Schrag's built an odd life in art out of different parts of it, trying new things in new mediums for new audiences.

But it's also simply about how one person can have multiple identities-as an artist, as part of a family, as part of a queer community, as a teen or an adult or a mother. Schrag's new comics collection, Part of It, structured around strips on belonging and not belonging, could be seen as a commentary on her own complicated and uneasy relationship with the comics community. This confusion and frank indifference, has only been compounded as Schrag has moved away from the comics form as an adult-she's worked as a writer for television's The L-word, written novels, and worked on the screenplay for an adaptation of Potential. Certainly, the comics community has struggled to figure out exactly how to reconcile Schrag's initial success as refreshing, appealing young prodigy, her growth as a chronicler of queer youth, and her final intimidating high art ambitions. The huge leaps in style and approach across Awkward, Definition, Potential, and Likewise make Schrag's output extremely rewarding-or extremely offputting, depending on how you look at is. By her senior year she was creating Likewise, an epic modernist/post modernist chronicle about her agonized relationship with her girlfriend and her own sexuality, structured half ironically around James Joyce's Ulysses, with multiple carefully calibrated formal shifts, including stream of consciousness narration, fragmented episodes, gestural sketch drawings, and obsessive self-referential interpolation of her earlier creations. Beginning in her freshman year of high school, Schrag began working on Awkward, a series of short strips with cheerfully rudimentary drawing chronicling her real life, pop culture crushes and conversations with friends. Some 20 years ago, without much notice or fanfare, Ariel Schrag created one of the strangest, most adventurous autobiographical comics series in existence. Features “It’s Still Just Me, Good Ol’ Ariel”: A Conversation With Ariel Schrag

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