Adrian Tomine (; born May 31, 1974) is an American cartoonist. He is best known for his ongoing comic book series Optic Nerve and his illustrations in The New Yorker. Early life Adrian Tomine was born May 31, 1974, in Sacramento, California. His father is Dr. Chris Tomine, Ph.D. and Professor Emeritus of Environmental Engineering at California State University Sacramento's Department of Civil Engineering. His mother is Dr. Satsuki Ina, Ph.D. and Professor Emeritus at California State University Sacramento's School of Education. His grandmother was Shizuko Ina, who was pictured in Dorothea Lange's photo essay on the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII. He also has a brother, Dylan, who is eight years his senior. Tomine is fourth-generation Japanese American. Both of his parents, in spite of being third-generation Americans, spent part of their childhoods incarcerated in Japanese American internment camps during World War II. Tomine's parents divorced when he was two years old, after which he moved frequently, accompanying his mother to Fresno, CA, then Oregon, Germany, and Belgium, while spending summers with his father in Sacramento. As a child, Tomine enjoyed reading Spider-Man comics, and was inspired to experiment with drawing and creating his own stories. In an interview, he said, "Something about the medium just transfixed me at an early age". In high school, he began writing, drawing, and self-publishing Optic Nerve, which he has continued producing as a regular comic book series for Drawn & Quarterly. Tomine continued to produce the series while studying English as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley. Career Tomine began self-publishing his work when he was a teenager, but was also featured in mainstream publications like Pulse! while still in high school. In an interview published in The Comics Journal #205, Tomine addressed criticisms of his work and discussed his influences; the magazine cover featured his self-parody of sorts, a sequence in which a hipster girl says to the reader, "I'm so cute! I love coffee and indie rock! But... I'm sad. Can you relate?" Tomine cites Jaime Hernandez (Love and Rockets) and Daniel Clowes (Ghost World) as two of his biggest influences. He is also a fan of his contemporary, Chris Ware. Optic Nerve Optic Nerve is Tomine's ongoing comic series that was originally self-published in minicomic format and distributed to local comics shops in his area. Tomine published seven issues of the Optic Nerve mini; most of the stories were later