We’re thrilled to welcome Christine Mari to Transatlantic!
Christine is a 23-year-old Japanese-American comic artist based in Los Angeles, California. She is half Japanese and was born in Tokyo but grew up in the United States. At age fifteen, she self-published her first book, Halfway Home, an illustrated account of a summer she spent traveling in Japan. Halfway was selected as a 2016 Great Graphic Novel for Teens by YALSA. In 2016 Halfway was expanded and published in full color as Diary of a Tokyo Teen by Tuttle Publishing. While studying abroad in Japan, she began posting autobiographical comics to Instagram. Today, she has over 140,000 Instagram followers and draws comics on a wide range of topics, from her experiences living in Tokyo to her multiracial identity and everyday struggles with anxiety and depression.
In 2020, she ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund Kokoro, a 300-page graphic memoir drawn from her Instagram comics. Kokoro explores themes of mental health, identity, and belonging through the frame of the author’s personal experience, with a simple, poignant, black-and-white art style that has been compared to Persepolis. Christine’s campaign ultimately raised $65,000, and copies of Kokoro have been sent to fans in 41 different countries around the world.
Christine is represented by Samantha Haywood and Devon Halliday.