now?
AT: Im splitting my time between Berkeley California and Brooklyn [New York City].
DRE: Why is that?
AT: Mainly because my girlfriend lives in Brooklyn with a job that necessitates her living here. Then Im sort of the one who is more portable in terms of my work.
DRE: It seems like the work you do thats not strictly autobiographical can often seem more autobiographical.
AT: Thats a pretty good assessment. If youre someone like Joe Matt, who in my mind is one of the best autobiographical cartoonists ever because he really has shed his inhibitions and almost takes delight in showing his worst qualities and almost daring his readership to hate him. I think when I was starting out I was much more vain than that so I was trying to do these autobiographical stories but I would get impeded by how I would come off to the public. As a result I ended up telling these very bland generic nothing stories where Im a likeable schmuck or something. At a certain point I realized I couldnt keep doing this stuff forever because I want to address some more interesting aspects of my personality. Once I started doing thinly veiled autobiography I was able to open up a lot. Its almost like a conceit where I give my character a different name or give them a different appearance but even that is enough for me to allow myself to get into personal stuff.
DRE: Do you ever see yourself doing long form stuff?
AT: Im in the middle of the longest story Ive ever done. It started with Optic Nerve #9 and its going to continue for the next two issues. In terms of content its a very autobiographical story.
DRE: What made you decide to do a longer story?
AT: Its been a slow build in my self-confidence and ambition to do it. I literally started off doing one page strips and slowly graduated to short stories then my last book, Summer Blonde, was four longer stories with each one being the length of an entire comic. It just seemed like the natural progression. Its a challenge for me to write something longer but now I feel more comfortable doing them. For most people writing a 150 page story may not be that hard especially in this era of things like Blankets but for me it is. Im having a fun and tortuous time working on this story.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Recently Tomine released Scrapbook: Uncollected Work 1990-2004 which collects a good chunk of that commercial work.
Check out Drawn & Quarterlys website for Adrian Tomine
Daniel Robert Epstein: Whose idea was it to do the scrapbook?
Adrian Tomine: Well for many years my publisher, Chris Oliveros, was trying to get me to do something with all the strips I did for Pulse Magazine that ended up at the beginning of the scrapbook. He was thinking wed do a booklet of them or maybe a special issue of Optic Nerve but by that point I was feeling a little reticent about releasing those to the world again. It felt like really old work to me. Then at some point I thought that if I publish in the midst of a whole bunch of other stuff it would remove the emphasis from them a little bit. That was sort of my purpose, to put together a bunch of stuff that I wasnt too focused on right now and have the cumulative effect of it being an entertaining book.
DRE: What was Pulse Magazine?
AT: It was a free magazine that Tower Records put out for many years. It was like a promotional thing in disguise with a lot of reviews and things like that. It was a good way to get customers to pick up a giant stack of advertising and learn about new records hopefully. The offices were in the same town I was living in as a teenager so the editor just stumbled upon my very early mini-comics work at a local comic shop and looked me up in the phonebook.
DRE: It seems like they gave you a lot of freedom.
AT: They really did. The editor that contacted me was named Marc Weidenbaum and he kind of spoiled me as far as freelance work goes for the rest of my life. I was 17 and my first job for a magazine was basically do a comic strip once a month, make sure it sort of relates to movies and music and they would give me freedom. Its been all downhill from there in terms of how much freedom I get from commercial work.
DRE: I think the stuff in the scrapbook is pretty good but what do you think when you look at your older work?
AT: I dont like to look at it. Putting together the whole book was an arduous experience because no one handled the production work for me. I basically created and laid out the whole book. It sort of necessitated a reviewing and revisiting of my past which is rarely fun for an artist. The best I can say is that some of the stuff in there is so old that I almost feel detached from it now. Maybe five years ago I would have been cringing at some of those things and now I just feel its cute stuff that a really young and enthusiastic artist did.
DRE: Enthusiasm is not exactly the word I would use for your work in general. Thats a compliment I swear.
What elements of this work made its way into Optic Nerve?
AT: A lot of things. There were a couple of pages in there I intended for Optic Nerve then I cast them out because I wasnt happy with the direction they were going in. You can see that one of them is the original first page of what would become Optic Nerve #6 a story called Hawaiian Getaway. There is another aborted story that sort of mutated into a story that was published in Optic Nerve #4 called Six Day Cold. The plot changed but the characters kind of looked the same and there were some similar thematic elements as well. There was a fair amount of recycling because I mistakenly thought that people who read the strips in Pulse were not the same people who read Optic Nerve once it started getting published by Drawn & Quarterly. For example the first story I did for Drawn & Quarterly was called Sleepwalk and then there is an ongoing strip I did for Pulse with the same title. Completely different stories but I just reused the title.
