Lisa Hanawalt interviewed in The Cut

To get in the head of artist and writer Lisa Hanawalt is to enter a swirl of birdwomen and horsemen, deep-seated anxiety, and many a sex joke.

Now well known for her work on BoJack Horseman and her own show, Tuca & Bertie (which Netflix canceled after one season but Adult Swim later picked up), Hanawalt has always been fixated on animals and neuroses in her work. The release of I Want You, a collection of her early drawings, comics, and flash fiction, is a way to see the connective tissue in her work now. The characters Tuca and Bertie — 30-something best-friend birdwomen navigating their busy city lives — make even more sense after you explore the friendships and romantic relationships detailed in I Want You. The Cut spoke to Hanawalt about the evolution of her work, diversity in animation, and telling dick jokes.

How does it feel to have your early work released after BoJack Horseman and Tuca & Bertie?

I made some introduction comics for it and assess this in those, but my ambivalence about reprinting older work is strong. But then when I actually look back, you can see the beginnings of a lot of my interests that show up in my later work. So I think if you’re a fan of my work, you’ll like it. Am I a fan of my work? Ehhhh.

How do you feel your work has evolved, and what came up for you while making these intro comics for the collection?

Some things are literal images that come up over and over again, like the sex bugs [horny bugs that frequently pop up in her work]. That’s something that comes back in Tuca & Bertie, and I always thought it was funny. And this preoccupation with bodily functions and fluids in a very infantile way. It’s the desublimated thing where I’m an adult but I’m splashing around in the mud. It’s so nice to see juvenile humor through a woman’s perspective. That keeps coming up in your work — showing women as equally disgusting human beings. It’s weird that that still seems subversive. The work I was making back then was trying really hard to take up space in that way. There are a lot of dick jokes in this book — honestly, too many. I was staking my claim, being like, I find this funny too, and I’m not gonna be apologetic or shy about it.

Have you always been drawn to the animal-human hybrid?

Well, I was born an animorph. [Laughs.] I can point to comics I made when I was 7 years old, and they were a horseman wearing a hat and sweater. A lot of the cartoons and things I watched were anthropomorphic animals, like Garfield and Ren & Stimpy. And I just liked animals in general. I was just really focused on them. At first, it was cats, cats, cats and then I switched to horses. Then for a while, I was a bird lady, and now it’s everything.

Read the rest of the interview at the link above.