May 1, 2009
After her freshman year in high school, Ariel Schrag had so many cool experiences, she decided she had to document it, comic book style. She ran off copies of her first graphic book and sold them out of her backpack at school. The result: Awkward. She wrote three more, after each year of high school, and they caught on, well beyond the walls of Berkeley High School. Ariel Schrag is currently adapting her third book Potential into a screenplay directed by Rose Troche (of L Word fame).

She took a few minutes to talk with Lesbian Life about her creative process and life as a high school lesbian.

Lesbian Life: What made you first decide to chronicle your high school years in comic book form?

Ariel Schrag:I’d always just drawn comics since I was a kid. In 8th grade I did a daily strip called “Live it Like Me” that was loosely autobiographical. After my freshman year of high school I was just so excited about everything that had happened, and I had discovered this comic called Deep Girl by Ariel Bordeaux. She wrote autobiographical stories about sex and drugs and being a shitty waitress. That inspired me to write a comic that was more explicit than what I’d been doing before. All of my influences before had been comics in the newspaper. By finding her comic I realized I could do a comic and it could include all these amazing things that happened to me my freshman year of high school, which basically involved making out with people and doing drugs, information that I wanted to share because it was very new and very exciting.

As I’m reading this, I’m imagining it’s almost like reading your diary.

Oh no, my diary is much worse.

But even so, I could imagine my parents finding this. You must have had some self-censorship.

The goal behind them was to take everything that was going on and all those emotions and turn them into something that would be fun to read.

In terms of censorship, I just didn’t think about it in that way. The only moment of censorship that I remember is in Awkward. I had a crush on this older girl. I didn’t want to profess my love too much because then she’d read it. So there was a little of that. But then as the books went on, I found that the stuff people responded to was the more personal stuff, so I was encouraged to include more of that.

How did you first get them published? Did you self-publish?

I did. I wrote Awkward and there was 49 pages just sitting in my room for a month. It started to depress me. So, I brought it up to my Mom and she said, “Well, let’s go down to the copy store.” So we went down to the photo copy store and she helped me print up 50 copies. Then I just started selling them around school. They sold really fast and I just kept printing more. I think there was something about it being a comic book that made it more special, or worth buying to people then if it had just been prose.

So, you became known as this person who drawing comics. Did it affect your relationships?

Yeah. There was a bit of everything. There were people who were trying to get into the comic. Then there were the people I liked who didn’t want to be in the comic. It was this fun weird thing. I guess now, with the internet and blogs there is easier access to publicity. It’s hard to explain, but back then it’s like the comic was this center that everybody was in. It was a focal point. Everybody was excited to read the new comic.
I was very serious about creating something important. It was very earnest. I didn’t want to abuse the comic just to draw ugly pictures of people I didn’t like. I did that a couple of times. Only to people I barely knew and I would put them in the background. It would be an inside joke between me and friends. There’s that stupid annoying girl. The people I was in relationships with, I tried to be fair and tell the story as truthfully and honestly as I felt about it.

You have so much detail about certain conversations, how did you go back and bring all that detail back in?

I think because I was writing it so close to the time, the majority of it is just my memory. There was also a lot of obsessive journaling and photos and tape recording of conversations. But those are all triggers to my actual memory. In Likewise it’s different. In Likewise half of the book turns into being about the recording process. Where you will see actual transcriptions of taped recorded conversations and actual transcriptions of my journal that I had scrawled in that night.

I was struck with how at certain times, especially during the dream sequences, your drawing style would really change. It went from being a caricatures to being more realistic. Could you speak to that?

There was two reasons I did that. After I did Awkward and Definition people were praising it and I was getting a lot of positive feedback, but people were saying how bad my drawings were and it really annoyed me. I wanted to prove to people that I can draw well.
The other thing was I always liked in books and movies when different segments of reality were told in different styles. I like the idea of separating the dreams from the reality. I feel like I had seen the technique of making the dream a cartoon in a live action movie so I thought it would be cool to flip it, so my real life was a cartoon and the dream looks like realistic.