A grown-up Charlie Brown
Although Optic Nerve is most often compared with Ghost World , it probably owes more to the elliptical structures of a Raymond Carver story. A man and a woman try voyeurism and see something they shouldn't. A blind man is snubbed on the streets by his grocery store helper. A man buying a cake is beaten and forced to bite the curb. A lonely woman finds someone who doesn't mind her nocturnal teeth grinding. Small tales become large when unspooled cinematically across Tomine's pages. Underneath it all is the sincerity and sweet sadness of Schulz's work. One imagines that if the Peanuts gang ever grew into their heads, the more neurotic of the bunch (Linus? Peppermint Patty?) might move to the city and continue their struggle to find meaning in the pages of something like Optic Nerve .
Indeed, there is something Peanuts-like about Tomine himself. With a neatly pressed vintage western shirt, black-rimmed glasses, short black hair, and a poker face, he's at once part of the aging youth culture he documents and also apart from it. In openly autobiographical strips, he appears as a hapless fellow in a striped shirt and thick glasses, victim to everyday cruelties and aggressions. "The push and pull between extreme misanthropy and also the great sympathy is something I find common in many of the cartoonists I like," says Tomine. "Being an observant writer makes you both kind of disgusted with people but also compels you to capture it on paper."
The watcher. Tomine's childhood trained him to become a great observer. His parents divorced when he was 2, and he moved often with his psychology professor mother, always the new kid at school. He began reading comic books and one day discovered Love and Rockets , Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez's groundbreaking comic series. "It was the spark that opened up my eyes and made me realize that comics was a medium and not just a handful of childish genres," says Tomine. At age 13, he spent a year in Germany but never learned the language or attended school. Instead he spent his days looking at German comics he couldn't read and playing with kids he couldn't speak with. That year may hold the key to his characters' subtly descriptive facial expressions, which almost need no dialogue.
"A good cartoonist can't be too much a people person," says Clowes. "You have to be comfortable shutting down your social impulses and grappling with a piece of paper. Sometimes I find myself working for weeks on end, only talking to my wife and no one else. It's not an uncommon thing to talk to a cartoonist and feel like they might be losing their mind."
Tomine returned from Europe just in time to begin high school in Sacramento, again the new kid. "I wouldn't say that high school was completely horrible," says Tomine. "But there was a sense of invisibility. It was just my social ineptitude among my peers." That gave Tomine plenty of time to draw. He got his first big break when Marc Weidenbaum, then an editor at Pulse!, the now defunct Tower Records magazine, saw a folded and stapled copy of Optic Nerve at a local comic shop. What followed was a three-year collaboration, Tomine, a regular contributor to the national magazine. Characteristically, he kept his cartooning gig a strict secret from high school friends. In 1992, Tomine enrolled at the University of California-Berkeley as an art major but found that his comics weren't well received. "The attitude was that comics might be used in some sort of ironic concept, but as a pure art form, it didn't make sense," he says. He soon switched to an English major.
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