A biography for Adrian Tominehasn’t been written yet.
“There's never been a moment where I sat down at my drawing board and thought, 'I'm a pro!'”
“For a lot of the time I was in Berkeley, I was single. I was living in a kind of collegiate apartment by myself - it 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.”
“A lot of my fears come out in my work rather than life.”
“I love the idea of trying to do the work of old-fashioned novelists of plotting and of really making you curious about what's going to happen next and all that, but also trying to load it up with your weird thoughts and opinions.”
“New York is a brutally expensive place to live, and the kind of person who might have the dedication and esoteric taste to make the comics that I would really love is finding it more relaxing to live elsewhere.”
“There's a lot of books that I've purchased simply because of the cover design. On the other hand, there's certain books that, even if I'm very curious about the content, I can't bring myself to buy if I really dislike the cover.”
“Most normal boys, as they're growing up, they - in order to become attractive, they might, you know, get good at sports or join a rock band or develop good social skills, and for some reason, I thought that drawing comic books might be my route.”
“I'm sometimes a cartoonist, and there's an audience for that, and I'm sometimes an illustrator, and there's an audience for that.”
“I never really thought of myself as an Asian-American cartoonist, any more than I thought of myself as a cartoonist who wears glasses.”
“I'm not the kind of person who would throw himself into some exciting or dangerous situation just to get material. So I tend to go about my normal, boring life and just try to look at things a little more closely.”
“I would honestly be elated if I could wave a magic wand and eradicate my back catalog and then have a fresh crack at some of those ideas.”
“I'm not the best person to analyze any kind of evolution in my work, but I do feel like it's been an ongoing struggle to basically teach myself how to tell the kinds of stories that interest me in comics form.”
“Readers often bring a different set of criteria to the work based on the format.”
“When I started creating my work for publication, I just assumed that the focus would be on the work itself and that there wouldn't be a lot of interest in who was creating the work.”
“I'm always a little apprehensive about 'decoding' fictional stories.”
“I enjoy getting any kind of mail. Like, for me, like, the more interesting a letter is, I just get more excited, and I know that this going to be great for my friends who are looking forward to reading that in my comic.”
“The most impactful comics that I've read are the ones where the artists swung for the bleachers and tried to immerse you in their world.”
“I think having kids has been the biggest influence on my work since I started publishing.”
“'Shortcomings' was me figuring out who I am.”
“I've always liked the tradition of publishing work serially in the comic-book 'pamphlet' format and then collecting that work in book form, so I've just stuck with it.”