Transcript
jesse thorn
Hey all, it’s Jesse. As 2020 draws to a close, think about what you’re thankful for, other than—I’m willing to bet—2020 drawing to a close. What got you through the year? Odds are, if you’re hearing my voice, public radio was one of the things. Public radio gave you accurate, dependable news about the election on the pandemic, information about local stories that matter to you. You got fun and fascinating interviews from shows like Bullseye. If you wanna show your gratitude at the end of this year, consider supporting your local public radio station. Public radio stations really need your help right now, more than ever. And it’s really easy to do! Just go to Donate.NPR.org/bullseye and give whatever you can. And thanks.
music
Gentle, trilling music with a steady drumbeat plays under the dialogue.
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Speaker: Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR. [Music fades out.]
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“Huddle Formation” from the album Thunder, Lightning, Strike by The Go! Team.
jesse
It’s Bullseye. I’m Jesse Thorn. If you’re a fan of comics, odds are you’re familiar with Adrian Tomine already. Maybe you read his series Optic Nerve or know his books, like Killing and Dying and Shortcoming. They’re reminiscent of Daniel Klaus or Jaime Hernandez, maybe Harvey Pekar: dark, realistic, but with an edge of humor as well. And even if you aren’t a fan of comics, you’ve probably seen Adrian’s work. He’s done several covers for the New Yorker, including a couple recently that illustrate the absurdity, frustration and isolation many people are experiencing after being home so long. Messy apartments, dates over video chat, Daniel Tiger episodes playing on repeat as kids climb up the walls. Adrian’s got a new book out now. It’s called The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist. And in it, he takes a little bit of a different approach. For one, there’s the presentation. The book looks like a notebook, each page written on graph paper. It’s also autobiographical. Tomine recounts book tours, trips to the doctor, even an interview he did on NPR’s Fresh Air. Conducting our interview with Adrian is Brian Heater. Brian is an editor for TechCrunch and the host of the podcast Recommended if You Like. He’s interviewed Adrian many times before and has seen him go from a small-print indie comics artist to, these days, a real big-deal comics artist and a screenwriter. [Music fades in.] So. Let’s get into it. Brian Heater and Adrian Tomine.
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Light, airy music.
brian heater
Adrian Tomine, thank you so much for joining us on Bullseye.
adrian tomine
Hi Brian. How you doing?
brian
I am doing well, all things considered. How is the book tour going for you so far?
adrian
[Laughs.] The book tour, uh… I didn’t even know exactly what—whose book tour you were referring to [laughs] when you asked, but uh, it’s fine. It’s mostly me just locking myself in the bathroom and talking to the computer for a little bit. But, you know, I was—I was disappointed at first when it—when all the plans changed, because we’d already set up this whole cross-country tour and everything. But you know, some of the one-on-one chats that I’ve done, I think, have gone maybe even a little better than if we were standing or sitting in front of an audience and kind of, you know, chasing after [chuckles] the audience reaction rather than just having a real, direct conversation. I know I’ve felt less self-conscious doing the Q&As on a computer as opposed to in front of an audience.
brian
In a lot of ways, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist is really your most personal and, I think it’s safe to say, potentially embarrassing book. Is there an upside to doing this—to having these conversations remotely?
adrian
Oh yeah. 100%. I mean, I was prepared—or, I wasn’t prepared, but I was expecting some kind of mental breakdown that I’d have while on the road, promoting this book, while—you know, the real-life experiences actually surpass the embarrassment that I depict within the book and—you know—hating it because it’s good material that didn’t make it into the book, but also having to [laughs] endure it. And so, yeah. Definitely I was—I had a lot of—there were even like specific cities where I was like, “Ooh, I know so-and-so lives in that town and—” you know. People that I was afraid I would run into along the way and specific questions that I knew I would have gotten from an audience Q&A but probably would not get from [laughs] a professional.
brian
I’m curious, do you have specific examples of something that I probably won’t ask you though, that a stranger in the audience might?
