MariNaomi

MariNaomi (born Mari Naomi Schaal on August 2, 1973, in Texas; they/them) is a Japanese American cartoonist, graphic memoirist, educator, and community builder whose career spans three decades of autobiographical comics and industry-changing infrastructure work. Raised in Mill Valley, California, MariNaomi began making comics in 1997 as a zine creator and went on to publish a body of work that is both deeply personal and politically engaged — exploring mixed-race identity, queerness, feminism, and cultural belonging. Their books include the SPACE Award-winning Kiss & Tell: A Romantic Résumé, Ages 0 to 22 (Harper Perennial, 2011); the Eisner-nominated Dragon's Breath and Other True Stories (2014); Turning Japanese (2016; extended edition Oni Press, 2023); the Life on Earth trilogy for young adults (Graphic Universe, 2018–2020); and I Thought You Loved Me (Fieldmouse Press, 2023). Their work has appeared in nearly 100 print publications and been featured in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and the LA Times, and their comics and paintings are held in the Smithsonian, the de Young Museum, the Cartoon Art Museum, the Asian Art Museum, and the Japanese American National Museum. Beyond their own creative work, MariNaomi founded three landmark opt-in databases for underrepresented cartoonists — the Cartoonists of Color Database, the Queer Cartoonists Database, and the Disabled Cartoonists Database — which together documented thousands of creators and served as essential resources for publishers, librarians, educators, and event organizers for nearly a decade before MariNaomi closed them. These databases were a pioneering model of community-built visibility infrastructure for marginalized creators in the comics industry, and directly inspired the development of platforms like ComicBooked!. MariNaomi splits their time between the San Francisco Bay Area and Nagoya, Japan, and is co-editor of comics at The Rumpus.