Hoffman Estates High grads create animated series reuniting them on screen and off

A pair of late ’90s Hoffman Estates High School alumni are being recognized both locally and internationally for their creative collaboration on the animated series “Furious and Fat Cat” on YouTube.

Kevin “K.L.” Reeves and Pierre Sutton Jr. have regularly combined their separate creative projects with unrelated careers, but have been developing this joint project since 2019 through its YouTube launch in November.

The dramedy’s pilot episode, “Homecoming,” was selected for last weekend’s Chicago IndieCon Film Festival at the Hollywood Boulevard Cinema in Woodridge.

The event reunited Reeves and Sutton in person just like the series does its title characters.

Furious and Fat Cat grew up best friends on the South Side of Chicago before taking different paths in adulthood. Furious became a cool Wall Street playboy, but returns home to feel rooted again as the roommate of Fat Cat — a socially awkward former correctional officer who still loves his video games and breakfast cereal.

About a decade after high school, the two friends learn to live together and meet life’s challenges in an often comedic fashion.

Though such a lifelong bond is something they know all about, the series’ creators are very different from the characters they conceived and voice.

Reeves graduated from Harvard University where he studied fiction writing with novelist Jamaica Kincaid. A novelist himself, he also wrote the memoir “Slugg: A Boy’s Life in the Age of Mass Incarceration” with Tony Lewis Jr. in 2015 that helped free Tony Lewis Sr. from a federal prison sentence of life without parole.

Sutton is a writer and producer himself as well as a decorated major in the U.S. Air Force set to retire later this year to reside full-time in Elgin. He’s an alumnus of the Writers Guild Foundation’s Veterans Writing Project, the Netflix Animation Foundations and the AT&T Veterans in 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.

Though both initially grew up on the South Side, their families separately moved to the Northwest suburbs — Reeves’ to Hanover Park and Sutton’s to Hoffman Estates — allowing them to meet at Hoffman Estates High School.

Sports brought them together; both played football and participated on the track team that finished second in the state in 1997. But it was their shared love of stories and literature that cemented their lasting bond — despite rarely living in the same city since high school.

“Even before ‘Furious and Fat Cat,’ we dreamed together,” Reeves said. “We’re friends and brothers first. I think the most important thing was having a clear vision.”

With the audience the series has already attained, the duo’s next goal is to find investors to help them make more seasons. In today’s online world, the continuation of the story is seen as more important than finding a different platform such as television.

“Right now, ‘Furious and Fat Cat’ is being seen in 50 countries,” Sutton said. “It’s already doing what we want. The platform isn’t as important. We’ll attract millions and millions of views. Our goal is to build the brand.”

Apart from being always on the hunt for new viewers, they’re eager to make contact with additional investors who can help realize future seasons of “Furious and Fat Cat” through their production company Power to Image Productions LLC.

And while it’s an example of the adult animation genre, the pair aimed to make the series family-friendly enough that a parent wouldn’t feel squeamish watching it with a 12-year-old.

Furious is named for Laurence Fishburne’s character in the acclaimed 1991 film “Boyz N The Hood.” Fat Cat was a nickname of two different people they knew growing up. But the animated characters’ personas are an amalgamation of other people altogether.

Likewise, not every plot development is based on a real-world equivalent. But while hilarity is a goal of the series, Reeves and Sutton also sought some poignancy.

“I realized we could be our most creative in animation,” Reeves said. “We hope for five or six seasons. It can’t remain the same the whole time.”