adrian
I was pretty sure that there would be questions about my digestive issues [laughs]—digestive issues that I wouldn’t want to go into onstage. And, you know, just in general I tried to make the book seem very casual and forthright and everything. Especially with regards to my family. It was very, very carefully calculated about how much I wanted to reveal and how much I felt like I could expose other people. And so, I didn’t wanna be in a situation where someone would say, like, “Well, what did—you know—” They refer to my kids and ask me about them or something like that. And just because my nature is just to—I love talking about them and I would love to, you know—there’s many much funnier anecdotes that didn’t make it into the book. And I think I’d feel, in my need to get laughs [chuckles] onstage that I would—I would expose them in a way that—it’s probably better if I don’t.
brian
You know, I get the sense that every time you release a book, there is kind of—there’s a—there’s some nerves attached to it. [Adrian confirms.] You know. It’s something that you’ve been working on for a really long time, you’re finally putting out into the world and in each one of these book’s case, they’re all personal in different ways. How did the nerves surrounding the release of this book compare to previous books?
adrian
Part of the nerves of releasing a book is that I’ve tried to sort of—at least with the last handful of books—to try and challenge myself to do something a little different each time out, whether it’s in terms of the drawing style or the subject matter or the tone or, you know, something as simple as color versus black and white. And so, you know, I think there’s sort of an ease and a confidence that can come with just kind of doing the same thing with each book, maybe perfecting it a little bit each time. ‘Cause you know that there’s not gonna be any real, unexpected response to it. I mean, it’ll either be positive or it’ll be—you know. You know, more of the same or something like that. But it won’t be, like, “Well, he really made a wrong turn this time.” And so that’s always the main thing that’s on my mind, is—you know, if I’m lucky enough to get sort of a good response to something like my previous book, Killing and Dying. There’s a part of me that just wants to get more of that same—[laughs] that same approbation. So, to do something different is always what weighs on me. Like, I’m—I envision the negative reviews that say, like, “Well, he should have stuck with what he was good at,” or something like that. And on top of that with this one, of course, the idea of doing something that’s so explicitly autobiographical was a challenge. I mean, I’ve drawn myself as a character in the past, but in very—actually, impersonal ways. Like—you know, it really makes no difference whether it was me or a fictional character, because the stories were so benign. So, when I started this one, I really kind of gave myself the challenge of, like—you know. Let’s try and go into some uncomfortable areas, because no one wants to read 200 pages of just kind of light, uplifting anecdotes. At least I don’t.
brian
Do you get the sense that any or most of these stories could have worked as fictional stories? That they could have made it into one of your, like, more—I guess for lack of a better word—traditional books?
adrian
Yeeeah. Well, that was something that I thought about at first. And I think in a lot of ways, it would have been maybe more commercial, you know. Especially since now, it seems like every graphic novel is [chuckles] a springboard for a movie or TV project or something like that. I don’t know. Like, sometimes the qualities that I look for, in art, are negatives to other people. Like, I want art that is as specific and personal as possible. But, you know, you look at what is kind of like the mainstream blockbuster hits and it’s kind of the antithesis of that. But the thing that—Um, I mean, aside from just not necessarily wanting to make that book, the thing that really impeded me was I started to think of, like, how much bizarre worldbuilding and fictionalization that it would require to translate this material. And so, like, to come up with, like, um—“He’s the young, Asian American frisbee player who’s new on the scene and there’s some more experienced frisbee players who, you know, take him under his wing or—you know.” All these things that just seem so stupid and then I started really thinking that the best way to present this material is to give the audience the knowledge that its absolutely true and it literally did happen to me. And I think that makes some of the things funnier or more impactful.
brian
How seriously are you considering things like commercial potential and how pragmatically, you know, when you sit down and work on a project that’s going to take you five or seven years, say, how pragmatic are you being about that commercial potential? And has having a family—has that impacted those concerns?
adrian
[Laughs.] I’m not as pragmatic about it as I—as I probably should be. And I don’t—I think the main thing is that the process of creating a big comic, like a long work, is—at least for me—is so daunting and takes so much time and energy that there’s no way I could get through a 200-page project if my heart wasn’t 100% in it. Like, I don’t think—I think a lot of people have this illusion that selling out is the easiest path and for me it would actually be really difficult for me to sit down and think, like, “Well, what would… be the most adaptable kind of story and let me think of an actor and I’ll kind of create a character that that actor will instantly relate to and wanna—and feel flattered by and wanna buy the rights to the—you know. And then now let me spend 7 years [laughing] executing that idea.” I just—it would be a real challenge and I don’t think I would have the correct intuition to do it in a successful way. I mean, one of the strangest things that I’ve discovered in recent years is that the things that I maybe thought would be appealing in that way get zero interest. I mean—and then—and then things that I assumed, you know, like this new book for example that I assumed would be completely uncommercial and was way too personal and, you know, that ends up getting the most attention. You know. I—it’s the inquiries from Hollywood about this book have completely surprised me, in a way that I never, never could envisioned.
