A Quote by Adrian Tomine
Just in terms of being able to be a professional artist, but also it's nice to not have to dread introductions. "What you do for a living?" It used to be easier just to tell people that I was a magazine illustrator than try to explain that I did comics, but not the kind of comics that they were used to, and no, it's not pornography, etc. And now people even of our parents' generation are familiar with the term "graphic novel," which is kind of amazing.
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In early comics, you see the amazing awkwardness and bizarre reasoning in the storyline, and it's because comics hadn't really been invented yet. There was no format for them to follow. They were just making it up. So I try to incorporate that kind of awkwardness in my comics quite frequently, which is odd. In some ways, I can't be as awkward as I'd like. But I do think that's one way in which my comics are unusual, because I will try to make the artwork look bad, occasionally.
The graphic novel? I love comics and so, yes. I don't think we talked about that. We weren't influenced necessarily by graphic novels but we certainly, once the screenplay was done, we talked about the idea that you could continue, you could tell back story, you could do things in sort of a graphic novel world just because we kind of like that world.
Just looking at pictures used to be considered cheating. No longer. The graphic novel is booming. Comics, heavily illustrated texts, books with no words are now accepted as reading.
'Just looking at pictures' used to be considered cheating. No longer. The graphic novel is booming. Comics, heavily illustrated texts, books with no words are now accepted as reading.
I hate this word 'graphic novel.' It is a term publishing houses have created for the bourgeois so they wouldn't be ashamed of buying comics... I'm not a graphic novelist. I am a cartoonist and I make comics and I am very happy about it.
I used to publish these stories in 32-page comics, and I would either do short stories or break the long ones up into chunks so there would be some variety inside the comic. But since then, people have been doing more and more long, standalone works, and the term 'graphic novel' has sort of become the codified term now.
I don't like 'graphic novel.' It's a word that publishers created for the bourgeois to read comics without feeling bad. Comics is just a way of narrating - it's just a media type.
I like collecting comics, I like buying comics, I like looking at comics, but I also read comics on digital readers, so any way people read comics is fine with me. Digital is just helping people who might not necessarily have access to comics help them; that's great.
There are a lot of good comics, no doubt, but as far as the quality of the comics goes, I think what you have is a bunch of situational comics - there are black comics that work only black crowds, gay comics that do only gay crowds, and southern comics that only work down South, and so on with Asian, Latino, Indian, midgets, etc. The previous generation's comics were better because they had to make everybody laugh.
I quit comics because I got completely sick of it. I was drawing comics all the time and didn't have the time or energy to do anything else. That got to me in the end. I never made enough money from comics to be able to take a break and do something else. Now I just can't stand comics. . . . I wish my work would be recognized by a larger crowd of people as more art than be stuck with the cartoonist label for the rest of my life.
Over the last ten years, breaking into comics has changed so much. There used to be specific ways about how to do it ... and now, just like there are so many different ways people are getting exposed to comics, there's no single way that people are breaking in anymore.
When I started out in the eighties, the idea of creating serious comics for adults was pretty laughable to most folks, and for the longest time it was hard to even explain what alternative comics or graphic novels were. Nobody seemed to understand or care. Not so, any longer.
I just continue to be kind of disappointed that people don't realize that and try and diversify the kind of work they are doing in comics.
I was going to be a storybook illustrator or an editorial illustrator. I ended up in a comics class by mistake because all the others were full, so I was like 'I'll stay for one class, and then I'll go take something else, because I don't care about comics.' I got pulled in really fast; I discovered I had a voice in comics that I didn't know I had.
Some people who come from high levels in other backgrounds where they're used to being the best or used to being on a kind of pedestal, it's hard to kind of lower yourself again and just be one of the grunts. I kind of enjoyed that challenge in MMA.
As each generation comes up that doesn't have the habits for paper it's just easier and cheaper to get your stuff online. You know, people go to what they're used to. Certainly our generation, you know, we'll always want to have a magazine in our hands. We like that, but millennials didn't see the value in that necessarily.
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