Adrian Tomine: A Chat with the Comic Artist

I have passed comic artist Adrian Tomine more than once on the street in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where I drop and fetch my son from school. While I’d like to believe that I recognize him from his drawings and self-portraits — I first encountered his now-legendary serial comic, Optic Nerve, in the 1990s — it’s more likely from various talks I’ve seen him give over the years. No matter: I don’t bother him. I’ve never been one to fangirl and moreover — most crucially — I am all but certain that he wishes to be as left alone in his workaday thoughts, as I do in mine.

Tomine, it turns out, is an adept conversationalist — or at least his latest book, Q&A, suggests as much. Recently released by his longtime publisher, Drawn & Quarterly, the book is a chatty call-and-response between Tomine and his readership through a series of questions culled from an open call posted on social media by the publisher and the artist himself. The queries range from more complicated musings about process to “Do you ever do sketches for fans?”

Engaging with an artist’s work and knowing them as a person are two wildly different propositions, particularly in the era of parasocial relationships. As an artist whose characters’ emotional fugue states form worlds unto themselves, Tomine has maintained a career-long flirtation with autobiography in his widely published work (the New Yorker has featured his illustrations and covers since the late ’90s), making it easy for readers to feel a sense of false intimacy with an artist who works in a mostly solitary way. Previous publications — Scenes from an Impending Marriage: A Prenuptial Memoir (2011) and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, published in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic reached a fever pitch — suggested an even greater sense of personal largesse toward the reader. We definitely knew Adrian Tomine after reading these books.

Though one could predict otherwise, Q&A isn’t a confessional. As reflected in the spare design and pocket-sized form of the book itself, it’s an honest and anecdotal dialogue that reads as a tactical playbook at times despite its intimate tone. Unlike the how-to guides of art school days gone by, Q&A makes no promises whatsoever. Sure, one might gobble up Tomine’s list of beloved drawing supplies — outlined in the book alongside fetishistic photographs of each item — or attempt to adopt his idiosyncratic methodologies as one’s own. Tomine’s generosity is the opposite of self-aggrandizement: He simply hopes that his readers find their own way as artists.

Tomine has reached an inflection point in his work, whose form has expanded more recently to include film. Paris, 13th District (2021) adapted several of his short stories, and he wrote the screenplay for Shortcomings (2023), the interpretation of his eponymous 2007 graphic novel. Q&A follows this turn in his practice that could be simply described as social. The artist isn’t sitting alone behind his desk anymore.

The middle of a career — whether or not one is recognized by one’s peers within a particular field (or thimble, in the case of the art world) — presents a fork in the road, where we tend to either double down on deeply held professional grievances accrued over so many years or — and this is the direction Tomine is heading in, if Q&A is any indication — begin to fully realize a sense of self-awareness and common decency in how we treat others.

To be the bigger person is a battle that Tomine has seemingly been fighting all along: He has regularly answered his readers’ letters since the outset of his decades-long career. Q&A doesn’t posit a new form for his work but rather is a natural extension of something he just does. It is a gesture of acknowledgment and even gratitude, delivered from a safe distance by Tomine to his readership — people who don’t know him at all, but feel a sense of kinship nonetheless. I was surprised and delighted to find my own question about introducing kids to comics answered on page 141. Thank you, Adrian, from afar.

Q&A (2024) by Adrian Tomine is published by Drawn & Quarterly and is available online and through independent booksellers.