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CREATOR PROFILE:

ADRIAN TOMINE

Adrian Tomine (pronounced toe-mean-ay) was born in Sacramento, California in 1974 and his childhood was spent in various small towns along the West Coast of the USA as well as a year spent in Europe at the age of 13. He studied English at the University of California and currently resides in Berkeley, California. He has been producing his comics since he was 17. “I became painfully aware of my detachment from any type of social interaction early into my freshman year. It was one those quite weekend nights when even my parents were out having fun that I began making serious attempts to create stories in comics form. It was a cheap way to keep myself occupied, and when a strip started really coming together, I actually forgot that most of my peers were interacting and socialising.” A particularly strong early influence was the comic Love & Rockets by Jamie and Gilbert Hernandez, which he began reading at the early age of 13 despite its adult themes and content. Eventually, he received a Xeric grant to publish the seventh issue o

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Adrian Tomine on Building a Creative Career

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here.

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A few years ago I gave a talk at an art school in Manhattan, and I could tell that the students were quickly losing interest in my admittedly ponderous presentation. So in an attempt to regain their attention, I asked the students what their goals were. A guy in the back of the room quickly blurted out, “To do whatever the fuck I want and get rich doing it!” Some of the other students cringed and recoiled, but just as many shook their heads in tacit agreement. I was instantly overcome by feelings of rage and contempt—but also irrelevance, like there was nothing I could really say that would help that guy achieve his goals. I tried to respond in a tactful manner, but I’m sure there was more than a hint of passive aggression in my words.

I’ll admit: my immediate thought was, “God, what an obnoxious, entitled creep!” But when I heard some of the other students’ answers, I found that many of them were vague, mud

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This time I am going to talk some more about Adrian Tomine and his life as an adult. At the age of 15, Adrian Tomine started working on his first “serious” work and self-published Optic Nerve. However it wasn't until he was 20 when Drawn & Quarterly offered to publish Optic Nerve as a full-sized comic book when he became a professional comic book artist ("Adrian Tomine Biography", n.d.).

Optic Nerve: front page

After graduating from high school, Tomine moved from Sacramento, California to Berkeley, California in order to attend UC Berkeley. He started off as an art major; however he felt that it was interfering with his comic work, so changed his major over to English literature (Magazine, 2012). In the interview he says that it "...was a good way to keep my academic life and artistic life separate" (Magazine, 2012). He lived a very collegiate lifestyle while in Berkeley – staying in the same apartment that he had since his college days and living a lifestyle very much like a college student (Terzian, 2012). During