A creator of distinctive cartoons for both adults and children, Andrea Tsurumi’s linework is full of energy and heart. In “A Week After the Wedding,” she explores a shift in perspective while wandering, newly married, through a museum.
—Kristen Radtke
THE BELIEVER: How did this comic start?
ANDREA TSURUMI: A number of events converged: I got married and I had a zine deadline for INK BRICK, the comics poetry literary journal that my husband, Alexander Rothman, runs. He and I had been dating for twelve years, we’d been living together for most of that. We’d been planning the wedding for more than a year, so I’d anticipated the usual wedding planning stress but no real surprises, you know? But I hadn’t expected to think in a new way about changes to my family and being an adult in the world. So after the dust settled, I was walking alone around the museum, surprised by these unexpected feelings and also thinking about making a new comic, so I started taking notes and writing with that in mind. It came out as something bigger than the mini I’d planned.
BLVR: What’s your process like?
AT: It differs for different projects, but for this comic, I sketched with a mechanical pencil and wrote while walking around the museum, starting to shape the piece, then I went home and put it into rough order, which showed me which parts I needed to cut and which I needed to expand. I made more trips to the museum to sketch and also drew from their online archive. The comic went through a few drafts before submission, then more while working with the editor. Almost all the original sketches are the final (cleaned-via-Photoshop) art.
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