Adrian Tomine has had a career spanning almost thirty years as a cartoonist and illustrator (Drawn & Quarterly, The New Yorker), which launched when he was just a teenager. In 2007 he wrote a graphic novel, Shortcomings, which immediately began to draw moviemaker attention.

But mainstream wasn’t quite ready for it yet. The story of an Asian American filmmaker and his relationships as he navigates life in California, Tomine was offered partnerships, but only if changes to make Shortcomings more “castable” were made. Not about to do a one-eighty on his story, Tomine declined.

Fast forward some fifteen years into a much more diverse film landscape and Shortcomings has been revisited, finally finding its way to the big screen. The film is directed by Randall Park and stars Justin H. Min, Sherry Cola and Ally Maki. Tomine and I spoke about the story and his experience shifting between graphic novelist and screenwriter.

Tell me about the origins of this project and its journey from comic series to feature film.

It’s a graphic novel and I think the very first inklings of it came to me around 2000. The finished book came out in 2007, and for what it was, it did pretty well. It was reviewed in the New York Times and made it to their bestseller list… all of these things happened which were unexpected. As a result of that, I started to get some calls from people in Hollywood. But all of the initial meetings I had were so disheartening – what people had in mind about what they wanted to do, or what my involvement would or would not be, was just not very appealing to me.

So, I said no to everything. This was when I was young and didn’t have a family to worry about – I was able to say, “Those people didn’t have the right idea.” I spent four months writing my own script of how I thought it should be adapted into a screenplay. I presented it to a bunch of people through my agents… and again, the response was disappointing. There were people who I met with who said that the character development was good, that the humor was great… all of these things that they liked about it, but they felt that it was this inherently flawed project at that time.

Adrian Tomine

They wouldn’t come out and explicitly say what they meant, but they would say, “We think that the way you’ve written it, is not very castable, and we’d like you to consider rewriting it in a way that we’d have a broader range of options in terms of casting.”

There were people who were very much on my side, but also realistic about the industry at the time, and they said, “It’s not a studio picture. You’re not going to be able to get the kind of funding you’d want for this script.” Again, this was at a time in my life where I was doing fine as a cartoonist – it wasn’t like my whole life was depending on selling the script and I would be willing to make whatever changes were necessary to make it happen. So I just said, “OK, this doesn’t sound right… I’m just going to put this away for now.”

I basically set it aside for quite a while and it was only a few years ago that it came back to life. That was a result of a company called Roadside Attractions. They reached out to me about optioning the graphic novel as a TV series. They had someone there who, to this day, regularly goes to the comic store and scopes out interesting material and brings it back, reads it, and presents it. I was happy to talk to them, but I made it clear that I thought of the work as a specific story with a beginning, middle and end – not as an endless series. I wanted it to be a feature, and on top of that, I wanted to use the screenplay that I wrote. It was a little dusty, but I had it. They didn’t know anything about it, and fortunately for me, they were open to reading it and considering it as a feature instead of a series. Then they were totally on board and I started a multi-year working relationship with them right there.

What was it like to revisit this story given the landscape has changed so much since your first writing of it?

My own selfish interest aside, I’d been watching the evolution with great interest. There’s an egocentric part of me that was watching all these changes in the last few years and thinking, “OK, if someone doesn’t reach out to me about Shortcomings now…”

I would watch these different projects with primarily Asian casts that were coming out and they were doing well in Hollywood. None of them were quite hitting the same kind of tone or the same sort of style that I had in mind with my story, but I thought, “OK, the doors are really opening up now…we’ve had our Marvel superhero and we’ve had our huge budget rom-com…” There was a part of me that felt like if someone didn’t come knocking, I’d be pretty disappointed. I had been watching the evolution of the industry as a fan and as an audience member, but also as someone who had this script that had been created many years ago.

What was the initial inspiration for Shortcomings?

I was already pretty far into my career as a cartoonist at that point since I started out quite young. I had a childhood hobby that somehow turned into a career. It wasn’t like I set out to do all these things by design, a lot of it just evolved naturally. I was a very un-self-conscious artist – my earliest published material were things that had never meant to be published. There were things that I did in a book as a teenager and a publisher took notice and put them out into the world. 

So, I was really free and that has its pluses and minuses in terms of shutting out the outside world. When I started getting a wider audience, I would often have these experiences with Asian American journalists asking why I wasn’t telling Asian American stories. Was I hiding my own identity through ambiguous character designs or by not naming characters with last names? All these things that I can now see why they would come to mind… but I hadn’t been thinking about them at all. I don’t say that with pride, but it was just that I was telling stories. I think some of those questions from the journalists planted a seed in my mind. At a certain point, I felt like yeah, maybe I should take up that challenge. Maybe I should tell a story with explicitly Asian American characters? Draw them specifically to look Asian. Indicate their last names, indicate their birthplace in the opening pages of the book. Talk about things that might be specific to those characters.

Ben (Justin Min) & Autumn (Tavi Gevinson). Photo by John Pack

But at the same time, I felt a strong need to tell that story in a way that was consistent with the work that I’d done prior. I didn’t want to draw a complete line in the sand and say, “Now I’m starting this different phase of my career.” It still had to be naturalistic, it had to have humor. It had to be somewhat irreverent. I didn’t want it to be heartwarming, and obviously, moralistic or anything like that.