brian
So, you are having those conversations with producers about this book?
adrian
Yeah! I don’t—you know—discount any conversation out of hand. I do [laughs] the exploratory work and, yeah. There’s a bunch of projects related to various books of mine that are sort of up in the air, right now. Some less so. There’s a—there’s a movie that just finished production, in France. I think this week they actually finished shooting it. That’s based on some of my stuff.
brian
So, does working in that medium—does that interest you? You know, obviously you’re good friends with Dan Klaus. He’s done a number of movies. He’s actually done the screenwriting on a few of them as well, would you be interest in making that transition or at least exploring work outside of art and comics?
adrian
Very much so. In fact, at least right now, at this phase of my life and through, you know, much of quarantine—aside from promoting the new book—I’ve been basically like a fulltime screenwriter. And I’ve been really enjoying it. It’s a—you know, it also makes me appreciate a lot about making comics, too. So, I’m sure that I’ll get back to that soon. But it is nice to be doing something different and I don’t know if it’s just the fact that it’s something different or if it’s the work itself, but my wife is always commenting about how what a good mood I seem in at the end of a workday [laughs], in contrast to the past whatever decade that she’s had to endure me.
brian
Do you feel that having done comics for a few decades now, that that was good preparation for writing screenplays?
adrian
I don’t know! I mean, I haven’t—I can’t—I can’t, you know, live an alternate life where I didn’t have that experience and tried to write screenplays. You know, it—logically it seems like, yes. But for all I know, it might be a bit of a hindrance, too. I mean, a lot of the challenge for me is to not overwrite and not try and describe every single detail in the way that I would draw every single detail in a panel. And so, it’s a lot of kind of trying to resist that impulse. And it’s also—you know. It’s by nature a very collaborative process, which making comics, at least for me, is not at all. I mean, I basically work in isolation on a book and then give it to my publisher and if they like it, they publish it. But there’s not a lot of editorial back and forth or checking in along the way or anything like that. It’s very different! And I think—yeah. I think cartooning has given me certain skills that I’m bringing to these new endeavors. But I think it’s also maybe given me some bad habits in terms of how I expect to work, now.
brian
When it comes to doing strictly things in the comics medium, do you find that you abandon a lot of work along the way?
adrian
I can’t afford to anymore! I used to. I could just kick myself when I think back on how much time and energy I wasted when I was younger. Like, I would—you know, spend months writing a story and then draw half of it with, you know, Zipatone and corrections all this stuff and then decide that I didn’t like it and just put it aside. It’s kind of a OCD thing, but like I would work on a page and, you know, after five days of working on it, I’d make a little mistake and it would annoy me so much that instead of just cutting out the mistake or painting over it or something like that, I would start over. Which, now, just seems like—you know, insanity. [Laughs.] And so, I think maybe—I don’t know, starting with Killing and Dying and then—and then this new book, I feel like my work time is so limited. And [laughs] and then my life time is so limited that I feel like once I embark on a project, you know, I really gotta find a way to make it work. And I think sometimes that’s interesting, I think. Sometimes maybe that struggle gives a little energy to the work that wouldn’t have come through something that just sailed through easily.
brian
I mean, you’re not an old man but given—I guess, given how long it takes to work on one of these books, does your mind immediately go to kind of quantifying how many of these you can potentially churn out?
adrian
Yeeeah. I’ve… I think might friends and I have all turned that corner where we’ve gotten out a scrap of paper and we’ve done a few calculations about how many books we have left in us. One of the nice things about having cartoonist friends who are mostly older than me is that I can sort of see them go through all these things a few years ahead of me [laughs] and brace myself for it. But yeah, I think—you know, I think that’s definitely something that you are oblivious to when you’re younger and you’re—you think you have all the time in the world. Yeah. I mean, you know, like—granted, there was a lot of other things going on in my life at the time, but the book before this one—Killing and Dying—from start to finish took about seven years. Which, you know, especially when you have kids that are—that are growing up, you know, before your very eyes, the idea of like burying your nose in some project for seven years seems, you know… pretty unappealing to me right now.
jesse
We have a lot more with Adrian Tomine still to come. After the break, what happens when a cartoonist turns his experience as a guest on Fresh Air into a cartoon. People ask him about it, lots of people. It’s Bullseye, from MaximumFun.org and NPR.
