Adrian Tomine discusses being called the voice of his generation:

It’s been surprising to me because one of the weird things about working publicly—I’m not doing these stories and putting them in a drawer; for some reason I want these to go out into the world—one of the strange by-products of that is that it makes you evaluate your relationship to the world. Prior to publishing my stories, I felt like, I’m really weird, I’m really different, I’m an outsider, I can’t relate to people and that’s why I draw comics. In my mind, I was flattering myself, I was thinking, I love the way Robert Crumb tells stories that are so imbued with his weird personality, celebrating his distance from mainstream culture. Then suddenly I start getting letters that say, “I know exactly what you’re talking about, I relate to you, you’re speaking to me.” On one hand, it’s nice, but at the same time, it’s cold water in the face to realize you’re not nearly as special and as unusual as you might have thought when you were an alienated teenager.

(Source: believermag.com)