Nov 17, 2015 Optic Nerve’s Adrian Tomine and TVOTR’s Tunde Adebimpe at Skylight Books
Last week, my wife and I walked over to Skylight Books in Los Feliz to see Adrian Tomine read from his new book, Killing and Dying, and chat about his work with Tunde Adebimpe from TV on the Radio. We’re longtime fans of both Tomine’s Optic Nerve comics and Adebimpe’s band, so how could we miss such an event? We were actually the first to arrive at the bookstore and sat in the front row like the geeks that we are.
Tomine read “Intruders,” the last and most succinct of the new book’s six short stories. It’s also the most creepy and solipsistic. The other pieces are about relationships–doomed, damaged, or desperate–but this one is told strictly from the point of view of a displaced veteran who lets himself into the apartment where he used to live with his ex, and then proceeds to make it a habit. The protagonist goes beyond mere lurking or stalking and yet is as innocent as he is pathological. Or is he?
Fans of Tomine’s early work might be jarred by his transition from depicting young, insecure waifs seeking their place in society to older, fatter misfits in this collection. Still, his craftsmanship and the protagonists’ neuroses will seem familiar even if portrayal of them seems unusually warm, or at least not cynical.
In the Q&A with Adebimpe, Tomine mentioned that a lot of his readers had asked him if he’d follow up on his somewhat autobiographical Scenes from an Impending Wedding with a book about parenthood. He wasn’t into the idea, but said that his newer work has definitely been affected by having daughters. I think working on Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s pitch-black, slice-of-life works about postwar Japan may have made his topics darker–and more human–as well.
It’s also worth noting that the style changes with each story. “Horisculpture” (about a gardener transitioning into sculpture, or is it craft into art?) seems almost like a throwback to old comic strips with recurring title panels, thought bubbles, and sound effects; the pastel colors of “Amber Sweet” (recounting the struggles caused by a college student’s uncanny resemblance to a porn star) come off as cute and disconcerting; and the tiny panels of the title story are appropriately confining and practically claustrophobic (just like the portrayed family’s uncomfortable mixing of tragedy with comedy). But the stories are as lovely as they are sad, and always open ended.
To many, Skylight’s pairing of Adebimpe with Tomine may have seemed like a stretch. But they are old friends, and their relationship is documented in Drawn and Quarterly’s 25th anniversary collection. In the massive tome, the TVOTR singer writes about being a young, aspiring indie comic book artist who was devastated to find out that the creator of Optic Nerve was less than a year older than him. What hope did he have if Tomine was already so polished? Yet they became friends and Adebimpe went on to sing for a very cool (and successful) group.
Adebimpe pulled out a bundle of old comics to prove his fandom. He relished in sharing a list of favorite bands from one of Tomine’s self-published comics. At that moment, the award-winning cartoonist reverted to being a insecure high school student. It was a little uncomfortable. But when the topic changed, he was the confident-yet-affable master of storytelling once more.
When we got to the front of the line to have Adrian sign some books, he said that he thought he recognized me. Since featuring him a few times in the magazine Wendy and I helped make, I’ve seen him every now and then at Comic-Con and it was nice to reconnect and hold up the line for a couple of minutes. I tracked down Adebimpe to have him sign the Drawn and Quarterly book, too. He may not have made his mark in indie comics yet, but he will forever be in the same beautiful book as Tomine, Spiegelman, Sturm, Seth, Matt, Brown, Beaton, Bagge, Barry… Oh yeah, and me.
Look into Killing and Dying at drawnandquarterly.com and follow Imprint on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, too!