Features

Molly Knox Ostertag (BFA 2014 Cartooning) has gone on to great things since graduating from the School of Visual Arts. Now a Los Angeles-based, Ignatz- and Prism Award-winning cartoonist and animation writer, Ostertag saw her career take off in 2017, after Scholastic published her critically acclaimed debut graphic novel, The Witch Boy, the first in a trilogy of books that became successively more popular. The series’ conclusion, The Midwinter Witch (2019), became a New York Times bestseller, and two years later she was named one of Forbes’s 30 Under 30 and Netflix announced it was adapting The Witch Boy series into an animated feature.

When Ostertag was a college-bound high-school student, she says, she had her heart set on attending the School of Visual Arts. “I just applied to SVA because I knew that that was the place to get the education that would take me where I wanted to go,” she says in a new SVA Features video. “It was this incredible time of exploring and learning how to really work hard. I was in this constant state of receiving inspiration and information and then trying to turn it out in my work.”

Since finishing the Witch Boy series, Ostertag has enjoyed continued success with her graphic novels The Girl from the Sea (2021), which debuted as a #1 young adult bestseller, and The Deep Dark, published by Scholastic last year. She has also written the Dungeon Club trilogy of middle-grade Dungeons and Dragons books and for the GLAAD Award-nominated and Peabody-winning animated Disney Channel series The Owl House, created by fellow SVA alumnus Dana Terrace (BFA 2013 Animation).

On top of her accolades, Ostertag has discovered the personal rewards of creating work that resonates with young readers, like a teen girl who had been bullied at school who Ostertag met at a comic convention in a small midwestern town.

“She had just carried this book around . . . like a talisman,” she says. “To make a book that feels like it is a friend when you don’t have a friend, that’s the kind of thing that feels vital. It just meant so much to me.”

Like any recent college graduate venturing into the professional world, Ostertag said she felt fear and self-doubt after completing her SVA degree and starting work on The Witch Boy.

“There is something about fear that is almost like a trail marker to say, ‘Go in this direction,’” she says. “So I started to ask myself, ‘Do I have the courage to pitch a book that is just myself, and who am I, truthfully?’”

“To every young artist, I would give the advice: pursue the thing that you are passionate about,” Ostertag continues. “Pay attention to where your fascination falls. Go into the wilds of your brain that you have to go into to come out with something that feels incredibly impactful.”

Watch the full SVA Features video with Molly Knox Ostertag below.