[4][5] Crabapple has remembered herself at age 12 as a "snotty goth moppet in a pair of Doc Martens, who blared Hole on her Walkman, drew headless cheerleaders, and read the Marquis de Sade in class.

[17][18] She characterized the school as being decorated with "fluorescent-lit halls hung with clumsy oil paintings cranked out by the previous semester of failures.

[4][25][26][27] Puppet Makers (2011), a steampunk webcomic that depicts an alternate history of the Industrial Revolution and the court of Versailles, was released for digital download by DC Comics.

Molly perched at her desk churning out protest posters and handing them to activists to copy and wheat-paste all over the financial district...After three days, the word went out that there was an apartment near the protest camp where you could find hot drinks, basic medical attention and a place to charge your gadgets and file copy.

[38] A fan of Taibbi's writing, Crabapple had read his 2009 Rolling Stone article "The Great American Bubble Machine,"[39] in which Taibbi called Goldman Sachs "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

[39] On September 17, 2012, Crabapple was among a group of protesters arrested during a rally to mark the one-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

In pitching the work, she wrote, "I'm interested in what happens when an artist leaves their studio, their cliches, and their comfort zone and draws beyond the limits of their endurance.

In 2012, Crabapple raised $30,000 on Kickstarter for The Shell Game, a project involving the creation of ten paintings about the Great Recession.

[53] Scenes from the Syrian War is a collection of illustrated articles serialized in Vanity Fair and made in collaboration with an anonymous source in Syria.

Most of the book covers the period in her early and mid-20s, in which she supported herself by burlesque dancing[10] and as a nude model for amateur photographers[57] in rented hotel rooms and the softcore porn website SuicideGirls.

"[10] Brian Castner, reviewing the memoir for The Daily Beast, said that "Drawing Blood might be the sexiest thing you read this year," calling the book "a remarkable read, dripping in old-fashioned sex, drugs, and rock and roll...a rewarding creation story, the tale of how Jennifer Caban, a shy and shame-filled Puerto Rican-Jewish girl from Queens, became Molly Crabapple: empowered sex-positive feminist, resident-artist of a worldwide movement, and producer of murals that have been compared to Diego Rivera, Bruegel the Elder, and Cirque du Soleil.

"[57] In May 2018, Penguin Random House published Brothers of the Gun, co-written (and illustrated) by Crabapple and Marwan Hisham.

The book offers an intimate view into the lives of three friends during the beginning of the 2011 Syrian protests through its descent into civil war and violent chaos.

Brothers of the Gun received several positive reviews, including one from Angela Davis, who wrote: "A revelatory and necessary read on one of the most destructive wars of our time...In great personal detail, Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple poignantly capture the tumultuous life in Syria before, after, and during the war—from inside one young man’s consciousness."

[58] In 2010, Crabapple collaborated with Canadian singer Kim Boekbinder and filmmaker Jim Batt on the crowdsourced, stop-motion animated film I Have Your Heart.

[59] Crabapple continued her collaboration with Boekbinder and Batt to create a series of five videos on political topics in 2015 for the media website fusion.net.

[60] In 2015, Crabapple, Boekbinder, and Batt collaborated with the Equal Justice Initiative to create the video "Slavery to Mass Incarceration".

[61] In 2016, Crabapple animated a video produced and narrated by Jay-Z, "The War on Drugs Is an Epic Fail", which presents a critical view of how federal drug laws instituted by the Nixon administration in 1971, as well as those implemented by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, targeted the Black community, resulting in the explosion of the nation's prison population.

[62] In 2017, Crabapple collaborated with Boekbinder, the ACLU, Laverne Cox, and Zackary Drucker on a video about transgender history and resistance.

[17][18] In 2012, Crabapple was one of several artists CNN commissioned to illustrate the theme of power for a digital art gallery pertaining to the 2012 presidential election, as well as the forces that drive debates over controversial issues such as money, health, race, and gender.

[68] Der Spiegel called her approach to writing unique, saying she had created a new role, that of the political journalist-artist ("die politische Journalistenkünstlerin"),[69] and in October 2016 Time magazine named her one of its Next Generation Leaders, "sketching from the front lines of conflicts in the U.S. and around the world" writing, "Her work is a perfect slow-media commentary on our current fast-media climate.