Adrian Tomine’s “Fall Sweep.” The Drawn and Quarterly artist discusses walking for inspiration and working collaboratively.
You’ve spent the past few years working on film adaptations of your stories. How did the experience compare with being a cartoonist alone with his drawing table?
It’s a lot less lonely! I’ve basically been working from home, by myself, since I was a kid; I really had no sense of what it was like to have co-workers or collaborators. But, to my total surprise, I’m really enjoying it. It can be terrifying and maddening, but I think that, overall, it’s been good for me to step outside my comfort zone and try something different. I did a cover about the movies a few years ago, called “Fourth Wall,” and now I’m having the experience of being on the other side of that window, which is sometimes hard to wrap my head around. But I should say that it also makes me appreciate the speed, efficiency, and economy of drawing. I submitted a rough version of this image only weeks ago and now it’s on the cover of the magazine, and that’s also pretty incredible.
Adrian Tomine was born in 1974 in Sacramento, California. He began self-publishing his comic book series Optic Nerve when he was sixteen, and in 1994 he received an offer to publish from Drawn & Quarterly. His comics have been anthologized in publications such as McSweeney’s, Best American Comics, and Best American Nonrequired Reading, and his graphic novel Shortcomings was a New York Times Notable Book of the year. Since 1999, Tomine has been a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughters.