Sofia Warren has been a contributing cartoonist at the New Yorker since 2017. She’s also the author of the 2022 graphic memoir for adults Radical: My Year with a Socialist Senator (Top Shelf). Warren makes her children’s book debut with Film Nerds (Putnam, Sept. 29), a poignant middle grade graphic novel starring two best friends and budding filmmakers who are hard at work on an sci-fi epic. As they navigate their first year of middle school, Ami and Ivy endure the particular pain of shifting friendships while trying to find a way back to each other and their shared creative passion. Ahead of her appearance at the Brooklyn Book Festival on September 26, Warren spoke with us about the distinctions and parallels between cartooning and longform storytelling, the influence of silent comedy on her work, and her own early filmmaking efforts.

What led you to tell this story for this age group?

The story is fiction, but a lot of it is based on some core memories for me. I loved making movies as a kid, and those were some really formative experiences. I spent an entire year making a feature-length movie called Mary-Kate and Ashley and the Sorcerer’s Scone. I have spent most of this year trying to track down the DVD that I knew existed; and I found it! I just got it digitized. And it is almost unbearable to watch.

So there are a lot of similarities between me and Ami, though we do depart in a couple important plot points. There’s so much development that happens at that age that really sticks with you, and it felt fun to spend some time from this vantage point with the person I was then, and with the feelings that come up in middle school that still strike a nerve and feel really true now. Creatively, I found it really motivating to spend some time with those emotions and that age group, and to kind of rewrite the story a little bit.

How was the transition from working in the single-panel cartoon format for a publication like the New Yorker to sustaining a narrative across a whole book?

I feel really grateful, just on a practice level, for the gag cartoons—because it’s been a good exercise in creative generation. Coming up with a batch every week means that most of them will never see the light of day. It gets you comfortable with not being precious about your work, with trusting that other ideas will come, with rejection, and with figuring out the voice.

The other part of it that translates well is the economy of it. It’s storytelling in a very minute format, and it also rewards efficiency, in terms of like, can you say it in six words instead of eight? Can you say it in no words? Can you say it with a gesture? I find myself, both in the gag cartoons and in my longform work, orienting towards gesture and emotion and the physicality of characters. So that was a lot of fun, especially in a middle school space where my main character, Ami, is quite internal. The practice ground of the gag cartoons—of communicating emotion in heightened and different forms, with minimal lines—translated pretty easily.

And because a book is such a long project that nobody sees for quite some time, it’s nice to have in parallel to the cartoons, where I get responses from folks. So I don’t completely feel adrift on an island. I stay somewhat connected to whether people are resonating with my voice. Am I still creating something that people might respond to?

The chapters are interspersed with scenes from Ami and Ivy’s movie, Rovers of Time and Space, which are presented as film strips. It’s such a clever device. I see you went on to study film in college after making those childhood home movies. How has cinema appreciation informed your work as a cartoonist and a comics creator? Were there any particular points of reference in the book?

The visual storytelling aspect of it is pretty seamless to me. They’re similar worlds. Certainly, there are differences, but it feels like a lot of the tools that I learned in film school translate pretty directly to comics. My program was more of a cinema appreciation. And there was a lot of creative energy on campus [at Wesleyan University]. Many of the folks I met in that program are still close friends and collaborators.

As far as direct references, I wouldn’t say that the movie Ami and Ivy are making comes directly from anything specific for me. But I really love silent movie comedians, especially Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. My parents didn’t like TV, but those films were an exception that I really gravitated towards growing up. And I certainly think there are some similarities in the visual storytelling and the kind of vaudevillian acting that’s a through line in my work.

Are there more children’s books on the horizon for you?

I’m in the middle of working on a sequel, due out in the spring of ’28. It’s the same characters, Ivy and Ami, but Ivy is more the main character in the second book.

The voice has been really fun to find, and these characters I feel connected to. I’m hoping that creative kids find it and get excited about it. And I hope that I’ll be able to do more in this space.