DRE: There is story in the scrapbook about when you interviewed Gedde Watanabe [Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles]. What did you do that for?
AT: It was for Giant Robot.
DRE: Did the interview come out good?
AT: The interview came out really good. Not so much because of my ability but because of the interview abilities of my friend Claudine Ko who is an editor at Jane Magazine. Shes very experienced so she took the lead and I chimed in here and there. Then I used that as an inspiration for the comic strip.
DRE: Are you of Asian descent?
AT: Yes both of my parents are Asian which Im sure is fascinating information for SuicideGirls [laughs].
DRE: Do you meet women that know of your work?
AT: I tried that for a little while. There was a period when my comics started to get widely read that I thought it would be a smart thing to do but I soon realized it was not such a great idea.
DRE: Why is that?
AT: Lets just say that I dont think that is a healthy way to begin a serious relationship. It has kind of a pseudo celebrity/fan dynamic which is kind of creepy.
DRE: Thats how Joe Matt meets his girlfriends.
AT: At the stage he is at his life hes just taking any chance he can get.
DRE: What is your favorite piece that appeared in the scrapbook?
AT: I guess you can correlate my appreciation for the work with how current it is. So the older it is the less I like it. The stuff that appeals to me the most are the more recent illustrations for The New Yorker and some of the sketchbook stuff at the end of the book.
DRE: When did you first meet Bob Odenkirk?
AT: I first met him many years ago when a bunch of Drawn & Quarterly cartoonists including myself did a signing at a comic book store in Los Angeles called Meltdown. Afterwards we had a party over at someones house and both Bob and David Cross were at the party.
DRE: Were you a fan of theirs?
AT: Yes I was a fan of Mr. Show so its always exciting when I bump into those guys. Then when I started doing the poster for Melvin Goes to Dinner with Bob we were already corresponding a lot.
DRE: What kind of input did you have into the poster?
AT: I was actually in LA at the time so he showed me some raw footage of the film then sent me a bunch of still photos. He had a basic premise of what he wanted in the poster with the people sitting around at a table. That was the only instruction he gave me then I designed the whole poster including the layout of the text.
DRE: Do you do much commercial work?
AT: I do something for The New Yorker at least once a month. Before I had anything like that I would never know where my next paycheck was coming from so a lot of times I would end up taking a job that wasnt that appealing to me. But now that Ive got this consistent situation with The New Yorker Im a lot more selective.
DRE: Where do you live now?
AT: Im splitting my time between Berkeley California and Brooklyn [New York City].
DRE: Why is that?
AT: Mainly because my girlfriend lives in Brooklyn with a job that necessitates her living here. Then Im sort of the one who is more portable in terms of my work.
DRE: It seems like the work you do thats not strictly autobiographical can often seem more autobiographical.
AT: Thats a pretty good assessment. If youre someone like Joe Matt, who in my mind is one of the best autobiographical cartoonists ever because he really has shed his inhibitions and almost takes delight in showing his worst qualities and almost daring his readership to hate him. I think when I was starting out I was much more vain than that so I was trying to do these autobiographical stories but I would get impeded by how I would come off to the public. As a result I ended up telling these very bland generic nothing stories where Im a likeable schmuck or something. At a certain point I realized I couldnt keep doing this stuff forever because I want to address some more interesting aspects of my personality. Once I started doing thinly veiled autobiography I was able to open up a lot. Its almost like a conceit where I give my character a different name or give them a different appearance but even that is enough for me to allow myself to get into personal stuff.
DRE: Do you ever see yourself doing long form stuff?
AT: Im in the middle of the longest story Ive ever done. It started with Optic Nerve #9 and its going to continue for the next two issues. In terms of content its a very autobiographical story.
DRE: What made you decide to do a longer story?
AT: Its been a slow build in my self-confidence and ambition to do it. I literally started off doing one page strips and slowly graduated to short stories then my last book, Summer Blonde, was four longer stories with each one being the length of an entire comic. It just seemed like the natural progression. Its a challenge for me to write something longer but now I feel more comfortable doing them. For most people writing a 150 page story may not be that hard especially in this era of things like Blankets but for me it is. Im having a fun and tortuous time working on this story.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 11 of 11 COMMENTS
black_tar_heroin:
its odd all of my optic nerve stuff ends up in the bathroom as well.
jena:
Scrapbook is lovely. ♥