Furious and Fat Cat Brings Brotherhood to 2D Animation
Furious and Fat Cat is a 2D animated series about Furious, a Harvard graduate and former Wall Street trader, and his best friend, Fat Cat, a high-school dropout and correctional officer at Cook County jail. Both are natives of Chicago’s South Side. Furious leaves Chicago while Fat Cat stays. The story picks up when Furious returns from New York and moves in with Fat Cat.
Friends and family of Pierre Sutton, Jr., and Kevin Reeves might recognize similarities in the pair’s narratives and friendship dynamics in the series, though Furious and Fat Cat isn’t biographical. Sutton and Reeves both grew up on Chicago’s South Side and met in high school in the Northwest suburbs. Reeves eventually left the Windy City to attend Harvard University and has had a 21-year career in the federal government; Sutton retired from the U.S. Air Force as a decorated major. The strength of their childhood friendship and belief in each other as adults has sustained them and their collaborative approach.
“We ran track together,” said Sutton of Reeves. “He actually was the lead-off man for our 4x4 relay team. He literally passed the baton to me for our state track meet.”
Foundational moments like that relay race are peppered throughout Reeves and Sutton’s shared past. Close as brothers, the two have been passing gems to one another since the day they met, and popular culture’s limitless bounty has kept their conversations from ever running dry.
“Really what bonded us was our love for literature,” said Sutton. “We would spend hours on end just walking, talking about great literature: Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, or Alice Walker.”
Fans of some of the greatest names in literature, both men are writers themselves and share voice-over and writing credits in the Furious and Fat Cat series.
“We’ve always tried to find something, a project, that we could do together, but we didn’t want to force anything,” said Sutton. “And so when Kevin came to me in 2019 with Furious and Fat Cat, I was like, this is it.”
Foundations for Success
Friends for thirty years, Sutton and Reeves share a wealth of life experiences—plenty of ups and downs that shape rich lives with loads to draw from as writers.
“It makes it that much easier to tell this story about these two childhood friends who took opposite paths in life,” said Sutton.
Sutton and Reeves founded Power to Image Productions, an LLC, in which both founders write, produce, and direct their projects, including the Furious and Fat Cat animated series and comic. The partners see the two as a “both-and” properties: the animation and the comic work together as one offering, though each can stand on its own.
“Our ultimate aspirations are to animate a full season of Furious and Fat Cat and then multiple seasons after that,” said Reeves.
Furious and Fat Cat launched as a web series in 2019 with no full production staff, not even a true character designer. Sutton and Reeves started with one animator.
“We were doing 1-to-5 minute short videos,” said Reeves. “Probably about 30 minutes total of short video. It did really well.”
Eventually, the partners paused animation to sharpen the project’s focus. From 2021 to 2025, they polished the pilot script, built out the Furious and Fat Cat universe, and raised money for the pilot.
“We didn’t crowdfund,” said Reeves. “Our investors were friends and family.”
Close-knit family and friendship ties supported the partners in ways only a lucky few independent Black creators can claim.
“We were able to go to some of my college teammates who’ve seen me for 20 years at this point and believed in me. Believed in Pierre. Believed in Furious and Fat Cat,” said Reeves. “We raised [capital] through that small group of equity investors. We did a PPM [private placement memorandum]. Everything’s buttoned up. We got lawyers, all that.”
With funding secured, Sutton and Reeves hired approximately 15 artists. Within seven months, they had completed pre-production, production, and post-production on the 22-minute pilot, “Homecoming,” which they released on YouTube in November 2025.
Homegrown Narratives
While the Furious and Fat Cat series and its companion comic continues to draw viewers and readers, it’s the creators’ compatibility, their bond and brotherhood, that helps sell the products.
“Pierre has impeccable taste,” said Reeves. “I trust him. Blindly.”
That trust is mutual and carries over into the pilot. From the start, the partners knew they wanted a 2D, hand-drawn style.
“Do you remember how The Simpsons used to look when they first started?” asked Reeves. “It was very crude and rough. That’s how Furious and Fat Cat was at first.”
“It took many iterations [and] working with various artists to get the look,” said Reeves. “Once we landed on this style, we kept it.”
While the visuals took time to develop, the characterizations materialized with relative ease. Furious is fiery, with a distinctly athletic and scholarly look. He’s tall, dark, and handsome—the proverbial ladies’ man—and wears a crimson sweater over a white button-down with the sleeves rolled up. If the crimson doesn’t give it away, Furious is a Harvard guy.
Fat Cat is his own man. He’s laid-back, cherubic, perennially hungry, and undeniably Black; hood to the core, he wears a sweatsuit and slides with white socks.
“Fat Cat loves comfort,” said Reeves. “He’s a homebody, a gamer. When he’s not at work, he’s trying to be as comfortable as possible.”
