Adrian Tomine started making comics in his teens when he created Optic Nerve. In it, he tells stories about people who tend to be searching for answers to questions they seem to think everyone else already knows. After a few years putting out Optic Nerve on his own, it was picked up by publisher Drawn and Quarterly.

Tomine is coming to Seattle to promote his first full-length graphic novel Shortcomings. Seattlest used it as an opportunity to geek out during an interview with one of our favorite writer/artists.

You told The Believer that you wanted Shortcomings to be as readable as possible so you could reach a broader audience. How did you do that?
Well, I should clarify. It almost [sounds] as if I deviously sat down and said "I want to crassly try and make as much money as possible selling my work to the lowest common denominator." That wasn’t the case. Whatever audience I had, I wanted their focus to be on the content more than anything else. I just wanted people to almost lose sight of the fact that they were reading a comic, almost as if they are hearing the dialogue as if they’re eavesdropping on it.

A lot people talk about Raymond Carver as a big influence on your stories but who you do you consider to be your literary influences?
I think one of the things that indirectly affected me quite a bit in working on Shortcomings was a lot of Phillip Roth's novels. Just the other day, reading his new novel, I suddenly felt myself in the weird position that a lot of readers of Shortcomings have portrayed when they come up to me. I wanted to get on the phone with Phillip Roth and say, "Now did this really happen to you? And how autobiographical is this?" I thought that maybe at some point, that had guided me a little bit in terms of the clouding of autobiography and just using the safety of fiction to probe even deeper into things that you might be apprehensive about if it’s your face right there.

It seems like books and other forms of art are a constant in your work. Like that New Yorker cover where the two people are sitting on the different subways and they see each other. The only connection that they have in that moment is the book. It seems like books, films and music have a major role in your stories.
That’s a good point. I guess it must sort of be reflective of my own life and my own personality in some ways. Specifically with the New Yorker, they've just pegged me as the guy who does covers about reading books. But I think that especially with Shortcomings, I was writing it at a time when I felt, in my real life, I was evolving and wrestling with my relation to the media-based youth culture. When I was younger, it was so important for me to be up on the latest bands and go to their shows all the time. I think that maybe it was a bit on my mind. Not the complete the disavowal of that, but the struggle with it where there's sort of a distinction between the real world and the things that you intake for entertainment or for culture.

On that cover, the man's look conveys a longing which is a pretty common theme in your stories, especially for the men and boys. Not to be presumptuous, but I know a lot of your work is pretty autobiographical, so is there stuff that you’re still longing for now that you're getting lot of commercial and critical success and just got married?
I think that some of the themes you're mentioning are, at least in my mind, a little more general than the way they get played out in my stories. They were materialized or physicalized in a very simple, romantic form. As if getting a date with the girl you see on the subway is going to fix everything and eradicate all sense of loneliness that you feel in your life.

Like our lives were in our 20s.
Yeah. I think that there’s certainly something about my personality that has sort of a pendulum or a see-saw type relationship to other people in terms of needing pretty intense periods of solitude. And then also at some point also being overwhelmed with a kind of existential fear of being alone. So I think that tension is going be something that’s at least in the back of my mind as I am working for quite awhile.

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 have a pretty deep history with Seattle, don't you?
I almost think of Seattle as something of a home town because I have a lot of family there. My brother lives there and throughout my whole life I have always gone there to visit quite a bit.

Do you have any favorite spots in Seattle that maybe you’ve drawn or something that we’ll get to see in a story someday?
I think it would require me to settle in there and get more of an insider’s feel for the place because the way I experience Seattle is pretty minimal. It’s spending time at my family member's house and then jumping in the car and going to Uwajimaya. I think that a lot of the real life settings that I put in my comics are not something I chose randomly. It’s something that I have to have to feel some tiny amount of authority about the area that I am writing about.

Adrian Tomine is speaking at the University Bookstore on Monday, Nov. 12 at 7 pm.