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Peppy, cheerful music.
jesse
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Ben Harrison: Alright, Adam. Uh, Maximum Fun wants us to record like a promo to tell people that they should listen to The Greatest Generation. You wanna do that? Adam Pranica: No! I am tired of all the extra work. I just wanna talk about Star Trek with my friend. Ben: I—I think it—it would be good to, like, try to get some new listeners by appealing to the audiences of other shows? Like, this—this will only take a minute or two. It could be good for us! Adam: We sit down for an hour every week and talk about a Star Trek episode and make a bunch of idiotic fart jokes about it. It’s embarrassing. If it got out that we made this show, I think it would make us unemployable. Ben: Adam—I have bad news for you. We have tens of thousands of listeners at MaximumFun.org. Adam: Oh, my god. I think I’m gonna throw up. [Sound of office telephone plays quietly in background.] Ben: The Greatest Generation! A Star Trek podcast by a couple of guys who are a little bit embarrassed to have a Star Trek podcast. Every Monday on MaximumFun.org. Adam: I’m really gonna be sick.
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jesse
Hey all. It’s Jesse again, with a reminder that now—the end of the year—is a great time to support your local NPR members station. Do it now. Go to Donate.NPR.org/bullseye. And thanks.
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Bright, chiming music.
jesse
Welcome back to Bullseye, I’m Jesse Thorn. Our guest is Adrian Tomine. Adrian is a cartoonist and the author of several comics collections and graphic novels. He’s also illustrated covers for the New Yorker. His newest book is an illustrated memoir, called The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist. It’s out now. He’s being interviewed by our friend, Brian Heater: an editor at TechCrunch and host of the podcast Recommended if You Like. Let’s get back into it.
brian
Over the course of this book, which really starts when you’re in grade school and you are—you know, you do the thing where the teacher brings you up and asks you what you wanna do for a living and you say, you know, I wanna be a—I think a cartoonist is the word you actually use at the time.
adrian
No, no. It’s more embarrassing than that, ‘cause I actually said that I wanted to be a famous cartoonist. [Laughs.]
brian
[Chuckling.] A famous cartoonist. Sure. You know. To the—to the amusement of—I guess the bemusement of your teacher and the—and the amusement of the rest of the kids in class. But you know, something I think we don’t really talk about a lot is—I mean, it’s something that, in a lot of ways, you’ve been single-mindedly focused on for—not single-mindedly, but has occupied so much of your mind-share for such a long period of your life. So, that feels liberating for the first point in your life, to really not being thinking or actively engaging with comics?
adrian
Yes. I mean, I think that there was just—and it wasn’t by design at all, but I feel like there was an amazing confluence of factors that led me to kind of write that book that wrestled with some of these issues and wondered if I should really be spending so much of my time thinking and working on comics. And then that book came out and… the pandemic struck, and these screenwriting opportunities came up and it all just kind of flowed together, where it was almost like that book was sort of, you know, the start of a—of a—of a new phase in my life. And I didn’t plan that at all. I sort of thought, like, “Well, this’ll be the book where I kind of think about that stuff.” And, you know, if people read the book and see—read it to the very end, they’ll see that it kind of doesn’t really resolve anything. And if anything, it sort of implies that I’m gonna jump right back to work on another comic despite what I’ve arrived at, philosophically. But things didn’t work out that way and you know—and I know it’s something that I will return to. But right now, like, having sort of an imposed break from it—in ways that I never could have consciously imposed upon myself. Like, I think it really took all these unbelievable external forces to truly change my life in the way—in the way that it has.
brian
At this point in your career, is making comics—is it still a pleasurable experience? Are there pleasurable aspects of it? Or is it something that you’ve kind of, in a sense, been saddled with since you were a kid?
