Giraffes with Prayer Hands

Art Talk with Will Heff: Big Mouth, the writers’ strike, puppet shows

I started this project with the aims of speaking to creative people and learning about what makes them tick. This week, I’m excited to share my first conversation with a visual artist—an animator and one of my oldest friends, Will Heff.

Will Heff is a storyboard artist, animator, and short filmmaker with over seven years of industry experience. He’s storyboarded on projects such as Big Mouth, Star Trek: Lower Decks, Human Resources, Bless The Harts, and The Harper House. Most recently, he published his first comic, I Hate Zoo, and we spoke about his work on the project, animation, and the scene in Los Angeles.

Photo courtesy, Will Heff

It's funny to be doing this, because we obviously have a long history.

I was gonna say, I pulled out some of our old stuff and it’s crazy. We've known each other for, like, 20 years, and to see each other kind of doing the thing we were always doing as 11 year olds is insane.

Yeah—how would you describe the videos that we made? I feel like I want to call them puppet shows.

Yeah, I guess it was like a puppet show. It was just us making up stuff as we went. We had these really bad puppets, and it was like a puppet show based on characters I drew as an 11 year old that were essentially a mix of Homestar Runner and Mickey Mouse rip-offs. We recorded these stories and then sold the videos in paper sleeves, and people bought them. It's nuts that even as 12 year olds, we immediately were like, how do we make money off this?

Watching your career, it’s always cool to see that the thing that you wanted to do since we were kids you've built a life around.

Yeah, likewise. I have so many memories of being at your house on Friday nights, and we're either drawing or making lil guys out of clay, and your dad brings home a pizza.

So, we’re talking because you recently published a comic, I Hate Zoo. How did you start working on this project?

I work in the animation industry, and this time last year, we were in between seasons of Big Mouth. We were getting ready for the final season, and then as soon as we started table reads, the writers’ strike happened. So we had a good six months of no work, and I was mainly just finding stuff to fill that time.

I have a list in my phone of random ideas that will be anything from a video that looks like an old VHS tape to just nonsense words that will be, like, a funny name, or Italian Muppets. There was one that was a zookeeper who hates all the animals, and then a zookeeper who finds out all the animals are practicing Christianity. I don't know why, but something about a giraffe breaking his limbs to do the prayer hands just stuck in my head.

I have these blank, little comic books. I would sit down while I was watching Gilmore Girls for the first time with my girlfriend, and I was like, I'm just gonna start making something. It was a fun challenge. I tried to do it in five page chunks—what is five pages of this story that I'm figuring out to push this idea out, and it became a lot of fun to make.

The comic books; photo courtesy, Will Heff

As the pages went on, more and more characters and themes started to become more prominent. The characters look different on every page, but I give them what I call the Clue Syndrome, where the characters look different but I know that's Colonel Mustard because he's yellow or has a distinct hat; there’s iconography that matches each of the characters throughout.

It just started through that. It was a lot of frustration at the strikes and the studios not giving working class people any benefit of the doubt and just trying to squeeze money, and also the absurdity of these people eating animals like it’s no big deal. The whole thing is pretty gruesome and kind of fucked up, but I try to do it so it’s not a horror comic, like “Oh my god they’re killing the koalas,” but they’re just props.

It’s a different reality where that's kind of shocking, but you accept different rules

Yeah. I have no beef with animals that I'm trying to get across. It's just a means to an end, you know? A lot of that also came from watching Gilmore Girls and seeing the parents deal with high society faux pas. I'm just like, wow, these aren't real problems, but it's fun that they live in this weird reality that doesn't actually exist.

You released these first online and then collected them into the book. Did the way you published it change the way you thought about the artwork or the story?

Not really. Because the notebook pages are so small, I tried to put that aside and be like, Look, I am not a professional. I'm making this up as I go along, so if some of the drawings look bad, that's fine. I would sometimes paste a piece of paper over a panel that I didn't like and redraw it. It’s more about getting the idea across as well as possible as opposed to this is something people are going to read and sell and buy.

Will used sticky notes and some improv in prepping his panels; courtesy, Will Heff

That all came about because one of the film festival networks that I am pretty active with, Silverlake Shorts, was doing a comic festival. I didn't have a book, so I started to just make it. Luckily, I have a bunch of friends who are in the underground comic industry, and they were helpful with finding who to publish with. It took way longer than I thought it would, scanning it and making them readable. I ended up in Photoshop redoing so many of the panels either because I thought they looked bad or because I’d put sticky notes to cover certain parts and when I went to scan them, the sticky notes ripped off a bunch of the art.

