While his career progresses, Tomine’s ego is bruised in new and more brutal ways. Illustration: Adrian Tomine/Drawn & Quarterly At a 1997 book signing, Tomine overhears the host arranging for his flatmates to masquerade as fans when no one turns up. As his reputation grows, the humiliations only increase. His early confidence is short-lived, as a bad review from the Comics Journal shatters Tomine’s perception of himself as the “boy wonder of mini-comics”, describing his work as “hip, muted, fragmented, overly-short short stories that this moron is trying to pass off as fresh and original”.
In the early sections of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, Tomine achieves his breakthrough deal and releases his first graphic novel with Drawn and Quarterly – for which achievement he’s angrily chastised as a “sell-out” at a comics convention. The epigraph comes from fellow alternative comics legend Daniel Clowes, who compares being a famous cartoonist to being “the most famous badminton player”: all the stresses and pressures of being at the forefront of an industry, without the fame or fortune to make it worthwhile.
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