adrian
It’s both! I mean, I would say that if I can get to the experience, the mindset, of making comics that I had when I was a kid—in other words, where you are creating purely for the joy of creating and you’re not concerned about what it’s at the expense of or what you’re missing out on and the results are coming out—at least to your eye—pretty well. And most importantly, when you have that feeling of time just sort of floating and you look up and you think you’ve been working for 15 minutes and, you know, 3 hours have passed or something like that. You can’t replace that with anything. And so, when I have those experiences, it really outweighs any negative. But it is—it is difficult to achieve that sometimes. Yeah. You know, just in general, I think—it’s hard for me to say, ‘cause this alternative work that I’m doing right now isn’t that different. I’m still sitting in the same room, just at a different desk and—you know. It doesn’t—it doesn’t change that much, but—you know. I’m sure if the job that I was doing now was, you know, roofing or something like that, I would [laughs] really, really missing comics a lot. And I still feel that, to a degree. I always think that any time I have a really annoying meeting about movie or TV stuff, it pushes me one step closer back to making more [laughing] comics.
brian
Have you drawn anything? Have you drawn for yourself in the meantime?
adrian
Yeah. I mean, I’m still maintaining what is left of my illustration career. And uh, I think I can say this, but throughout the quarantine I think I’ve had maybe three or four… covers for the New Yorker that were approved and accepted and completed and then at the last minute were made obsolete by the sudden change in the news or something like that. So, I’ve been—unfortunately—doing a lot of drawing that has not seen the light of day.
brian
But you’re—I mean, you’re not really a sketchbook guy, are you? Do you just kind of—I guess—I guess kind of keep your skills up by drawing more casually for yourself?
adrian
I’ve tried to get back into it. You know. Like, I’m definitely on the lazier side of that spectrum compared to some of my peers who—I honestly don’t understand it. Like, they’ll be working all day on a comic and then when they’re eating dinner, they’re doodling in their sketchbook or something like that. Or for fun, they’ll draw. And, yeah, I—I am definitely not one of those people. But—especially while we’ve all been home and not being able to do as much. I have been doing more, you know, sketchbook kind of pleasure drawing. And you know, one of the things that I have been doing is like, because I’ve been watching more TV than usual and feeling guilty about it, I’ve been trying to draw while watching TV. And so, I was, for a while, on Instagram I was posting sketches that I was doing of people [chuckling] that I was—that I was watching on TV.
brian
Obviously—and this isn’t specific to you—but obviously to some degree, anytime you’re working in fiction, there’s going to be a certain amount of autobiography, a certain amount of truth, and that does absolutely hold for a lot of the work that you’ve done in the past. You know. Given the sensitivity of certain topics, even though you are perhaps x-ing out some names, do you feel that there are things that you can reveal or that there are truths that you are able to get to in fiction that you can’t in memoir?
adrian
Oh, 100%. I’m a very inhibited person. I mean, as much as people talk about like, “I can’t believe you showed yourself sitting on the toilet,” or something like that, that really—I mean, really, in the scope of like human shame [laughs] that’s pretty—that’s pretty minor. And yeah, there’s—that was a real struggle and I think that for sure there are lots of topics and experiences that, for me, are better funneled through fiction. And in fact—I mean, I don’t think it’s necessarily something that I wanna do right on the heels of this book, but I have had ideas for a fictional book about an author on the road and I think that that would be a place for me to put in a lot of the things that I didn’t feel comfortable making autobiographical.
brian
So, before we go, I do have to ask you—there is one story in this book that is relevant to this current situation right now. The Fresh Air interview that you did. [Adrian agrees with a laugh.] Which obviously didn’t go exactly as you had hoped and clearly there were a lot of external forces…
adrian
Well, I mean first of all, I gotta preempt this, because what’s happened is since I—since the book has come out, people have gone to the website and have found that episode and they say, “Oh. You’re so—you’re so full of it. You’re trying to, like, create drama that wasn’t there and you’re trying to, like, be falsely modest or something. ‘Cause the interview as fine.” And my defense is that that is purely a testament to the skill and kindness of the editors at—on Fresh Air, who like surgeons, worked magic on the raw material. There are so many incidents and moments from that interview that I remember [laugh] with crystal clear clarity that have been artfully omitted or finessed. So, I—yeah, that’s been—I’ve wanted to clarify that, because people have held that up as empirical proof that this whole book is [censored] or something.
