The trailer for the first season of “BoJack Horseman” is adorned with one of those savant-like Internet comments: “This trailer tricked us into thinking it’s just a dumb funny show when in actuality it’s dark and depressing﻿.” While Netflix technically classifies the show as a comedy, the episodes make you laugh and cry in equal measure, using humor to disarm you before punching you in the gut with tragedy. The show delights with animal puns, absurdist humor, and show-biz jokes—all threaded together by an otherworldly visual style, created by the cartoonist Lisa Hanawalt. It also ventures unflinchingly into those dark and depressing places, with no easy happy endings in sight—a multi-season meditation on what mental illness is, and what it does. Twelve new episodes, already hailed as ever more distressing and meta, arrive on Friday.

“BoJack Horseman” is the love foal of the writer and creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg and Hanawalt, whose comics provided the inspiration for BoJack’s look. Bob-Waksberg, who is thirty-four, is the self-described “son of two professional Jews.” He wears glasses and is balding, and has some beard stubble and a charming gap-toothed smile. His mother and grandmother, Ellen Bob and Shirley Bob, co-owned a Jewish book-and-gift store called Bob & Bob. Hanawalt has dirty blond hair and looks like John Singer Sargent’s “Madame X” in sportswear. She is an artist who started drawing comics at “the age of six or seven.” Their friendship took off in high school, in Palo Alto, when Bob-Waksberg cast Hanawalt in a play called “The Family Continues,” which Hanawalt describes as “a super-surreal play in which I had to pretend to give birth onstage and stuff.”

“I think we were kind of drawn to each other as like-minded weirdos,” Bob-Waksberg says, adding that the theatre department was “a haven for all these people who didn’t fit in anywhere else, as I think most high-school theatre departments are.” Hanawalt remembers hanging out with Bob-Waksberg in the so-called green room, which was just the drama classroom. “He would look at my sketchbook and make up little stories about the characters, and we would make jokes about, like, what kind of TV shows we’d make, although I don’t think either of us honestly thought we’d be doing that later in life.” Bob-Waksberg’s memory is similar. “I think we had a mutual prep period or something where we both didn’t have to go to class, and we’d just, like, sit in the green room and chat all day. She would doodle stuff and I would, like, make up voices for them, or we’d talk about different cartoon characters we made up. I don’t think either of us assumed we would one day be actually professionally making a cartoon together.”

Bob-Waksberg went to college in New York, while Hanawalt went to art school in Los Angeles. They stayed in touch through LiveJournal, collaborating long distance on a Web comic called “Tip Me Over Pour Me Out,” which was about Bob-Waksberg’s experiences dating in New York. Of art school, Hanawalt says, “I was doing mostly, like, really big, weird, funny paintings, and ceramics and photography. And I kind of didn’t know what I was gonna do when I graduated.” The big, weird, funny paintings were “all really silly,” she says. “A lot of them were, like, just weird juxtapositions of things. Like car crashes and monkeys fighting. There was one that was just a pile of military equipment and tanks surrounded by giant owls.”

She says that some classmates were unsure how to take her work, which was both gruesome and jokey. “I always thought that a lot of the art world takes itself way too seriously. Or, like, a lot of the art world, I feel like they don’t know what to do with funny women. Men can get away with being flippant in a gallery setting in a way that women can’t.” The absurdist grotesquerie of male fine artists such as Paul McCarthy, with his sculptures of gnomes holding butt plugs, springs to mind.

After college, Hanawalt took a job as a secretary in Glendale, coming home at night to draw. The gallery-painter path that she’d envisioned didn’t pan out. “I was, like, ‘I’ll get solo shows in Chelsea, that’s what I’ll do!’ That didn’t happen, so I went back to comics,” she says. She freelanced as an illustrator for publications like Vice, augmenting that income by doing pet portraits that she’d “trade for beer and money.” She met other cartoonists through making comics, and moved from L.A. to Brooklyn to hang out with them more often. “My disposition is that of a cartoonist,” she says. “We’re all kinda, like, funny weirdos who don’t take ourselves very seriously.”

Lisa Hanawalt, whose comics provided the inspiration for BoJack’s look, says she has been obsessed with drawing anthropomorphized animals for as long as she can remember. Photograph by Ross Mantle

In Brooklyn, she shared a studio with “a bunch of other women cartoonists, and we called it Pizza Island.” Those other cartoonists included Julia Wertz (“Tenements, Towers and Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York”), Sarah Glidden (“Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches From Turkey, Syria, and Iraq”), Domitille Collardey, Kate Beaton (“Hark! A Vagrant”), and Meredith Gran (“Octopus Pie”), a veritable Who’s Who of hyper-talented women currently working in indie comics and illustration. They met I.R.L., through the local Brooklyn D.I.Y.-comics community, where they had tables at book and zine fairs, and through the Internet, where they read one another’s Web comics.

Hanawalt scraped together rent through freelance illustration work and by selling comics and original art at festivals. When I ask what her professional plan was before “BoJack” appeared in her life, she admits, “I really didn’t have a plan. I guess I find it best not to have a plan, ’cause then I’m not disappointed. I don’t know if that’s the best strategy for most people, but I sort of always assume everything’s going to fail. So I’ve got a Plan B and a Plan C, and I’m always, like, ‘Maybe I’ll just move to the desert and make pots.’ ”

Hanawalt has been obsessed with drawing anthropomorphized animals for as long as she can remember. “I just really have always loved animals. I’ve always been focussed on them. I’m not quite sure where that comes from. That feels like a part of my DNA, honestly,” she says. She has also been obsessed with horses since she was a kid, and rides them whenever she can. When I ask what she loves about horses, she says, “Oh, if only I could answer that question. I don’t know! They’re so intrinsically good. It’s like asking why someone likes ice cream. It makes me feel good to look at them. I wish I didn’t like them because they’re, like, very dangerous and unpredictable. Like, I was riding a horse the other day, and she’s a really solid horse, like, she thinks about things before she reacts. And she saw a bucket, someone had left a bucket where there’s not supposed to be a bucket, and she found that to be terrifying. I had to get off her, because I was, like, I’m gonna fall if I keep trying to ride near this bucket.” She relates to the horse, and describes herself as a “super-anxious person” plagued by personal scary buckets.