Lisa Hanawalt’s vivid comics and drawings have been included in The Believer, McSweeney’s, Vice Magazine, the L.A. Weekly, and Arthur Magazine, among other publications. Her genre-bending and hilarious debut comic book, I Want You, which includes both interspecies romance and freeway accidents, was published by Beunaventura Press in 2009. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

What initially drew you to the language of comics? How would you characterize your particular approach to the form?

LH: I started pairing drawings with text and using narratives as a way to make personal and cathartic artwork pretty early on. Lately my approach involves a lot of thinking about the most interesting, beautiful, and funny way to illustrate whatever dumb idea I just spent three days rewriting.

Did you set out to make comics, or did you arrive here by way of other pursuits?

LH: I think I wanted to be a fancy gallery artist, but I was so fed up with that world by the time I graduated from art school (at UCLA) that I immediately went into comics and illustration. And now I’m ending up in galleries via those pursuits—excellent!

Your comic for this series is a portrait of the great American road trip that is at once immediately familiar and completely unique. Did you actually hit the road to make this comic?

LH: Yes, most of the things in that comic came out of two cross-country road trips. First, in the Summer 2006, I had just graduated from college and didn’t know what to do with myself, so I drove from L.A. to Vermont and back. Then in Spring 2009, I moved from L.A. to Brooklyn. My boyfriend, Adam, flew out to California and we took the Southern route across and then drove up through the Mississippi Delta. The car broke down three times and we both caught the flu, but it was also pretty much the best two weeks of my life.

The comic has a mix of delightfully immature humor and rather pointed observations about our country. How do you strike this balance in tone, and is this something you often attempt in your work?

LH: Humor is my primary way of processing experiences and dealing with life, so I want my comics to be funny even if there are serious underlying issues. I think my most successful comics combine immaturity with universal truths and witty specifics.

Is there any topic you wouldn’t dare tackle?

LH: It’d be embarrassing if I ever tried to make overtly political cartoons.… It’s not that I’m completely apathetic, but I’m not one to pontificate. There are much smarter people with savvier observations about current events, so I’ll stick with the poop and boner jokes.

Lists and other explorations of a certain object category—hats, for example—appear in your work quite a bit (your comics for this series is a kind of list, too). Why do you choose to use a list to explore a particular idea or tell a story?

LH: It’s a great way to organize and set up jokes or little narratives. I always have a dozen ideas for lists and I’ll slowly add things to them until they seem finished. Some of them take hours and some take years to complete.

I had a list of “Worst Sandwiches” that I was working on for over a year and only just recently finished. It started with “peanut butter sandwich that doesn’t taste right,” which I couldn’t get out of my head and is a phrase barely worthy of writing down… but I’m glad I did! I swear it’s funny in the comic.

Your work often depicts a variety of anthropomorphized scenarios; what has led you to portray animals in such situations as shoe-shopping or hanging out at the arcade?

LH: Animals are fun to draw and easy to project emotions onto, for some reason. I prefer drawing them to humans, whether I’m processing something I just experienced (the arcade one was inspired by the documentary King of Kongs), or illustrating a funny idea (for example, birds who are obsessed with ornate shoes and also hide eggs everywhere. That drawing has 23 eggs. Can you find them all?).

You went to Comic-Con this year—how’d that go?

LH: It’s fun to see celebrities and other artists I wouldn’t normally run into, and I love yukking around with whoever I’m crammed into the hotel room with for that week… drinking too much and making dumb jokes. But it seems like less of the attendees are there to buy books every year and it’s become a prohibitively expensive show at every level.

Southern California needs a smaller show with more focus on books and cheap (or free!) admission, something more like the Toronto Comic Arts Festival or the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival (recently started by Gabriel Fowler, owner of Desert Island, the comic book store in Williamsburg).

Which artists have had the biggest influence on your style and sense of humor?

LH: The first names that come to mind… B. Kliban, Renee French, Dan Clowes, Phoebe Gloeckner, John Kricfalusi, David Foster Wallace, and my brother.LH: The first names that come to mind… B. Kliban, Renee French, Dan Clowes, Phoebe Gloeckner, John Kricfalusi, David Foster Wallace, and my brother.

What are you working on next?

LH: I’d like to write and draw a longer book. I’ve also been telling anyone who will listen that I want to make piñatas. I don’t know how or where to make them and I’m generally horrible at sculpting, but at this point I’ve told too many people and they’ll think I’m full of shit unless I make some!

What are the issues facing us today that you’re most interested in, concerned about, or motivated by as an artist? What should we be paying attention to?

LH: I can only speak in general terms here, but I’m concerned with the shitty economy, poor education, poor nutrition, health care, and basic human rights. Basically I love this country and I’ve got a wonderful life—anything barring anybody else from working and living well is worth paying attention to.