From the Horse’s Mouth

In 2013, shortly after I gave birth to my daughter, the Canadian publisher Drawn and Quarterly sent me a copy of My Dirty Dumb Eyes, by Lisa Hanawalt. Her art and writing made me laugh out loud through the mire of postpartum depression, and I’ve been a devoted fan ever since. So this June I direct-messaged her to ask if she might draw the cover for our Summer Issue; to my delight, she accepted. In an early sketch, Hanawalt included some made-up coverlines, which I wished were real: Jessipa Jonesky: Talking to Ghosts at the Local Diner; Allain St. Brewing: Donkeys, Doorknobs, and Dubrivnik; Chilm Timbers: Where Did I Put My Car Keys?; Cindy Chomps: Ballet on the Playground; Santiago Biggle: Kafka’s Lost Poems; Bageta Suzsmith: Trick-or-Treat in Outerspace; Verily Spivak: I’m Too Cold to Go Swimming; Omar Meerkowtow: High School Dances and Broadway Revivals. Lisa Hanawalt: Draft for New York Review cover Hanawalt’s genius, I think, is in her evocation of the bodily and disembodied absurdities of being human and animal at the same time. She is best known as the creator of the television series BoJack Horseman (2014–2020), about a depressed horse-man, which Adam Thirlwell called, enthu...