When I emailed Simon Hanselmann about doing this interview, he responded: “Let’s hit this shit. Just got home from breaking into a construction site.” The email was sent at 6am.

What was he doing at a construction site? Following a heavy drinking session in Melbourne with his friend and fellow artist HTMLflowers, the two of them had climbed a 12-storey crane. “Beautiful views of the city,” he muses. “Very, very easily could have died. They really need better security at that site.”

Part one of Hot Shave, from Megg and Mogg in Amsterdam by Simon Hanselmann. Illustration: Fantagraphics

When not putting himself in mortal danger, Simon Hanselmann is responsible for the cult comic series Megg, Mogg and Owl. “If I don’t do stupid things every now and then, I will run out of stupid things for Megg and Mogg to do,” he says. “If I stop being a fuck-up, then Megg and Mogg will soon just be about managing European translations and Skyping with network executives.”

The comics based on Hanselmann’s “stupid things” have garnered acclaim from audiences as diverse as the Paris Review literary magazine and 4chan, the anarchic and often controversial online community. Ostensibly a stoner sitcom, Megg, Mogg and Owl is a playful riff on Helen Nicoll and Jan Pienkowski’s beloved Meg and Mog picture book series, a “slice of life” comic where that life revolves around ingesting large quantities of narcotics and Megg and Mogg’s awkward sexual relationship. Megg has appeared as both Millais’s Ophelia and a pornographic centrefold in pizza underwear, which gives you some idea of Hanselmann’s range. Owl sometimes tries to break out of their destructive lifestyle: get a job, get a steady girlfriend. Sometimes they are joined by Werewolf Jones, a sociopathic “party bro”; Booger, who Hanselmann has described as a “gender-illusionist bogeyman”; and a series of stock fantasy/children’s character types such as robots and wizards. All of them engage in the various wonders and grotesqueries that a humanoid – or feline – body can, inside Hanselmann’s desolate suburban world.

If I don’t do stupid things every now and then, I will run out of stupid things for Megg and Mogg to do Simon Hanselmann

Hanselmann seems both delighted and repelled by the human body; he refers to his own as “animated, sentient meat”. “I am full of impulses to shove animal matter into my poorly designed facial rot hole,” he says. “I must endlessly defecate. I need to fuck. I need to be fucked. It’s fantastic and terrifying. Fascinating. Pointless, swirling molecules. But, yeah, having a fun time. I spent $300 on a T-shirt last week.”

Despite its seemingly juvenile subject matter and superficial simplicity (“My comics are meat and potatoes,” he says), Hanselmann’s work explores addiction, depression and everyday anxiety with precision and subtlety. The story Megg’s Depression, for instance, uses the ambiguous nature of time inherent to the comic book form (it’s hard to tell how much time passes from one frame to the next) to mimic the persistent, crippling inactivity of depression.

And yet, formally, Hanselmann likes unadorned designs: most of his work is arranged in neat, four-by-three grids. “I just want my action (or lack of action) to run smoothly,” he says. “I think all that fancy design shit gets in the way of reading comics.” He finds the layouts of most modern comics “horrifying” and Chris Ware’s recent output confusing, as he doesn’t know “where to go next”. “I believe in the grid,” he says, describing the grid-centric cartoonist Frank Santoro as his “L Ron Hubbard”.

‘One of the main strengths of Megg, Mogg and Owl is that it’s reasonably gender-neutral’ … Simon Hanselmann. Photograph: Fantagraphics

The son of a biker and a drug addict, Hanselmann was born in Launceston, Tasmania, and grew up in Hobart. In a 2013 interview with the Comics Journal, he compared his childhood to the Harmony Korine film Gummo (a vision of “teenage anomie, complete with drugs, garbage and dead cats”, in the words of the New York Times). In that same interview, he came out publicly as a “cross-dresser/transvestite, whatever you want to call it”. His treatment of gender roles, and how his cross-dressing affects this, is a popular topic in interviews, one he sometimes side-steps. “I have no idea [how it affects my writing]. That’s for the critics to tell me,” he recently told Format Magazine. He is fiercely aware of gender; when talking about a potential TV adaption of Megg, Mogg and Owl, he says that the one thing he demands of networks is “half the team has to be female. I don’t want to make a show for boys … I think one of the main strengths of Megg, Mogg and Owl is that it’s reasonably gender-neutral – although, Megg really needs to find some female friends.”

In the era of Adult Swim, that Megg, Mogg and Owl has not yet been adapted as a cartoon is surprising. Back in 2013, Hanselmann was desperate for a TV show; he wanted Lindsay Lohan to play Megg. Speaking to Comic Book Resources in 2014, he claimed he might have botched a deal with the network involved, by insisting on retaining rights to all the characters. He has since been in touch with most of the major networks – but isn’t bothered about the lack of progress. “I ain’t gonna beg,” he says.

Still, Hanselmann says TV has been a bigger influence on his work than most comics: “You can’t have dead space – shit has to keep moving, shit has to be tight,” he says. “I’ve learned all of my most valuable lessons from Seinfeld, The Simpsons and Sabrina the Teenage Witch.”

Scene from Megg and Mogg in Amsterdam by Simon Hanselmann. Photograph: Fantagraphics

4chan users were early adopters of Hanselmann’s work, but his editorial decisions have upset a lot of them – particularly a comic strip where Megg, Mogg and Werewolf Jones pretend to rape Owl as a “prank” on his birthday. “It’s a harsh episode – it makes a lot of readers very uncomfortable,” he says. “A lot of readers claim that the assault is glossed over. I disagree, as that incident stands as the main catalyst for Owl removing himself from the friendship group.”

Perhaps predictably, 4chan’s users objected not to the “rape prank” itself, but to the impression of censorship. “When I was putting a book together,” Hanselmann recalls, “I realised that it made more sense (for later in the story) for Megg and Mogg to not really fully know what they were doing, and I changed a line from, ‘We’re going to rape you’ to, ‘We’re going to do you.’” He was, in Hanselmann’s words, accused of being a “social justice warrior”. “Not our precious rape jokes!” Hanselmann mocks gleefully. “Noooo!”

Hanselmann loves reading comments from the notoriously aggressive 4chan community. His personal life comes up a lot. When reflecting on them and the “rape prank” episode, he gave me something bordering on a mission statement: “People are horrible. People are cruel. People are abused. Social circles, especially in small towns, can get fucking nasty. I just write what I see and what I’ve experienced. I don’t deliberately set out to aggravate or shock. I don’t censor myself. You need to be honest. You need to not hold back. I hate twee art. I find it dishonest; a false, privileged construct. Life is not nice. Existence is sad and cruel.” That could describe Megg, Mogg and Owl. Hanselmann’s work is as puerile as it is tragic, tasteless as it is tender. It can also be, like life, very funny.