Nerve center: Canada's National Post spotlights the work of cartoonist Adrian Tomine:

"The young have beautiful bodies but turbulent and troubled souls. The same dichotomy between outward allure and inward agony can be seen in Tomine's work. His drawings are always a pleasure to look at: With his taut line-work he takes fleeting moments of beauty and freezes them into a still perfection. Yet his stories are about pain, not pleasure. He is so good at evoking the social awkwardness of a first date and the ebbing of a faltering relationship that you squirm with queasiness as you read him."

Meanwhile, The Toronto Star chats with Tomine, who will be the first comic book artist to appear as part of the Harbourfront Reading Series:

"It's such a strange situation right now, because I'm very grateful for all the attention and acceptance from the literary world, but at the same time, I don't think that I, or most of my cartoonist friends, have ever aspired to that. It's a really helpful, flattering by-product, but we don't want to be thought of as the poor cousin who's just now being allowed into the family."

Not to be outdone, The Globe and Mail also previews Tomine's Harbourfront appearance:

"When I started working for Drawn & Quarterly and started getting distributed and getting reviewed, I became very self-conscious of the level of slickness and professionalism in my work. I really, perhaps wrong-headedly, went down a path to refine my style, learned how to make things look as professional and slick and inadvertently, kind of constricted. I think what's happened recently has been an intentional regression, trying to find some middle ground between the two extremes."