Meet My Art Friend: Kat Schneider
On transitioning from online comics to graphic novels, navigating personal stories, and staying flexible with online platforms
Welcome to the sixth edition of Meet My Art Friend 🎨 This is my interview series where I chat with artist friends about their creative projects, practice, and everything in between.
Today we are joined by illustrator, comics artist, and printmaker Kat Schneider from New Jersey. I first met Kat when she was tabling at Renegade Craft Fair NYC in 2021. We followed each other on Instagram and have kept in touch via the internet ever since! I hold so much love and appreciation for her ability to capture and communicate emotional, existential interiority into succinct comics.
Kat has been hard at work on her debut graphic novel I'd Like You to Like Me, set to be published by Random House in 2026. In this conversation we chat about transitioning from making short comics to a full-length graphic novel, navigating the responsibilities of telling personal stories, and connecting with artists as a freelancer working alone.
Meet Kat Schneider
Carolyn: You went to art school at Rutgers for photography and film. How did you make the switch to illustration in your career?
A few years after college, I started working at a bookbindery called Conveyor Studio assembling art books for customers. At the same time I was making drawings and posting them to Instagram just for fun. I had seen some of my friends start to make comics and share them online, which got me interested.
The switch was very gradual. I felt a lot of guilt getting into drawing as opposed to "serious" fine art. Doing any kind of illustrative drawing felt like selling out, which is what they emphasized at my fine art school.
Did you have to do a lot of deprogramming in your own brain seeing fine art as a more valuable art form?
Exactly. I discovered illustration is more inclusive. The fine art world is very much an exclusive bubble, and you really have to work for it. I like the idea of being able to share art to a wider audience and for it to be relatable to other people.
I think there's more of a possible entry point into illustration through independent publishing and social media, which is not possible in fine art.
Yes, that accessibility is what I love about being part of the illustration community. And your work is a perfect example of that since you like to write and draw!
Thank you! You're most known for your diary comics, which are wonderfully succinct while capturing really large and complicated emotions. How did you come to embrace the diary comic format?
My friend Meredith Park was a big inspiration. She doesn't make too many comics these days, but she used to churn them out. I found them so inspiring because she was really working through all her emotions through drawing. Then through her, I met a lot of different people in the comics world doing similar things.
How did your practice of self-published comics lead to your upcoming graphic novel?
The graphic novel felt like the natural next step. A big perk of working at the bindery was having access to print and bind anything for free. I would make zines of my comics and share it online and at markets. The more I got to know comic artists publishing graphic novels, I started to think it'd be really cool to do. I wanted to see if I could work on something longer than 25 pages in a self-published zine.
It took a long time to get a graphic novel book deal. I tried to find a literary agent for five years. Even after I got an agent, it took a long time for me to come up with a story that would work.
When you found your agent, was it through a specific proposal or your general portfolio?
I reached out to my current agent [Chad W. Beckerman] with my portfolio. Usually you have to approach an agent with a story pitch, but I thought I wanted to illustrate for others. I offered to draw somebody else's graphic novel, but he encouraged me to come up with my own idea. It's been a long process of figuring that out.
You're writing a YA fictional graphic novel, I'd Like You to Like Me, set to release in 2026. Most of your comics are autobiographical. How did you reckon with the switch in genre in your head? What have been some challenges?
I first started pitching my story to publishers as an autobiographical one, but then I freaked out. With the nature of the story, I didn't want to infringe on anybody's privacy, since the stories are personal. So I changed enough within the story so that it's not referencing any specific people. Instead it centers the general feeling of what I felt in real life at that time. The main character is technically me, but also it's not at all.
There's safety in being in a fictional world. Are you dramatizing what happens with certain characters?
Yes, but only slightly. I hope I am accurately capturing what it felt like to be a teenager working at a very Pentecostal Christian summer camp in 2008. That's really my goal, to be in that specific time and place and to have it feel like it felt to me back then.
I'm curious what makes your graphic novel YA. It's not always as simple as branding a story YA because the teenagers are protagonists. From a readership perspective, people who were teenagers in 2008 are adults now. Have you had discussions around the specific genre the book falls in, and how creating a work for young adults affects your story?