brian
Sure. And I wanna go on record as, you know, somebody who’s followed you for a while and we’ve had a number of conversations over the years that I believe—[laugh] I believe that you accurately portrayed the information. [Adrian laughs and agrees.] You know. But I have to ask, you know, having done this for a while, do you feel that you have become a better interviewee? That you’ve become more… more comfortable with being on that side of the mic and being, I guess, kind of probed to some degree?
adrian
I wonder if—is that what you’re—is that what you’re take on it is? Having talked to me over the years? [Laughs.] Numbers help?
brian
[Laughs.] I think so! I think—I think that’s fair. Yeah. No, I think you’re—you know. I think you’re kind of more comfortable and have opened up quite a bit.
adrian
Yeah. I mean, you know, the best—the best way for me to learn and improve at anything is by failing. You know. Especially with this totally bizarre aspect of the job that literally did not exist before my generation of cartoonists. But this idea of having to promote yourself and to be a public figure in some minor capacity and—you know, just the fact that cartoonists now have to even give a thought to how they look, about what their hair looks like or what they’re wearing or anything like that is… is horrible! I think it’s a terrible betrayal of what this job looked like when I started out. But you know, there’s no—there’s no training for it. You know? Like, you can—there’s actually colleges now where you can go learn to be a cartoonist and they teach you how to ink and how to use a tablet and all these things. But there’s no training for this side of the job. And I imagine, if you were in any industry where there was a higher amount of money involved, you would have people who… took you to a stylist and who taught you—gave you media training and in advance told you, like, here’s who this interviewer is, and this is what to expect. And there’s none of that in my world. And it’s—you know. So many experiences like the one that you’re talking about where I just sort of like am looking at an address that was given to me and I kind of wander into some building and then [laughs] suddenly I’m in the middle of this situation that I wasn’t expecting. And so, my training has been on the job, unfortunately. And so, you know. If I’m a little bit more comfortable doing it now, it’s because I was horrible on Fresh Air.
brian
Well, Adrian, you did—you did great today. [Adrian laughs.] Thank you so much for joining us on Bullseye.
adrian
Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
jesse
Adrian Tomine, interviewed by Brian Heater. Adrian’s new book, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, is available to buy now from your local bookstore. Thanks to Brian Heater for talking with him. Brian’s podcast, Recommended if You Like, is a great listen. He’s got another interview with Adrian on there, plus conversations with folks like Open Mike Eagle, Van Dyck Parks, and Ralph Nader. You might know him from our college improv group, Humor Force 5. [Beat.] Not Ralph Nader. Brian. Anyway.
music
Relaxed piano music.
jesse
That’s the end of another episode of Bullseye. Bullseye is created from the homes of me and the staff of Maximum Fun, in and around greater Los Angeles, California—where, you know, they say red tape prevents you from building homes, here in Los Angeles. But they sure are building one right across from my living room. So. You know. Sorry if you’ve heard it! The show is produced by speaking into microphones. Our producer is Kevin Ferguson. Jesus Ambrosio and Jordan Kauwling are our associate producers. We also get some help from Casey O’Brien and Kristen Bennett. Our interstitial music is by Dan Wally, also known as DJW. Our theme song is by The Go! Team. Thanks very much to them and to their label, Memphis Industries, for letting us use it. If you wanna hear the latest about what we are up to, you can keep up with the show on Twitter, @Bullseye. On Facebook, at Facebook.com/bullseyewithjessethorn. And on YouTube, just search for Bullseye with Jesse Thorn. We post all of our interviews there. And I think that’s about it. Just remember: all great radio hosts have a signature signoff.
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Speaker: Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR. [Music fades out.]
About the show
Bullseye is a celebration of the best of arts and culture in public radio form. Host Jesse Thorn sifts the wheat from the chaff to bring you in-depth interviews with the most revered and revolutionary minds in our culture.
Bullseye has been featured in Time, The New York Times, GQ and McSweeney’s, which called it “the kind of show people listen to in a more perfect world.” Since April 2013, the show has been distributed by NPR.
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