ADHD ALIEN creator Pina Varnel brings viral webcomic to the page this September

The ADHD Alien has been quietly narrating the neurodivergent experience across social media since 2019. But this September, Pina Varnel’s viral sensation is finally returning to the page. Feeling Like an ADHD Alien, the debut graphic novel from Varnel, hits shelves September 15 — and it's set to be less "webcomic collection" and more Varnel finally letting Kiki, her alien stand-in, take up a whole book's worth of space.

Varnel didn't set out to build an audience. According to a 2019 interview with The Beat, she created the ADHD Alien character in the aftermath of her own diagnosis in 2018. She has said that when she got on medication, it changed her life dramatically, and made it almost insultingly better — which made her furious, because it meant all the years she'd spent being told to just try harder had been a lie. So one night, at 4 a.m., she got up and started drawing about it. 

She's described the process less as cartooning and more as homework: journaling what she's struggling with, tracing it back to its root, researching how others experience the same thing, and only then turning her notes into a script. It's a method she credits partly to Nagata Kabi's My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness, which showed her that deeply personal, nonfiction stories could carry the same weight as fiction — and it's part of why the strips read less like jokes and more like small, exposed confessions.

That 4 a.m. spite-drawing turned into an accidental empire: the ADHD Alien accounts have since amassed more than 550,000 followers across platforms, becoming a rare pop-culture space where ADHD is rendered with candor instead of caricature — and where readers say they've recognized their own inner monologue for the first time.

The road to publication has been a long one. Publishers Weekly reported back in 2020 that the project was sold at auction to editor Lauri Hornik at Dial, negotiated by Varnel's agent Jennifer Azantian of Azantian Literary, with a summer 2022 release originally on the table. Five years, one imprint shuffle, and presumably several thousand more therapy-homework comics later, it's arriving via Penguin/Rocky Pond Books this fall.

Read the official description of the book below:

Candid, comforting, and practical, this graphic novel is an endearing portrayal of the ups and downs of living with ADHD.

Kiki has always felt different from other people: She loses track of time, she daydreams when she should be paying attention, she questions all the rules and shows her emotions more strongly than her friends. But through trial and error (and error and error), she discovers her own ways to succeed and to connect with her loved ones. And eventually, she discovers a truth that makes all the difference—that she has been living with undiagnosed ADHD. Now, Kiki can get real help in managing her disorder and a new understanding of why she has been feeling more like an alien than a typical high school student.

Through disarmingly honest fictional anecdotes and enlightening interludes that explain the specifics of ADHD, Pina Varnel shares her own life experiences and hard-won knowledge.

Feeling Like an ADHD Alien hits shelves September 15, 2026.

Source: Penguin Random House