{"id":40621,"date":"2012-10-29T10:00:58","date_gmt":"2012-10-29T14:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=40621"},"modified":"2012-10-29T13:27:49","modified_gmt":"2012-10-29T17:27:49","slug":"urban-renewal-an-interview-with-adrian-tomine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/10\/29\/urban-renewal-an-interview-with-adrian-tomine\/","title":{"rendered":"Urban Renewal: An Interview with Adrian Tomine"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In \u201cMissed Connection,\u201d Adrian Tomine<\/a>\u2019s now-famous <\/em>New Yorker cover illustration, a boy and a girl spot each other through the windows of subway cars headed in opposite directions. They\u2019re both reading the same book\u2014potentially perfect for each other, they\u2019re destined not to meet. The image sums up what makes city life frustrating but also thrilling: the possibility of romance around every corner, the sense of isolation in a crowd, the higher-than-usual incidence of bookish hotties. Tomine began contributing crisp, colorful artwork to the magazine in 1999 and has continued to produce covers that often gently send up urban reading habits. The newly released <\/em>New York Drawings<\/a> collects the entirety of Tomine\u2019s <\/em>New Yorker work, along with his illustrations for other periodicals, book jackets, and album covers.<\/em><\/p>\n

But commercial illustration is only one part of Tomine\u2019s career. The thirty-eight-year-old artist began publishing comics as a teenager. His stories of young misfits and malcontents, serialized in his semiregular comic book, <\/em>Optic Nerve, have been collected in book form as <\/em>Sleepwalk and Other Stories<\/a>, <\/em>Summer Blonde<\/a>, and a full-length graphic novel, <\/em>Shortcomings<\/a>. His short, funny, loose autobiographical comic strips pop up throughout his books; last year\u2019s <\/em>Scenes from an Impending Marriage<\/a> narrated Tomine\u2019s wedding preparations in the style of classic newspaper funnies.<\/em><\/p>\n

A West Coast native, Tomine moved to Brooklyn eight years ago. We met one evening at a pastry shop near his home in Park Slope.<\/em><\/p>\n

It seems obvious that by now your <\/strong>New Yorker<\/strong><\/em> work has given you more visibility than your comics. How do you feel about that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It definitely reaches a broader audience. At this point there are a lot of people who know me through The New Yorker<\/em> and have no idea about the comics I do. I guess that shouldn\u2019t be surprising to me. I\u2019ve separated the two jobs in my mind quite a bit, and that\u2019s been useful. I\u2019m sometimes a cartoonist and there\u2019s an audience for that, and I\u2019m sometimes an illustrator and there\u2019s an audience for that.<\/p>\n

But there must be some relationship between the two.<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The art editor in charge of the covers at the New Yorker<\/em> is Fran\u00e7oise Mouly. She\u2019s very familiar with the eccentricities and personalities of cartoonists, so working with her is very easy. She knows how to criticize and cajole and encourage and praise a cartoonist in all the ways that will make him feel productive and comfortable. There are some illustrators she uses who are purely illustrators\u2014like, for the food issue, they\u2019ll have a nice painting by Wayne Thiebaud of a slice of cake. But I think she tends to gravitate toward cartoonists and narrative artists, and she holds them to a bit more of a storytelling standard. From the first cover I did for her, she was adamant that the image didn\u2019t have to contain a gag per se, but had to have something that could be read visually\u2014some suggestion of a story or message that could be gleaned from spending more than a second glancing at it. I don\u2019t know if she would have hired me if I were just a guy with my middling drawing ability.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

How many of your images of New York life are based on incidents that you\u2019ve actually seen?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Almost all of the images in the book have some root in observation. I arrived in New York in 2004, after living on the West Coast for thirty years. Anything I knew about New York was through a filter of movies or comic books or novels. Especially when I was first taking on these assignments, I was conscious of my lack of authority. Certain artists capture New York very well because they\u2019ve lived here their whole lives and can sit in their chairs and think back to some memory and put that down on paper. But I felt more like a reporter going out into the field and trying to capture what he sees. There are a few that were invented on a tight deadline, just in my studio, and I feel they have that fakeness you might see in a movie that\u2019s set in New York but was actually shot in Toronto. My default version of New York is far more artificial than when I actually go out and get the details right.<\/p>\n

Do you sense a different mood or tone to your New York work, as opposed to your <\/strong>Optic Nerve<\/strong><\/em> comics set in Northern California?<\/strong><\/p>\n

For a lot of the time I was in Berkeley I was single, I was living in a kind of collegiate apartment by myself\u2014it 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. Now we\u2019re married and I have a daughter who brings me great joy, so I think that really tips the scales. I associate New York with a lot more happiness in my personal life, and I\u2019m sure that plays a part in the artwork. If I had been dealt a different hand and my experience in New York was a real struggle, that would start to come through in the work, and I\u2019m not sure that\u2019s what The New Yorker<\/em> wants to put on its cover.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I feel like I can almost identify the book in the couple\u2019s hands on the \u201cMissed Connections\u201d cover.<\/strong><\/p>\n

People have discussed this quite a bit online actually. There\u2019s a Malcolm Gladwell book that gets referenced a lot.<\/p>\n

Did you have a specific book in mind?<\/strong><\/p>\n

No, and in fact that detail was a last-minute addition that came about from conversations with Fran\u00e7oise. I had that basic image but the books were blank, and she had the idea of making it so that they\u2019re reading the same book.<\/p>\n

That cover came out in 2004, but I think today the boy and girl would both be reading Patti Smith\u2019s <\/strong>Just Kids<\/strong><\/em>. In fact it has that same little square image in the center of the cover.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It does, that\u2019s true. Strangely that might be the closest one to it in terms of the actual design.<\/p>\n