One of the best moments in “Homecoming” centers on Fat Cat’s cereal addiction. Fat Cat tells Furious that he was a poor kid who didn’t always have cereal and milk. He vowed that when he had the income he’d buy as much cereal as he could. He kept that promise: Furious discovers that every one of Fat Cat’s kitchen cabinets is stuffed with boxes of Crunch and learns that Fat Cat eats two-and-a-half boxes a day. When Furious calls him out, Fat Cat answers, almost trance-like, with one of the pilot’s funniest lines.
“I like watching the milk pour over it,” he purrs.
In that same segment, Fat Cat works his game controller with his toes while eating Crunch, and somehow manages to beat Furious 147 to 15.
What’s Next
Barriers to producing and distributing Black animated series persist, but the appeal of Furious and Fat Cat gives it the legs for a potential breakout. Sutton and Reeves have already begun nurturing international business relationships to scale the series and grow the platform into a major franchise.
“We had already written 10 episodes that we plan to animate,” said Sutton. “We call it ‘Year One.’”
Nine of those 10 episodes have been adapted into comics. The second episode became the comic’s first issue, “Girls, Girls, Girls,” in which Furious tries to get Fat Cat a girlfriend by arranging a series of double dates.
“‘Girls, Girls, Girls’ picks up right where the pilot leaves off,” Sutton added.
Sutton and Reeves have equally high hopes for the companion comic. Intentionality drives every element of their enterprise, and the comic is no different. Although issue one is finished line art, the end result is all heart: the narrative and art direction deliver the goods.
“We’re going full color with the second issue,” said Reeves, “and we’re not going back. We started out with the line art because we were very cost-conscious.”
In early 2027, fans can expect The Game Master, issue two of the Furious and Fat Cat comic. The plan is to place the comic in as many comic shops and conventions as possible. Meanwhile, it can be found at independent retailers, such as The Comic Den in Los Angeles, where the pair have made special appearances and held book signings.
Sutton and Reeves have also appeared at major comic conventions, such as Lore Con, which took place in Durham, North Carolina.
For the animated series, Sutton and Reeves envision a pipeline that starts in the U.S., where animatics are rendered, and end in Africa, for post-production. The partners have already begun consulting with potential animators there.
Demand for authentically Black animated series is high, and the Furious and Fat Cat pilot shows it, with nearly 400,000 YouTube views and 38,000 hours watched across 50 countries. According to YouTube Studio analytics, 62% of that audience is in the U.S. The partners plan to animate a full season of Furious and Fat Cat and have entertained the idea of teaming up with others (short term) to reach that goal. Comic sales have been strong enough that revenue could also help finance a season.
“People are accustomed to seeing millions and millions of views,” said Reeves. “Those are the extreme outliers, but we’re also outliers.”
Including New Film Makers Los Angeles’ InFocus: Veterans Cinema program, Sutton and Reeves have entered the “Homecoming” pilot in 10 film festivals and have won prizes at six of the 10. At some of the international stops, festivalgoers compliment their Furious and Fat Cat character merchandise, especially the T-shirts.
“We walk in cities, different countries, and people stop us all the time to say, ‘I really like that.’ I think it’s the style choice and the spirit that comes through Furious and Fat Cat. People can feel it—all the deliberate thought, the intentionality that went into it,” said Reeves. That same energy and emotion that propels Sutton and Reeves’ friendship fuels Furious and Fat Cat, and audiences can’t get enough.
“I’m happy it worked out, and that it’s continuing to resonate with people,” Sutton added.
Passing the symbolic remote control to our readers, 808 TRACT Magazine invites everyone to watch the full 22-minute pilot of “Homecoming” on YouTube and to pick up the Furious and Fat Cat comic at local comic shops. Readers can also buy the comic and merchandise, watch the pilot, and learn more about Sutton and Reeves’ Power to Image Productions at furiousandfatcatshop.com.
Creator Bios
K.L. Reeves is a writer, editor, and communications leader whose work spans publishing, journalism, and public service. He’s the creator and executive producer of the indie animated dramedy Furious & Fat Cat. In 2015, he co-authored Slugg: A Boy’s Life in the Age of Mass Incarceration with Tony Lewis Jr. The book sold more than 50,000 copies.
Pierre Sutton, Jr., is a writer/producer and author who blends lived experience with dynamic storytelling. He’s an alumnus of the Writers Guild Foundation’s Veterans Writing Project, the Netflix Animation Foundations, and AT&T Veterans and Media programs. His stage play Father and Son was a semifinalist for the inaugural Arts in the Armed Forces Bridge Award and received a workshop reading at the historic Playwrights’ Center. A dedicated advocate for creatives, he is a program coordinator for the Starz and Veterans and Media Entertainment Emerging TV Writers and Producers Program.
Comments