SATA

PERSONAL

Married.

EDUCATION:

Center for Cartoon Studies, M.F.A., 2012.

ADDRESS

• Home - South Berkeley, CA.
• Agent - Farley Chase, Chase Literary Agency, 11 Broadway, Ste. 1010, New York, NY 10004.

CAREER

Writer, editor, and educator. Worked as a graphic designer; has taught cartooning at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA, and Animation Workshop, Viborg, Denmark; The Nib, contributing editor, 2016-23. Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park artist-in-residence, 2019, 2021, 2023.

AWARDS:

Berkeley Civic Arts Grant, 2018.

WRITINGS

• This Land Is My Land: A Graphic History of Big Dreams, Micronations, and Other Self-Made States, illustrated by Sofie Louise Dam, Chronicle Books (San Francisco, CA), 2019
• SELF-ILLUSTRATED
• Brief Histories of Everyday Objects, Picador (New York, NY), 2016
• Spring Rain: A Graphic Memoir of Love, Madness, and Revolutions, St. Martins Griffin (New York, NY), 2020
• "ANDY WARNER'S ODDBALL HISTORIES" SERIES; SELF-ILLUSTRATED
• Pests and Pets, Little, Brown (New York, NY), 2021
• Spices and Spuds: How Plants Made Our World, Little, Brown (New York, NY), 2024

Editor of comic anthology Irene, nos. 3-6, Irene Comics, 2013-16. Contributor to As You Were: A Punk Comix Anthology, nos. 1-4; Silver Sprocket Bicycle Club, 2013-16; and Incubator: A Selection of the Best Comics Made by Art School Students from Around the Globe, Timof Comics (Warsaw, Poland), 2017. Contributor of comics to publications and organizations including Buzzfeed, Fusion, Medium, Nib, Popular Science, Slate, Symbolia, American Public Media, KQED, IDEO.org, Center for Constitutional Rights, UNHCR, UNRWA, and UNICEF.

Works have been translated to French, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, and Russian.

SIDELIGHTS

Andy Warner is a cartoonist and author who has filled the pages of comics and graphic nonfiction with his artistic visions and narratives. Already in elementary school he thought to become a cartoonist for a living. In his young adulthood, only after a stint as a graphic designer did he get an M.F.A. at the Center for Cartoon Studies, in White River Junction, Vermont, and start making his dream a reality. Although he broke his drawing arm in three places in a bicycle accident in 2007, he has been able to continue producing artwork digitally. In response to a Silver Sprocket interviewer’s observation that his work is variously, and sometimes simultaneously, “serious and political and lighthearted and fun,” Warner related: “It’s sort of hard to get a grasp on what I do sometimes, but I don’t mind that. I think the thing that ties it all together is that it’s stuff that interests me that I can really dig deep into. Oddly, that includes both the Syrian refugee crisis and the history of the toothbrush. It’s not difficult to switch gears, because I think my mind is working the same way in both: trying to figure out what’s really going on, and how to tell it as an interesting story.”

Collecting webcomic strips he had created, Warner made his debut with the expansively insightful and best-selling Brief Histories of Everyday Objects. From toothbrushes, razors, and shampoo to dice and billiard balls to toilets and cat litter to coffee filters and traffic lights and all sorts of other quotidian objects, Warner looks at how they were first fashioned, invented, or developed and where the idea, as well as the innovator, went from there. A Publishers Weekly reviewer observed that “each strip, though brief, has the power of a parable,” as themes like ambition, greed, and idealism play out. The reviewer praised Warner as a “deft cartoonist, able to convey a lot of information, humor, and emotion” in every panel.

Warner teamed up with illustrator Sofie Louise Dam to produce This Land Is My Land: A Graphic History of Big Dreams, Micronations, and Other Self-Made States. Casting his gaze around the globe, Warner presents thirty social collectives—intentional communities, utopian experiments, and self-proclaimed states—whose founders sought to create ideal circumstances for themselves and like-minded folks. From South Carolina’s Oyotunji African Village to Australia’s Principality of Hutt River, and from India’s Auroville (the “City of Dawn”) to the Coral Sea Islands’ Gay and Lesbian Kingdom, Warner looks at the views, practices, and beliefs that make these communities unique.

A Publishers Weekly reviewer observed that Warner and Dam manage to “capture the spirit and optimism that drive each society’s founder, while challenging … how people allow themselves to be organized” by their society. The reviewer hailed This Land Is My Land for offering both “inspiration” and “armchair escapism.” In Xpress Reviews, Martha Cornog declared that Warner’s “thoughtful collection about visionary living” offers readers a “tantalizing Rorschach test for speculation and research … and late-night debates among friends.”

Warner turns his gaze inward with Spring Rain: A Graphic Memoir of Love, Madness, and Revolutions. This autobiographical work portrays the several months the author spent in Beirut, Lebanon, while in college in 2005. Having just broken up with a girlfriend, he found himself in an unanchored, unstable state of mind. This left him room to befriend an open-minded group of expatriates, most of whom were queer, but it also left him shaken when the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri stirred up the ghosts of the fifteen-year Lebanese civil war, which had only recently ended. With mental illness part of his family history, he became aware of a strange internalized dissociation, whereby writing journal entries left him feeling like a character in a story of his from the future. As Lebanon gets mired in political uncertainty, Warner tries to muster the resolve to wend his way toward healing.

Impressed by Warner’s evocation of an “abstract, unnameable darkness” during his period of mental strife, a Publishers Weekly reviewer observed that his “artwork is tidy, detailed, and expressive, and he proves a confident illustrator of cityscapes, star-strewn canyons, and creepy hallucinations alike.” A Kirkus Reviews writer observed that Warner’s tone in Spring Rain is “matter-of-fact and dispassionate, which juxtaposes against the crazed desperation of his powerful artistic expression.” The writer concluded that “the political and psychological potently intertwine within this highly charged memoir.”