When I was brainstorming stories to write, I quickly found out making up fictional stories in my head was not for me. I need to base stories on real life. It's how my brain works. My agent suggested I come up with a story from when I was around 14 or 15, because teenage stories sell better. I wasn't really thinking in that way, but I understand why my agent does—that's his job.
A lot of YA graphic novels can lean more adult, just like how fictional novels can blur the lines of true story. I don't mind my graphic novel being labeled as YA even though I'm writing it from the perspective of a 31 year old. The themes in the book are accessible for anyone who's a teenager or older. So I think the graphic novel being YA might have been a marketing decision. Anybody can read it and hopefully get something out of it.
When sharing stories about your life, whether fictional or autobiographical, are there certain topics in your work that feel too private to share? How do you approach more private and vulnerable topics?
I consider myself an open book in most circumstances. But growing up as a conservative Christian pastor's daughter, you're told to not make any waves or think outside the box. I still have a lot of love for the people I grew up with, even if a lot of our views don't align. I want to take care to not offend anybody.
So when it comes to your own emotional interiority, you're an open book—but with other people and their stories, you don't want to assume.
Yeah, I never want to assume that I know everything about what a person has gone through. I'm very interested in the human experience as a whole. We're all able to relate about something even if we grew up completely differently
How are you managing the large project timeline of a graphic novel?
Pretty well! I like to get things done on time, especially with a deadline. I'll be done drawing the line art for the book in two weeks. [Editor’s note: she finished, hooray!] It was interesting working on the book because I had no idea what my pacing was for drawing, and I've never tackled a project like this before.
Line art is my least favorite part of the whole drawing process, so I'm excited to spend the next few months on color while watching lots of movies. It's like my very own adult coloring book.
Is it a full color book, or limited color? I know you're used to limited color from working with riso.
It's not finalized, but I plan to come up with a few limited color palettes. Each section of the book will have its own color palette depending on the mood and story. It's fun to limit colors and see what happens.
Let's talk about being a freelance artist, which can be really lonely sometimes. You mentioned how you built your career through friends and connections you've made. What avenues made it easier to connect with other artists?
Definitely Instagram and tabling at different fairs. I started following you on Instagram, for instance, after we first met at a fair. Tabling allows me to meet different people and get a lot of good face to face interaction. But Instagram is the biggest way for me to connect and it's where I've had the most luck. [The loneliness] is hard—I'm by myself all day every day, so I rely on the Internet to connect me to different people. It does a pretty good job.
Do you ever swap work with people or ask for feedback from people other than your agent?
Not too often! But it's only because I'm scared.
I'm with you. I just post and let the internet be my feedback.
Most things I post are not too serious. A lot of it is super introspective, and I'm not necessarily trying to refine my craft. I throw things online and try to relate to other people, and have other people relate to me. That makes life a little less lonely.
I do wish I had gone to school for illustration to get feedback. Even though I did go to art school and had crit there, I never had it for my illustrations. It would have been good exposure therapy.
You've tried a bunch of online platforms through the years—Instagram, YouTube, Patreon, Substack. How do you stay flexible through the ebbs and flows of these platforms? What do you gravitate towards nowadays?
It's hard to keep up, but I'll try anything for a little bit, give it a fighting chance. Ultimately, it boils down to what I'm comfortable with. These days I'm drawn most to Instagram and Substack. I love Substack because it feels more intimate, even though there's not a ton of crossover with who I follow on Instagram. But that could be a good thing—I keep discovering new people through Substack, and it's fun to have something more longform.
Thank you Kat for sharing your process, practice, and storytelling approach! For more Kat you can subscribe to Kat’s Substack
, follow her on Instagram, or join her monthly Riso Print Club on Patreon.Have any additional questions or discussion fodder for Kat? Leave them in the comments!
Thanks Carolyn!! 💕
I love this idea, and so enjoyed "meeting" Kat through your post! I'm realizing I have a lot of Art Friends as well, I'd love to begin a series like this to interview them!