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.
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.
Clowes's wife, Erika, was in an English class with Tomine and recognized him from his self-portrait on a mini-comic. Clowes, then already a superstar in the comics world, befriended the 19-year-old. "He was a goofy kid, but I liked him right away," says Clowes. "He was one of us: a work-obsessed perfectionist with a dark sense of humor." Although he says he offered Tomine little cartooning guidance, Tomine credits Clowes with helping reach a new maturity in his work and introducing him to other artists. "Pretty much all my favorite cartoonists are also my best friends--Richard Sala, Dan Clowes, Chester Brown, Seth, Ivan Brunetti, Archer Prewitt, and Charles Burns," says Tomine. " I have young friends and we go out to clubs and see shows, but I have this group of old fogy cartoonists, and we sit around and talk about comics."
Tomine recently took a hiatus from Optic Nerve to edit the English-language publication of one of his heroes, Japanese postwar cartoonist Yoshihiro Tatsumi, who never achieved great fame in either his home country or America. "Tatsumi wanted to go underground and write personal, shocking stories," says Tomine. "And he relegated himself to a career on the fringe." It's a testament to the current literary climate that Tomine himself has already left the fringe, but his success hasn't come without resentment. On a cover for the Comics Journal in 1998, Tomine parodies the less charitable view of his accomplishments: Literally sitting on top of the world, he's pictured leaning against a huge sack of fan mail, green bills wafting all around, while hovercrafts filled with screaming girls and paparazzi vie for his attention.
But perhaps a panel from his Scrapbook offers a more accurate portrait. A Tomine-like figure sketches while sitting squeezed between two strangers on a subway car. A stylish young woman fixes him with a mildly icy glare. Rising over Tomine's head like a cloud, a thought bubble reads: "If I could turn myself invisible, I'd have the best sketchbook ever."
Born: May 31, 1974
Education: B.A., Univ. of Calif.-Berkeley
Publications: Optic Nerve Nos. 1-9; Sleepwalk: And Other Stories ; Summer Blonde; Scrapbook--Uncollected Work: 1990-2004.
This story appears in the March 21, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.