EXCLUSIVE: Interview With Cartoonist & Writer, Ariel Schrag

The author of “Potential” and “Awkward” discusses her upcoming debut novel, being a lesbian in America, issues with censorship, and much more.

 By: Ashley Ramnarain for ShalomLife

Ariel Schrag began her comic book career as a young freshman at Berkeley High with “Likewise”, her first graphic memoir. She has since completed a whole series about her high school experience including, “Potential”, “Awkward”, and “Definition”. She even went on to create “Stuck in the Middle”, a comic about her experience in middle school.

Graduating from Berkeley High, Schrag continued on at Columbia University completing a degree in English literature. She has written for HBO’s “How to Make it in America” as well as Showtime’s “The L Word” and continues to work in the television industry as a writing consultant.

Her more current works include writing the screenplay for the up and coming film adaptation of “Potential” and an online comic series with her best friend entitled, “Ariel and Kevin Invade Everything”. Ariel Schrag is awaiting the release of her debut novel “Adam”, which is expected to hit bookstore shelves April 2014.

We recently got the opportunity to speak with Schrag about her graphic memoirs, upcoming novel, being LGBT in America, and much more.

ASHLEY RAMNARAIN (AR): How did a young teenager get started with autobiographical comics in high school?

ARIEL SCHRAG (AS): I had been playing around for comics for a while, had drawn my own fictional stuff as a kid and in eighth grade kind of played around with the idea of a, doing a, strip sort of inspired by for better or for worse. Like a newspaper strip. And I came up with something like live it like me, based on my family, and did like a few of those and then when I entered ninth grade I kind of became more familiar with the alternative comic book scene which was kind of big in Berkeley where I grew up in the early mid nineties and I sort of started to realize that, you know, there were comics beyond newspaper comics and that’s when I had the idea to make an actual comic book based on my high school: first on my freshman year of high school and then after I did that to continue the project every year.

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