During Pride Month, we are taking the opportunity to celebrate some of the many incredible queer artists that we know and love. Our next artist is the fabulous Ariel Schrag!
Ariel Schrag is a cartoonist and television writer who became known at an early age for her autobiographical comics. Ariel self-published her first comic series, Awkward, while in high school, depicting events from her freshman year. She later published three more series about her next three years of high school: Definition (about sophomore year), Potential (about junior year) and Likewise (about senior year).
The comics depicted a range of her adolescent experiences, from developing crushes to trying drugs, to navigating her relationship with her family, to coming out as bisexual and later as a lesbian. It was Ariel’s young age and therefore her closeness to the experiences that she portrayed that made the comics so honest and endearing. Readers who related to the clumsiness and vulnerability of teenagehood fell in love with the books.
The comics depicted a range of her adolescent experiences, from developing crushes to trying drugs, to navigating her relationship with her family, to coming out as bisexual and later as a lesbian.
After graduating from Columbia University with a degree in English in 2003, Ariel began working as a television writer. She worked on the popular series The L Word, about the lives of a group of lesbian and bisexual women living in Los Angeles.
In 2014, Ariel published her novel Adam, a coming-of-age story about a seventeen-year-old boy who goes to live with his sister in New York City for the summer. Adam finds himself falling for a gay woman and becomes inadvertently involved with the LGBTQ scene in the city, along with his sister who is gay herself.
Basing the novel on her own experiences with the New York LGBTQ community in her early twenties, Ariel set it in 2006. Though it was released only eight years later, it became a period piece due to Adam’s ignorance about the transgender community, which made more sense in 2006 than in 2014. Adam takes the typical boy-meets-girl trope and gives it a twist through an exploration of queerness and the presence of queer identities. In 2019, Adam was released as a film, which FF2 contributor Roza Melkumyan described as “charming in both its portrayal of teen awkwardness and the messiness of first and second loves, gay, straight, or anything in between.”
Not only does she bolster queer representation, but there are also few artists that have been able to represent the adolescent experience as precisely and delightfully as Ariel Schrag. Ariel’s cartoons and other writing projects are a welcome addition to the canon of queer media.
© Julia Lasker (6/20/2023) FF2 Media
LEARN MORE/DO MORE
Read Roza Melkumyan’s review of Adam here.
Read more about Ariel and explore her work further here.
CREDITS & PERMISSIONS
Featured photo: Headshot courtesy of Ariel Schrag.
Bottom photo: Cover image for Ariel’s graphic novel Part of It. Courtesy of Ariel Schrag.
