Lisa Hanawalt Quotes

When I realized that people actually wrote comics, that it was a job people could do, I thought, 'Gee, these things are only 17 pages long! I could probably finish one of those and find out whether I suck before I've spent five years of my life on it.' In stumbling into comics that way, I discovered that I loved the form.

Drawing is more fun to me than writing. I think it's interesting to talk to different cartoonists about how those activities work for them. I'm a very writerly cartoonist. I certainly spend more time on the writing than I do on the drawing, even though the drawing, of course, is very time-consuming.

Cartoonists' dirty secret is that we tend to come up with stories that involve things that are really fun to draw.

I've been drawing my whole life. My mom says my sister and I were drawing by age 1. Animation seems a real, natural extension of drawing as a way of telling a story visually.

The writing process isn't something I'm in love with. I'm an illustrator who writes.

Growing up, I enjoyed drawing, but it was always in the service of an idea. I drew all the time, and I enjoyed making.

Writing and drawing comics for the sheer joy of it - that's true bliss.

I was a painter before I was a writer, so I was always a visual artist. And my writing, to me, was always visual.

I didn't have the time to literally write and draw the strip at the same time.

I was trying to be a writer, and I was kind of getting sidetracked, so I started doing cartoons as a form of expression.

All the pictures I could never do, I'll do it in comics. All the comics I do are the pictures I could never do.

I have been drawing and creating visual works my entire life, as long as I can remember.

For me, drawing is a way of navigating the imagination, and it remains the fundamental vehicle of my practice. Drawing allows me to be at my most inventive.

I was always most interested in drawing - most of my childhood drawings are black-and-white line work. And when I kind of abandoned comics, through college and art school, I was doing a lot of painting. But once I started doing comics again, everything else just fell by the wayside.

For me, who loves to draw and who loves to write and cannot choose between one or the other, the comic is the best form.

Doing graphic novels is cool! It's fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

After that I jumped, especially being in art school, to the illustrators.

Mostly I wanted to be a writer, though for a couple of years there I wanted to be an animator, because I loved drawing and capturing beautiful movements.

Well, everything surprises me about the writing process because illustrating comes much more naturally to me than writing does.

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

I have been doodling since childhood. I have a passion for illustrating but cannot paint or colour for that matter. I illustrate what I am trying to communicate through my writing. My images are like drawings in a science text book.

I always wanted to write something illustrated, and the Details strip finally gave me the opportunity.

The real power of comics is writing as you draw.

I probably get a deeper satisfaction of having taken a very good photograph than of having written something very good, a very good story. Maybe it's because the element of magic is so present in a good photograph - luck and magic, but also hard work and being ready and all that.

Your instincts for what's dramatic are the same whether you're working on a drawing or on a script.