ADRIAN TOMINE

I was thinking about what it was like for my parents to have a strange kid with a hobby or a pursuit that maybe they weren't that familiar with. It must have been a strange experience - nerve-wracking, in some ways.

To be perfectly honest, if it was up to me, I would be invisible as an artist.

I do think that many Americans have a limited view of what constitutes Japanese cartooning based on what gets translated, so it's great to see an increase in diversity.

If anything, I feel a bit of pressure to write about less disenfranchised people, because I'd probably sell more books that way and would've already had some hot property that I could've sold to Hollywood.

When email and the Internet came along, I never publish an email address. I just stuck with this P.O. Box address.

To me, one of the big fears of doing a big huge graphic novel is locking yourself into one style and getting halfway through it and going, 'Oh I made the wrong choice,' which is a recurring nightmare I have.

All my stories take place on the West Coast - not the beach, but smaller inland towns. I feel homesick, and I find inspiration in capturing that.

My responsibility is to present things in a way that is realistic and true to the multifaceted world I've known... This is how I think the world is, not how it should be.

I think having kids has been the biggest influence on my work since I started publishing.

I started publishing my comic while I was still living with my parents.

I wanted to be as invisible as possible as an artist. I wanted to differentiate between myself and who I'm writing about.

I was just taking my sketchbook to Kinko's and making photocopies and hand-assembling them - folding them over and stapling them.

I'm an unabashed fan of 'The New Yorker.' I do feel proud when I see my artwork in there.

A lot of the qualities in 'Killing and Dying' is sort of a response to work I'd done previously. I wanted to push myself in some different directions.

The comics work is very slow, and it basically involves working for sometimes years in isolation and not knowing how the work is going to be received.

I think that artists, at a certain point, can either become defiant and say that the audience is wrong, readers don't get them, and they're going to keep doing it their own way, or they can listen to the criticism - and not necessarily blindly follow the audience's requests and advice.

Even though I'm usually not conscious of it, I think drawing has always served a sort of therapeutic purpose in my life. There's something about the process of translating the messy chaos of real life into a clean, simple drawing that's always been comforting to me.

A lot of my fears come out in my work rather than life.

There's a lot of books that I've purchased simply because of the cover design. On the other hand, there's certain books that, even if I'm very curious about the content, I can't bring myself to buy if I really dislike the cover.

When I first started drawing the earliest incarnation of 'Optic Nerve,' I hadn't even been on a date; I hadn't had a romantic relationship of any kind yet, so in a way, I was almost writing science fiction.

The basic work schedule for me is whenever I'm not doing anything more important, like taking care of my kids or something. So, it's most of the day, five days a week, most evenings and sometimes on the weekends.

New York is a brutally expensive place to live, and the kind of person who might have the dedication and esoteric taste to make the comics that I would really love is finding it more relaxing to live elsewhere.

I used to live in Chris Rock's former apartment. I've got some junk mail for him if he wants it.

I hated 'Dilbert.'

I love the idea of trying to do the work of old-fashioned novelists of plotting and of really making you curious about what's going to happen next and all that, but also trying to load it up with your weird thoughts and opinions.