Ariel Schrag (born December 29, 1979) is an American cartoonist and television writer who achieved critical recognition at an early age for her autobiographical comics. Her novel Adam provoked controversy with its theme of a heterosexual teenage boy becoming drawn into the LGBTQ community of New York. Schrag accepts the label of ‘dyke comic book artist’. Career While attending Berkeley High School in Berkeley, California, Schrag self-published her first comic series, Awkward, depicting events from her first year, originally selling copies to friends and family. Schrag then published three more graphic novels based on her next three years of school: Definition, Potential, and Likewise. The comics describe Schrag's experiences with family life, going to concerts, drug-taking, high school crushes, and coming out as bisexual and later as lesbian. Schrag graduated from high school in 1998. She graduated from Columbia University with a bachelor's degree in English in 2003, and has continued to work as a cartoonist and writer. Schrag was a writer for the third and fourth seasons of the Showtime series The L Word, and for the second season of the HBO series How To Make It in America. The documentary Confession: A Film About Ariel Schrag was released in 2004. It explores the then-23-year-old Schrag's world in which she "negotiates fame, obsesses about disease, and discusses the way she sees as a dyke comic book artist." Schrag is a part-time faculty member at The New School in Manhattan, where she teaches in the writing program. Schrag participates in the artistic community Yaddo, and the queer-centric creative retreat Radar Lab. In 2014, Schrag published her novel Adam, which in 2019 was adapted into a film of the same name. Works High school comics Slave Labor Graphics subsequently reprinted Awkward as a graphic novel. Her follow-up works Definition, Potential, and Likewise were republished by Touchstone/Simon & Schuster in 2008 and 2009. Killer Films is producing a movie adaptation of Potential; Schrag has written the screenplay. Adam Adam is coming-of-age story which follows Adam, a seventeen-year-old boy who comes to New York City to live with his older sister for the summer of 2006. Adam is straight and cisgender, but is introduced to the LGBTQ community of New York through his sister, an LGBTQ advocate. During his stay, he becomes attracted to a gay woman. After being mistaken for a transgender man, he decides to maintain the deception to date the