Seattlest has a brief interview with Adrian Tomine, who talks about Shortcomings, his influences, and the letters in Optic Nerve:
Do any of those people who write those almost vitriolic letters you print in Optic Nerve ever show up in person?
Oh yeah. They generally want me to recognize them as the person who sent me the vitriolic letter. I have this recurring episode in my life where at almost every event there’s what I call “The One Guy.” It’s like you can spot him a mile away. Generally he gets up and has a long prepared statement about his own feelings and then it’s usually followed by a pretty confrontational or insulting question that I am the forced to answer in front of a group of other people.It’s amazing to me that somebody would even do that.
Yeah there’s definitely an atmosphere at a lot of these events that I do where I feel like people are hoping to have some interaction – whatever, positive or negative – with the other attendees. So I sometimes think it is a very misguided attempt on The One Guy’s part to maybe impress the girls in the audience or something like that.
You can read an excerpt from Shortcomings on the Drawn & Quarterly website.
