The Loneliness of The Long-Distance Cartoonist
"I retreat into it, and hide behind it, and I've been doing that for most of my life."
- Adrian about his work on comics
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Bear with me the thoughts, well... if you can. Because this isn't simply a matter of liking or disliking, for the book or even the artist. I guess because Adrian's work is arguably the kind that people don't agree upon. After all, it doesn't quite impress you with a creative plot or something necessarily new .. I guess it depends on what you feel about it, you either like it or not. And in his memoir I felt he showed how some people don't feel any unique thing in his work.
"You know, I ... I never set out to re-invent the wheel, and, uh ... the term 'Graphic Novel' is really just a fancy way of saying 'comics for grown-ups' "
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From his work, I read 3 books of Optic Nerve, liked the first one very much .. but with the second and the third (I liked them) but not as much as the first one, where the stories were shorter and with the second & the third he made each story longer than the previous ones. But there's one story that I remembered while reading his memoir, that story in "Summer Blonde" where a writer needed a thing in his life to make another successful book .. I felt that story was really personal to him.
In this book, his memoir I believed summarized his general ways with comics, a little bit sad, awkward, strange or funny, but pitiful .. and I think he made it with different times so he could tell short stories here and there, and changing the style as he pleases. Like the style of the interview in the middle of the book ... that part, I really liked that part. The book really gets to the point where it's funny and really good from the middle to the end, where Adrian approaches his memoir with different styles to the situations, creating a combination of his events that represent his style .. and certainly how comics/graphic novels in general are very simple, and its simplicity comes to create a personal beauty that a few people in this world will care about.
"And that's basically what cartooning is all about; using simple drawings to send an idea from my mind to yours."
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