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Adrian Tomine is enjoying just a typical fall of greatness—a new issue of Optic Nerve is out and he’ll be a featured guest at the Booklyn Book Festival later this month. And in the meantime, his new cover for the New Yorker nails the dread many are feeling when faced with real estate choices in a city where the average price for an apartment in Manhattan—AVERAGE, we said, AVERAGE—is $1.425 million. (The median price is $837,500.) Tomine, who has a small child, lives in the marginally more affordable borough of Brooklyn, where the median price is a mere $617,000.

When asked how being a father affects New York living, he says, “We live in a notoriously kid-centric neighborhood, so it’s not like I’m walking around, gritting my teeth, and thinking, Oh, the sacrifices I make for this kid! Most of the things that become difficult or impossible when you have kids, I was never really into anyway.” As for the teeth-gritting moments? “You can definitely drive yourself crazy thinking about the cost of living here, but I try to remind myself that the monthly check I send off is giving me access to a lot of great things beyond our apartment. On certain lean months, I probably remind myself of that with greater frequency and vehemence, and my wife probably wonders why I’m suddenly so rhapsodic about, say, a Bagel Hole bagel or the view from Brooklyn Bridge Park. It also helps to avoid that sadistic real estate feature in the Times where they show you, like, ‘What you get for…$150,000’ in other cities.”

 

.CVC_TNY_09_16_13_580px.jpgAdrian Tomine is enjoying just a typical fall of greatness—a new issue of Optic Nerve is out and he’ll be a featured guest at the Booklyn Book Festival later this month.