Pendleton Ward

**Pendleton Ward**is the co-creator of *The Midnight Gospel*. He is also the creator of the Cartoon Network show *Adventure Time* and the web series *Bravest Warriors*.

## Early Life

Ward grew up in San Antonio, Texas, and currently resides in Los Angeles. He is a graduate of the CalArts Animation Program.

Pendleton became interested in animation at an early age, inspired by his mother, who is an artist and worked with animators. He started drawing flipbooks in first grade. He often worked with his best friend, Alec "The Logdog" Coates, on short comic books.

Ward attended CalArts, where he became friends with J. G. Quintel and Alex Hirsch. They later worked on *The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack* together. Eric Homan, vice president of Frederator Studios, offered Ward a job at the studios after watching one of his films at the annual CalArts animation screenings. Ward would go on to make *Adventure Time* for Cartoon Network during his time at Frederator.

## Career

In 2002/2003, Pendleton Ward published a webcomic titled Bueno the Bear. He later took down the comics because he thought they were "terrible." However, he retains the name "buenothebear" for his website and his handle on sites like Twitter. Later, Pen created a short for Frederator Studios titled "Barrista" starring Bueno the Bear.

Pen continued to work on short animations for Frederator's Random! Cartoons which aired on Nicktoons. There, he worked with several people who later join him on the Adventure Time series, including composer Casey James Basichis, Adam Muto, and Niki Yang. His two shorts were "The Bravest Warriors" and the "Adventure Time" animated short. The "Adventure Time" short was made in 2006 and went on to become an internet phenomenon in 2007, with over 1,000,000 views by November of that year. (Internet searches seem to indicate it first went viral in mid-January 2007, although the original versions of the video on YouTube have since been removed.) Pen pitched Adventure Time as a full series in 2006 or 2007, but it took some time before Cartoon Network decided to pick it up.

In 2008, Pendleton Ward worked on Cartoon Network's The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack (along with JG Quintel, creator of Regular Show) as a writer and storyboard artist. Flapjack was a storyboard-driven show, meaning that the storyboard artists also wrote the episodes, based on an outline. The experience inspired Pen to run Adventure Time the same way, once it was picked up as a series.

In 2012, Frederator Studios developed *Bravest Warriors* and turned it into a web series for the relaunch of Cartoon Hangover, however Ward has little involvement in the series. Former *Adventure Time* lead designer Phil Rynda worked on the redesigns of the characters for the series. The series premiered during the fall of 2012 through Cartoon Hangover's YouTube channel alongside a comic book series of the same name by Boom! Studios.

Sometime during the fifth season of *Adventure Time*, Ward abruptly stepped down from running the show, explaining it was negatively affecting his "quality of life". In the October 2, 2014 edition of the *Rolling Stone* magazine, Ward stated "I quit because it was driving me nuts". However, he continued to work as one of the show's writers and storyboard artists until the end of the season six, and he still serves as an executive producer. In an interview with Indiewire prior to the debut of season seven, head writer Kent Osborne noted that Ward had stopped writing episode outlines at the beginning of season 7 but still looked over them and provides input.

In 2017, Ward was credited as "Story Consultant" for the current hard-cover adventure for Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, 'Tomb of Annihilation'.

On March 16, 2020, a trailer was released for an adult animated Netflix original show, *The Midnight Gospel*, co-created by Ward and Duncan Trussell. The plot reads, "Clancy is a space-caster who uses a multiverse simulator to interview beings living in other world.