In \u201cBored of Tourism,\u201d I\u2019m pretty sure that\u2019s <\/strong>Nine Stories<\/strong><\/em> by J. D. Salinger.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

That definitely is a Salinger book. It has those diagonal stripes in the corner. It seemed like the right book for a gloomy teen to be reading on a tour bus.<\/p>\n

And then both books show up in the window of \u201cRead Handed.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s right. You\u2019re the first person who\u2019s brought that up.<\/p>\n

Was that conscious?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was. They kept giving me assignments to do these book-related illustrations, and I thought, this is an opportunity to tie some of this stuff together.<\/p>\n

Almost all of the characters in your <\/strong>Optic Nerve<\/strong><\/em> comics were in their teens or twenties. Now that you\u2019re in your late thirties, do you find it more difficult to use younger people as your material?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I find it less appealing. The next book I put out is basically going to be a collection of short stories. I knew I had a kid coming along and my time was going to be fragmented. So I had to break it to my publisher\u2014it\u2019s not a graphic novel, it\u2019s not an issue-oriented memoir, there\u2019s no connective tissue to sell this whole collection with. Sorry! But as I started working on it, my present concerns and circumstances started to find their way in. In a totally subconcious way, it seems like it\u2019s headed toward being a book about parental anxiety. Having a kid has surprised me\u2014I almost feel like it\u2019s a time-travel thing, where I\u2019m thinking of the present as much as I\u2019m projecting into the future, and it\u2019s also making me reconsider a lot of my interactions with my parents from the past.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Would you like to return to the long format of <\/strong>Shortcomings <\/strong><\/em>some day?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s a good question. The most impactful comics that I\u2019ve read are the ones where the artists swung for the bleachers and tried to immerse you in their world. I\u2019m very envious of that accomplishment, and to be honest I still think of Shortcomings<\/em> as being like a novella at best, or a warm-up to something much more ambitious, when the playing field includes Building Stories<\/em> and Jimmy Corrigan<\/em> and David Boring<\/em> and Maus<\/em>\u2014all these things that are just out of my reach at this point.<\/p>\n

At the same time I don\u2019t know for sure that comics are necessarily the best and most efficient medium for achieving those experiences, and that all cartoonists are going to excel at that goal. I think now that that\u2019s become the ideal accomplishment, we\u2019re starting to see artists of a lesser caliber than some of the ones I\u2019ve mentioned who are aiming for that goal and falling short or getting frustrated with the process, or maybe stretching out something that would have been more potent as a smaller thing for the sake of having a thicker spine. I could eventually decide that I fall into that category\u2014that I work better in little concentrated doses. We\u2019ll have to see.<\/p>\n

Maybe every cartoonist has his or her own natural narrative length.<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you were to go back in time and talk to the people who invented cartooning, and were doing it for newspapers, and told them that there were going to be guys who were going to do twenty-four-page long stories, they would think that was a strange use of the medium. And if you then said, they\u2019re going to try and inject that with a singular vision and personal experience and do six-hundred-page long stories\u2014I mean, their heads would have exploded. We might see when we look back that there were a few exceptional cases who could take this form and mutate it into something that it really wasn\u2019t meant to do, and could do it with extreme grace and insight.<\/p>\n

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In \u201cMissed Connection,\u201d Adrian Tomine\u2019s now-famous New Yorker cover illustration, a boy and a girl spot each other through the windows of subway cars headed in opposite directions. They\u2019re both reading the same book\u2014potentially perfect for each other, they\u2019re destined not to meet. The image sums up what makes city life frustrating but also thrilling: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[2547,134,9043,228,910,8084,9037,4882,9038,9042,9041,9039,9040,9044],"class_list":["post-40621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-adrian-tomine","tag-cartoons","tag-francoise-mouly","tag-illustration","tag-j-d-salinger","tag-malcolm-gladwell","tag-new-york-drawings","tag-new-yorker","tag-optic-nerve","tag-scenes-from-an-impending-marriage","tag-shortcomings","tag-sleepwalk-and-other-stories","tag-summer-blonde","tag-wayne-thiebaud"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nUrban Renewal: An Interview with Adrian Tomine by Peter Terzian<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"October 29, 2012 \u2013 In \u201cMissed Connection,\u201d Adrian Tomine\u2019s now-famous New Yorker cover illustration, a boy and a girl spot each other through the windows of subway cars\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/10\/29\/urban-renewal-an-interview-with-adrian-tomine\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Urban Renewal: An Interview with Adrian Tomine by Peter Terzian\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"October 29, 2012 \u2013 In \u201cMissed Connection,\u201d Adrian Tomine\u2019s now-famous New Yorker cover illustration, a boy and a girl spot each other through the windows of subway cars\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/10\/29\/urban-renewal-an-interview-with-adrian-tomine\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2012-10-29T14:00:58+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2012-10-29T17:27:49+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/ATsketch-line.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"3480\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"5760\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Peter Terzian\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Peter Terzian\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"9 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/10\/29\/urban-renewal-an-interview-with-adrian-tomine\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/10\/29\/urban-renewal-an-interview-with-adrian-tomine\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Peter Terzian\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/38e2c8cf37ad24ed3b2d81f29a179d35\"},\"headline\":\"Urban Renewal: An Interview with Adrian Tomine\",\"datePublished\":\"2012-10-29T14:00:58+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2012-10-29T17:27:49+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/10\/29\/urban-renewal-an-interview-with-adrian-tomine\/\"},\"wordCount\":1724,\"commentCount\":6,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/10\/29\/urban-renewal-an-interview-with-adrian-tomine\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/ATsketch-line-181x300.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Adrian Tomine\",\"cartoons\",\"Fran\u00e7oise Mouly\",\"illustration\",\"J. 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