Hi, I'm J.S. Fan Busker from Atlanta. The Sound of Young America is an independent production supported by listeners like you and me.

If you'd like to donate to support the show, visit MaximumFun.org and click on Donate.

Live on tape from my house in Los Angeles. I'm Jesse Thorn and this is the Sound of Young America from MaximumFun.org.

It's the Sound of Young America. I'm Jesse Thorn, America's radio sweetheart. My guest on the program is Comic Artist Ariel Shrag.

Just reissued were her three books, Awkward Definition and Potential, which she wrote and published while a high school student at Berkeley High in Berkeley, California, published herself in fact.

Ariel, welcome to the Sound of Young America. Thank you.

It's an odd circumstance to be republishing something that you wrote ten years ago. How do the works look to you now ten years later?

They basically look the same. I wouldn't say that they look any different. I guess I sort of have a...

There's some of the graphic sex scenes that I'm like, oh, my goodness. I probably wouldn't draw that now.

It's not that you didn't remember your life being that graphic.

No, yeah. I guess sometimes I'm shocked at sort of how brazen I was, but I think it's a really specifically teenage thing, you know, a sort of impulsive exhibitionism that comes with being a teenager.

These are really... I mean, exhibitionism is like a really powerful word. These are really intensely personal autobiographical comic books.

There are books that I could imagine someone writing in their high school years, but I have a hard time imagining someone writing and self-publishing in their high school years.

So when you started on the first, did you always imagine it as a work for public consumption?

No, the very first one awkward. I did just because mainly I was so excited by my first year of high school. I come from a really small public, I mean, a really small private school with like 13 kids in my class.

And so to then go to Berkeley High School, which is, you know, huge 4,000 student body was so amazing and so exciting to suddenly be with all these different kinds of people and just really felt like the real world.

You know, I had all these first experiences, my first boyfriend, first on my dried drugs, first sexual experiences. And so I felt so excited by this. I just needed to share and to tell everyone what had happened.

And so I definitely wrote the book with a sense of an audience, but I had no sort of idea about publishing or whatever that would consist of.

And I, you know, I've finished the book and I remember just sort of lying around the house one day and being like, Mom, what's going to happen with my comic? I wrote this comic and she's like, well, let's go down to the photocopies store and we'll make copies.

And so my mom and I went down to kinkos and we made, you know, 50 copies and then I just basically sold them to everyone I knew.

When you say everyone, you knew, does that include people that you knew like at school?

That would be kind of the extent of people.

...