Up until that point, I’d been writing and drawing very intuitively, literally just sitting down and making things up. But with Shortcomings, I gave myself a specific assignment. I said, “Let me write about some Asian American characters, and let me do it in a way that I feel comfortable with, that feels consistent with my previous work. And let me tell, by my standards, a more ambitious story.”

This was at a time when graphic novels were just becoming a “thing.” I figured I would try to structure a three-act story and tell something that had a reason for it to start and end where it did, and eventually work towards packaging that up as a hardcover book that would be sold in bookstores. At that time it was all very experimental for me.

How did you approach taking it to the next level and adapting your own work into a screenplay? Did you draw on any resources or training or just put pen to paper?

The first version that I did back around 2008 was a complete learning experience. I had to figure out things like what software to type it on. I had no formal training, so it was similar to the way I had trained myself to make comics over the years. I read books and looked at other examples of screenplays that had been published. I talked to anyone I knew who had written a screenplay.

I was fortunate to have the guidance and friendship of Daniel Clowes, who is one of my oldest friends. He wrote Ghost World, which was adapted from his own graphic novel. So, in the same way that he was a great resource as I was learning to become a cartoonist, he was also a great resource as I was learning to write a screenplay.

That first round of work on it felt like dog paddling to keep my head above water. I didn’t know what I was doing. I’d become very well-versed in the language of comics where there was no translation necessary between what I saw in my mind and what I put on the paper. It would just flow naturally in the way that someone speaks their native language naturally.

Writing the screenplay at that point in my life, that was not the case. I kept having these experiences where I would know what I wanted it to look or sound like, or how it should be played out on the screen as a movie. I didn’t know what the right way to spell that out on paper was. So it was a learning process to get that writing style, to be able to just clearly tell exactly what needed to be told without any ambiguity, but without too much flourish.

Alice (Sherry Cola), Meredith (Sonoya Mizuno) & Ben (Justin Min. Photo by Jon Pack

By the time I revisited the script for the version that we see on the screen, I’d been doing a lot of other screenwriting in the interim. I became more comfortable with it, and it was a pure joy to revisit Shortcomings as a story. Most authors get one shot at their book – they write it and it gets published and then they have to live with it for the rest of their life. I felt like the world had changed a lot, and that I had changed a lot as a person and as an artist. To get a shot at revisiting that story and those characters fifteen years later with all that I’ve learned was a great joy.

Were there any particular scenes that stand out as especially difficult to adapt?

One of the biggest choices we had to make early on was whether or not to make it a period piece. When one of the producers asked me about that, I didn’t know what they meant. But the book was created almost twenty years ago, and normally, I never go back and look at my work. There were characters angrily hanging up landlines…and there was a whole plot element where one character in New York wants a character in California to see something in his city. So, that guy has to actually get on a plane and fly to New York to see that thing, as opposed to just texting a photo. So, that was a big decision and they said that it was going to cost X number of dollars more to make it a period piece. Was it worth it to use that budget to have a 2000 Toyota Corolla rather than a 2023? More importantly, did that add anything to the story to have it set in that time or could we save money and update it to the present day?

So that was what involved the most adaptation on my part in terms of altering the source material. On top of that, there were just a lot of little nuances in terms of language and attitudes. Itt’s a story that touches on a lot of subjects around race and sex and dating. All of these things that have thankfully evolved quite a bit since the book was published. It was a case of going through the script, line by line, and saying, “This feels out of date… I think we need to address this.”

How did you become involved with Drawn & Quarterly and how did that work set the stage for your career now?

I was a “conscious comics reader” in that, by the time I was eleven or twelve years old, I was already thinking that I’d outgrown the childish superhero comics that I first read as a kid. I was looking more towards the alternative or underground work that was happening at the time, most of it geared towards adults. From that early age, I was a big fan of the publisher Drawn & Quarterly, located in Montreal. I just liked the work that they were publishing, and it had this sort of small boutique family feeling – it was just a handful of artists who all knew each other. I think all kids have that feeling of ,“I want to be part of that club.” I don’t know why, but I wanted to be part of theirs. I was making comics  just as a hobby and self-publishing them, if you can call it that. I’d make little Xerox pamphlets at the local coffee shop and put them on the shelves at local shops.

I would put them in the mail and send them to the offices of Drawn & Quarterly. Eventually the publisher, Chris Oliveros, sent me a note that was a pretty blunt criticism. It wasn’t full of any praise or any offer to publish. It was just, “Here are the things that I think you’re doing wrong. Here’s what I think you can work on.” I took that as a great encouragement. I think it’s one of those things that you could get defeated by, but I was excited that he was even taking the time to address my work and think about it in a critical way. I took that as a great compliment really, especially since I was just a kid working in isolation in my bedroom.

I continued to send in my work and when I was in my second year of college, he called me up on the phone and said, “OK, I think we’re ready to start publishing your work.” That was around 1993, and they’ve published every book and comic of mine since then.

Do you still have that first letter from Chris Oliveros?

Yes, I do!

[More: Teresa Hsiao and Cherry Chevapravatdumrong Go On A “Joy Ride”]