China

Not the country. The third season of the Adult Swim show begins on Sunday, and CI creator Brad Neely talks about how he got to the power position where he could make the series in the first place.

Brad Neely: ... I started out not having every option available to me, and I thought, “Hmm, I’ll select animation and television. I guess I’ll gladly dismiss literature and classical music.” It just kind of happened like this. I was here, in Austin, Texas. I did not go to college. I was extremely poor and came from a poor background. I just happened to play in bands and I happened to draw cartoons.

And then I did this alternate audio for the “Harry Potter” movie when the internet was just getting to be popular and that got large enough to clue me into, you know, maybe I can go from making my friends laugh to making more people laugh. It seems like there’s evidence here, so maybe I can mash all of these interests together in one thing where I have control over it and could do on the cheap, because I had no funding or backing or interest.

So I was able to do “George Washington” with all of those elements, and then that became popular, so it seems like all of the sudden I had a skill set that people were interested in. From “Washington” I went to Super Deluxe and got the job working with “South Park” as a writer in their room, and everything snowballed from there.

On a daily basis I ask myself, “Is this right for me? Is this career right for me?”now that I might have more options, but it’s hard to turn away from an audience that’s telling me what I’m communicating is working. Communication to me is just so hard that if you have some of it you should hold on to it. ...

We, of course, wish Mr. Neely well. And we wish even harder that, one day, the show comes under a union contract.

It's fun to dream.