Biography
Peter Hannan is an artist and writer. He is the creator and executive producer of the Nickelodeon animated series, CatDog, overseeing all aspects (writing, storyboarding, character design, art direction, and post-production) of sixty-five half hours, including several holiday specials. Since most of the shows are made up of 11-minute episodes, this amounts to one hundred and twenty-something stories and at least one fistfight. He produced Fetch, the CatDog theatrical short subject for The Rugrats Movie as well as a ninety-minute television movie, CatDog and the Great Parent Mystery.
He has several new film and television projects in development (for little kids, big kids, and grown-ups), and is working behind the scenes or in collaboration with a variety of talented cohorts, writing show bibles, scripts, and treatments, creating/designing characters, art directing, and songwriting.
He is the author and illustrator of The Sillyville Saga, a series of children's books and a veritable manifesto of absurdity: Sillyville or Bust, Escape from Camp Wannabarf, School After Dark: Lessons in Lunacy, and The Battle of Sillyville: Live Silly or Die! He also wrote and illustrated stories for the anthologies Speak! Children's Illustrators Brag About Their Dogs and Purr! Children's Illustrators Brag About Their Cats. He is currently working on series of middle-grade illustrated chapter books which feature a staggering team of super-avenging nincompoops. He really wants this to be a runaway best-selling series because he feels that sitting on the beach, or perhaps in the woods, scribbling funny words and silly pictures while sipping refreshing beverages would be a very civilized way to live. He is also writing and illustrating several picture books and working on a book intended for adults. He has written and illustrated a number of amusing newspaper and magazine pieces with titles like The Incredible Shrinking Christmas, Death of Yuppie, Mike Royko Moves to the Suburbs, and The Good, the Bad, and the Irish.
Hannan has had a life-long interest in, some might say addiction to, singing and songwriting. He wrote the CatDog theme song, which he also sings. He wrote many other songs for the series, but mercifully left the singing to his remarkable cast. The most hilarious coup of his songwriting career was convincing Oscar-winning multi-hyphenate Billy Bob Thornton and Ally McBeal/Broadway star Jane Krakowski to sing two perfectly ridiculous songs (as two characters each) for CatDog and the Great Parent Mystery. Five Hannan CatDog songs are included on "The Newest Nicktoons" and several other Nickelodeon collections released on Kid Rhino.
He has done illustrations for The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Playboy, Entertainment Weekly, and many other newspapers, magazines, and advertising media. His single-panel cartoons (The Adventures of a Huge Mouth) have appeared in Harper's Magazine, Esquire Magazine, The Chicago Reader and many other publications. A book of his cartoons was published by Chicago Review Press and he created a line of greeting cards for Paper Moon Graphics. He is currently working on a series of drawings entitled My Own Private Hollywood, a harrowing look at the funny business of the business. His paintings, drawings, illustrations, and cartoons have been included in numerous exhibitions.
Peter Hannan was born and raised in upstate New York. He is a proud victim of small-town public and parochial education and a graduate of tiny and notorious Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, famous as the alma mater of David Mamet. Peter Hannan has never even met Mr. Mamet. Mr. Hannan lives in southern California with his wonderful wife (who he met when he was six and she must have been, like, negative ten or something), two fabulous kids, and two dogs, one of whom is certifiably nuts, but only when the doorbell rings.
