On The Easel
Ink Big
Drawn by the success of The Simpsons and Beavis and Butt-head, three of Texas’ top cartoonists are going Hollywood. Houston’s Michael Fry, for instance, has sold the television rights to two of his comic strips—Committed and When I Was Short—to production companies in Toronto and Los Angeles, respectively, and both are being developed as thirty-minute sitcoms. Meanwhile, Twentieth Century Fox is completing a deal to turn Fry’s Over the Hedge into a feature film that would combine live action and computer animation—much like Babe. Likewise, Austin’s Shannon Wheeler, the creator of Too Much Coffee Man, is working on an animated TV series in which his overcaffeinated protagonist would be only one member of a large, diverse ensemble. Other newly created characters would include Espresso Guy, Underwater Guy, and Too Much German White Chocolate Woman With Almonds. And Dallas’ Buddy Hickerson, who draws The Quigmans, is currently finishing a script for a TV pilot based on a bunch of new oddballs he has created: a “brilliant idiot meandering through life” and his female friend Stan.
My Library
