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Tom Toye AD: Do you want to introduce yourself? TT: I’m Tom Toye. I live in Brooklyn right now, but I live upstate too. I commute back and forth. I’m a printer and a comic drawer and sometimes a sculptor. AD: Cool. Where did you go to school? Were you “formally trained”? TT: Yeah, I went to Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. And it was a pretty good experience. AD: What did you study while you were there? TT: Illustration. AD: Ok, so you’re in between Brooklyn and Upstate? TT: Yeah, I stay at my parents house cause I’m paying off loans. Then I come down here [Brooklyn] and stay with my brother. AD: So you work in Brooklyn? Where? TT: Oh, yeah, Endless Merch. I do all the t-shirt printing. AD: And it’s a record label? TT: Yeah, and it’s a distribution/record label. We just put out a thrash-metal album but we also do some indie rock stuff.
AD: You do print and comic stuff? TT: Comic stuff. That’s a really great way of phrasing it. AD: Do you prefer the term “comic” or “cartoon”? TT: Either one is fine. AD: Ok, so did you get into illustration stuff first or did you want to do narratives first? Does that make sense? TT: Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. I don’t know when. I just always thought about comics, like doing shitty ones in high school. And then it just made sense in school, because people were doing them anyway. AD: Did you read comics in high school or as a kid? TT: Yeah, all through my life. AD: What are your favorites? TT: I grew up reading super hero stuff, and I still read that stuff. In middle school I started reading a lot of Giant Homicidal Maniac and was into weird, goofy shit like that. And now it’s just really independent, homemade stuff. That’s kind of what I follow now. I still have this giant stack from all these fests I’ve been going to that I haven’t read yet. AD: Yeah, I’ve been getting more into independent comic stuff since getting to Brooklyn. I just went to a Jonny Negron opening a couple weeks ago. And something for Printed Matter. There seems to be a cool community growing around comics. Is that an emerging or growing thing, or am I just really late on that? TT: Haha, I think it’s just that new people keep