A grown-up Charlie Brown
To readers of Adrian Tomine's acclaimed comic series Optic Nerve, his immaculate Berkeley, Calif., apartment might seem oddly familiar. There is the carefully composed minimalism: straight horizontal lines of a '50s-retro couch and strong verticals of Ikea shelving. There are cultural references both high and low: books by Carson McCullers, colorful Pez dispensers placed at precise intervals above the wide kitchen window, a rotating postcard-stand homage to Charles Schulz--each slot filled with a single, shiny Peanuts postcard.
And finally there is a sense of unspoken tension resonating just under the smooth surfaces: a glowering Tomine, eager to return to his habitual state of solitude, pacing restlessly in his workroom. Dialogue, likewise, is minimal. Asked to name the work of which he is most proud, the bespectacled Tomine deadpans, "I couldn't pick one. I'm not a big fan."
Since self-publishing his first issue of Optic Nerve at age 15, Tomine, now 30, has received steady recognition as something of a boy wonder of comics. The California native is included in the ranks of serious literary cartoonists like Daniel Clowes ( Ghost World ) and Chris Ware ( Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth ). He's done illustrations for Time, Esquire, and Rolling Stone and is a regular contributor to the New Yorker . But it is Optic Nerve 's tales of loneliness, alienation, and attempted connections among teens and 20- and 30-somethings that have gained Tomine a cultlike following.
"Comic shops throughout North America have actually been declining for the past decade, so the fact that his readership has been growing in that context has been quite remarkable," says Chris Oliveros, head of the Montreal comics publishing house Drawn and Quarterly. With his latest Optic Nerve selling 17,000 copies, Tomine is the publisher's bestselling author.
Serious fun. His rise in popularity comes at a turning point for comics. While masked superheroes and pneumatic heroines are still widely read, serious storytelling has achieved a permanent place in the comics world as well. "There's a broader graphic novel movement afoot," says Scott McCloud, author of the seminal work Understanding Comics . "The notion of serious comics for adults is no longer an anomaly." Today's cartoonists benefit from Art Spiegelman's 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus , which retold the Holocaust with animal characters--and showed mainstream audiences how very serious comic art could be. Films like Ghost World and American Splendor have further brought the medium popular attention, while the Random House imprint Pantheon now publishes high-quality graphic novels every season, most notably Jimmy Corrigan and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis .
Just seven years ago, 95 percent of Drawn and Quarterly's comics were sold in traditional superhero comic book stores--places that can be unappealing to adults and intimidating for girls. Now about 60 percent are sold in mainstream bookstores. With his appeal to female readers--due in part to an emotional depth, part to a hipster style--and his easy transition to regular bookstores, Tomine may be the prime example of how graphic novels expand their audience. In the coming months, Tomine is poised to release Optic Nerve No. 10, the second part of his longest work to date. "The story that I'm working on now is drawing back on material that I've had in my head since college," says Tomine. "The writing that comes out of my head is a weird scrambling and regurgitation of memories." The graphic novel in three installments will total 80 to 100 pages and deal with issues of race and identity--barely charted waters for the fourth-generation Japanese-American cartoonist.
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