Tagged as another of “Andy Warner’s Oddball Histories,” Pests and Pets surveys the history of human interactions with eighteen different creatures, including dogs, cats, raccoons, mice, cockroaches, honeybees, and house sparrows. Along with anatomical and dietary details, Warner provides an accounting of when humans first encountered the animal and how the relationship proceeded from there. Dogs and cats were first domesticated in ancient times, while nearly all pet hamsters are descended from a female captured near Aleppo, Syria, just a century ago. The various creatures are loosely divided into the three categories of “Creatures we find cute,” “Creatures we find useful,” and “Creatures that find us useful.”

In School Library Journal, John Peters pointed out that the artwork’s “figures and action are easy to make out, and Warner lightens the informational load with comical side comments.” Peters was concerned that the author sometimes wades into “controversial territory,” such as when he details corporate chicken farming practices and even cockfighting “nonjudgmentally.” Altogether, though, he opined that middle schoolers would find Warner’s book “both droll and informative.” A Kirkus Reviews writer declared that the chapters are “informative and include enough jokes, quips, and groaners to keep most readers engaged.” The writer summed Pests and Pets up as an “entertaining, sometimes-sobering look at the effects we’ve had on the planet.”

 [open new]The next round of “Andy Warner’s Oddball Histories” comes in Spices and Spuds: How Plants Made Our World. Taking the long view of civilization, Warner explains and depicts how ten types of vegetation, as grown and harvested by humans, have shaped the way societies and cultures evolved. While rice, wheat, corn, and potatoes have been essential staples of diets around the world, sugar and tea have helped keep up the pace, and peppers added spice. Wood enabled the building of sturdy homes and furniture, cotton revolutionized clothing, and tulips showed advancement from survival to aesthetics. In treating the history of cotton and sugarcane agriculture, Warner makes sure to point out the role greed played in the rapacious colonizing of indigenous peoples and their lands and the cruelty of slavery. Appreciating the “colorful, detail-filled illustrations” and “chatty, conversational tone,” a Kirkus Reviews writer hailed Warner’s account of plants’ impact on humanity as “informative and eye-opening.”  The reviewer summed Spices and Spuds up as a “concise overview of a complex and fascinating history presented in a digestible visual medium.”[close new]

Warner told SATA: “I’ve always wanted to be a cartoonist. I had a comic strip in elementary school, and even did my high school chemistry reports in comic form. Managing to convince myself that it was actually something I could do professionally took a bit more time, but I got there.

“Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe series was a big early influence on me for the way that I think about history and humor. For my comics, journalism and more serious nonfiction, I was influenced by Joe Sacco, Alison Bechdel, and Art Spiegelman. I also read a lot of newspaper comics growing up, especially Calvin and Hobbes, Doonesbury, and Bloom County.

“I listen to audio as I draw—lots of podcasts, mostly nonfiction, history and news. That lets me accumulate a bunch of different ideas and narratives in my head that I mentally organize, and then when I think of a topic, like micronations, utopias, domestication of animals, or whatever, I can unspool all those different bits of information and leads. I then organize them, look for the narrative in the story and why it fascinates me. Then I do a deep research dive, go to the library, read the book I need to read or talk to the experts I need to talk to. Then I write out the comic, panel by panel, with no visual descriptions, just bits of narrative. Only when I’ve got a script laid out like that do I start to consider the page design and visual aspect of the story and begin the thumbnailing process. That leads to drawing, which means I’m again listening to audio eight hours a day while I work and beginning to file things away again for the next project.

“I care a lot my work while I’m physically creating it, and get a huge amount of enjoyment from the craft. But once it’s done, I find it hard to care about at all, and only want to move on to the next project. Turns out it’s the process, not the product, that keeps me going.

“I’d hope for my books to get people to reconsider things they take for granted. A lot of my work, like object histories of boring things, or deep dives into dog domestication, is trying to trigger people to pause and be fascinated by things that they had found unfascinating. The systems that surround us are always more complicated than we give them credit for, as well as less coherent, and I think that it’s good to think about that. I also want to provoke people to examine the effects of things—their own actions, the fallout of a new technology, anything. Look closely, and stick around-it’s more complicated, but that’s ok. Also maybe laugh at least a few of my dumb jokes.”

BIOCRIT

PERIODICALS

• Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2019, review of Spring Rain: A Graphic Memoir of Love, Madness, and Revolutions; September 1, 2021, review of Pests and Pets; September 15, 2024, review of Spices and Spuds: How Plants Made Our World.

• Publishers Weekly, February 4, 2019, review of This Land Is My Land: A Graphic History of Big Dreams, Micronations, and Other Self-Made States, p. 167; November 4, 2019, review of Spring Rain.

• School Library Journal, August, 2021, John Peters, review of Pests and Pets, p. 103.

• Xpress Reviews, March 22, 2019, Martha Cornog, review of This Land Is My Land.

ONLINE

• Andy Warner website, https://www.andywarnercomics.com (April 11, 2025).

• Evansville Courier & Press, https://www.courierpress.com/ (November 26, 2016), Terri Schlichenmeyer, review of Brief Histories of Everyday Objects.

• Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon website, https://jsma.uoregon.edu/ (January 26, 2022), author profile.

• Nib, https://thenib.com/ (January 26, 2022), author profile.

• Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (August 15, 2016), review of Brief Histories of Everyday Objects.

• Silver Sprocket website, https://www.silversprocket.net/ (February 24, 2016), author interview.