It was cool to do that. I've never made a professional book, but seeing all the things that go into it—things you don’t even bat an eye at when reading a book, like the spine design—and having it literally delivered the day of the convention—there's something so cool about having something tangible in your hands, because a lot of the work I do is digital.

With animation, you can spend a year on a project, and it's a minute long. I spend so long making this thing that's 1/25 of what a normal episode of something is. So with comics, it was so much easier to pump out a story. That was really fun. I think the most surprising thing was that people actually bought it. The convention was out in the L.A. sun at 105 degrees, and people would come up and ask for the Zoo book.

You mentioned working in animation. Can you speak to those differences between illustration and animation?

It feels like there’s a level of disconnect when it's something that you're making that isn't directly yours. With Big Mouth or other projects, we really don't have a say in the writing process and sometimes even the design process. You're given these characters and all the pieces of a creative project, and told to go make it. It can be super fun because it's sometimes challenging, but at the end of the day, it's also like you made this thing, but you didn't really make it. I love doing it, don't get me wrong, but that has given me such a determination to double down and make my own stuff, especially in animation.

Will’s desk; courtesy, Will Heff

I've met so many people who have a binder of things that they want to make, and I'm like, just do it. I always say, when I'm gone, I want to leave behind this messy, kind of wet folder of things where it's just like, oh yeah, he made puppets, and here's a book about eating zoo animals, and a weird thing about babies on skateboards. I just love having that repertoire of stuff. I definitely get way more creative fulfillment out of that.

The cool thing that's happened the last few years is people are now coming to me not because I worked on Big Mouth, but because they saw this short and liked it or they liked this idea.

How do your personal projects fit in with the work you do for your day job?

I think I have undiagnosed ADHD. The last few years, being locked up because of COVID, I've really had to draw lines in the sand: from nine to five, I'm drawing these Big Mouth things, but once that's done I’ll stay and draw my own stuff. There'd be times where I’d have two files open, and one of them is the one I'm not getting paid to work on, but I'm spending all my time in that. I've really had to create those boundaries.

You talked about that wet folder. What are the things that are inspiring you?

The stuff I love to make is the stuff that middle schoolers found on the computer that they probably shouldn't be watching: early YouTube, New Grounds, and eBaum’s World. That stuff had such a impact on me—like, I don't know what I'm watching, and I know I shouldn't be and my mom's gonna come in and tell me to turn off the computer. There’s something so neat about underground art seeping into a suburban home. In that regard, the internet is amazing.

I try to have all my cartoons look slightly different than the last one. Some have mixed media clay in them, and others are 2D. I also would love to have a show. I think that's everyone's dream who works in animation right now.

Jim Henson's a huge inspiration for me. There’s a John Waters quote that “Hairspray is a Trojan horse: It snuck into Middle America and never got caught.” I like that—where people are able to have their subversive things go mainstream. It’s the same with early Adult Swim—I love that type of stuff.

What’s your relationship to the industry in L.A. like?

It definitely has its drawbacks, but I would say it's a net positive. I've met so many cool people who are essentially just like me. They're doing all these things I didn't know I wanted to do until I saw them and then thought, this is the best thing I've ever seen.

There are so many good underground film screenings. I've met so many incredibly funny and talented people at free screenings, like Silverlake Shorts and Secret Movie Club, who really work on nurturing and developing a sense of community. Everyone does talks and panel discussions out here. It's really cool to have those opportunities, especially coming from Massachusetts, where we essentially lived in the woods, and there weren't many creative talks and stuff going on. To be here and see these people whose work impacted me so much is amazing.

I really enjoy the sense of collaboration that comes from this. One of my dreams is to have a little group of collaborators that I can always go back to the well with—kind of like, “Oh, we need this, so we’ve gotta hit up Danny because he does that really well.” I really thrive in that sense. It's great seeing people make stuff, especially because everyone, for the most part, moves out here to make something or find their thing. To see people actually do it, as opposed to sitting on it and waiting for that chance, is super inspiring.

Reference Section

• Currently reading: I really loved Keziah Weir’s The Mythmakers. The book is an original and thought-provoking meditation on artists’ and writers’ relationships with their work—how do people manipulate their subjects for their own purpose?

• I’m also still rereading The Shards. I’ve been struck on this reread by how the multitude of references to music begin to develop this undercurrent of the narrator’s emotional weather (and the affiliated Spotify playlist is full of bangers). Rereading a thriller, I find, is such a rich exercise as a writer in seeing how plot is seeded.

• What are your thoughts on rereading books? I’d love to hear from you.

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