Tomer Hanuka

June 3, 2009
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FormatMag recently had a chance to sit down with the amazingly talented illustrator known as Tomer Hanuka. Tomer calls NYC his home, and describes himself as a cartoonist who has worked on a number of projects, ranging from magazines, to films, ads and everything in between. Regarding his formidable years, Tomer states: “I grew up in Israel where the sun bleaches out the color out of everything, and early on got hooked on comics. This was the late 70′s and for production reasons mostly, the colors in these pamphlets where pumped to the max. I want to say it was escapism, but I had a terrific childhood. It was exotic, the whole idea of superheroes, visual icons, worlds within panels. My brother and I lived in those panels as much as we did outside of them, and soon enough we started constructing our own.

On working with his brother, branching out and re-joining forces, Tomer explains: “We have complimentary skills and no ego issues so it’s perfect grounds for collaboration. We share a similar value system and when there is a disagreement and there always is, we can zoom out and reconsider. We took what was quite a hermetic childhood of drawing together in the same bedroom, on the same desk, and sometimes on the same piece of paper, we took that and for a decade or so went to very different, even opposing destinies, trying to define ourselves through a personal aesthetic that was individual only to each of us and independent of the other. If you boil it down to the most general terms, it means Europe versus the U.S., once that was established, and each of us had his own sense of self, the road to working on the same piece paper again seemed like the natural next step.” Be sure to check out the full interview at FormatMag.