Adrian Tomine’s signing last March at Brooklyn comics shop Rocketship drew a legion of devoted readers. Eager fans admired the preliminary studies and black-and-white drawings for the latest installment of Optic Nerve while waiting to approach the bearded California-born cartoonist. Tomine was genial but observation revealed that his focus was rather determinedly directed at the task at hand: his precise, slightly ornamental rendering of fans’ names onto copies of the issue. The exacting style that characterizes recent issues of Tomine’s ongoing series entails a high level of absorption in his work, yet the social unease that distinguished his presence that evening is perhaps the most recognized feature of his stories.

At age twenty, Tomine signed on with Canadian comics publishers Drawn & Quarterly, and his talents were quickly recognized: The following year, Optic Nerve, which had begun as a self-published venture, was nominated for a Harvey Award for Best New Series, and Tomine himself won the Harvey for Best New Talent. Over the next decade, Tomine continued the series and published collections of it and his early work; he earned a degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and moved to New York; and his illustration work began appearing in the interiors and on the covers of magazines such as the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Esquire. It’s a fair bet that his new book, Shortcomings—which collects issues 9 through 11 of Optic Nerve and has already garnered praise from such literary luminaries as Jonathan Lethem and Charles McGrath—will only further secure his title as the “most masterful” and “most critically acclaimed” comics writer of his generation.

Tomine, however, shies away from such overheated designations, preferring instead to pay regard to the importance of other cartoonists, particularly his predecessors, writers like Peter Bagge, Julie Doucet, Dan Clowes, and the Hernandez Brothers. In this humble aspect, he couldn’t be more unlike Shortcomings’ hypercritical, sarcastic, and downright crabby protagonist, Ben Tanaka. Tomine’s Brooklyn apartment—as spare and unassuming as his stories—was an air-conditioned haven when I met with him on a hot day last June.

—Nicole Rudick

I. “IT’S COLD WATER IN THE FACE TO REALIZE YOU’RE NOT NEARLY
AS SPECIAL AND AS UNUSUAL AS YOU MIGHT HAVE THOUGHT WHEN YOU
WERE AN ALIENATED TEENAGER.”

THE BELIEVER: Drawn & Quarterly began publishing Optic Nerve in 1994, but had you self-published a few issues of it before then?

ADRIAN TOMINE: Yeah, I started when I was a sophomore or junior in high school, just making little Xeroxed pamphlets. Those minicomics were the most intensive training ground that I had,...