Animation’s coolest grandma designed the Ghanaian flag. Meet her grandson.

Ian Jones-Quartey put a Ghanaian family on Cartoon Network and let America raise their kids on it.

In 2013, a Cartoon Network show about a boy made of light who cries a lot and fights aliens with his magical friends became the most emotionally devastating thing on children’s television. In 2017, a different Cartoon Network show about a kid working at a strip mall superhero supply store became the most kinetic, hand-drawn, alive-feeling cartoon on the network. Between those two things sits Adventure Time, which spent a decade hiding a story about nuclear apocalypse and human grief inside what looked like a comedy about a dog who could stretch his arms really far. Ian Jones-Quartey worked on all three. He was Storyboard Supervisor on Adventure Time, Co-Executive Producer and Supervising Director on the Emmy-nominated Steven Universe, and the creator of OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes.

Adventure Time via Cartoon Network/Boomerang
OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes via ScreenRant

If you’re trying to draw a line through the best decade of American animation, you keep landing on the same name. Calling him an animator, though, is a low-ball offer.

The story that Ian tells animation students the most goes like this: he’s at his day job at World Leaders Entertainment, still fairly junior, and he walks past a supervisor’s desk and notices a stack of technical animation tests being sent out to prospective applicants for The Venture Bros.—Adult Swim’s hyper-detailed, reference-dense action comedy that was running at the time. He has zero connection to the production. He asks to look at one out of pure curiosity, the supervisor hands him a copy, and Ian takes it home and spends the next week and a half completing the whole thing after work every night, teaching himself the show’s entire visual style from scratch for no reason other than the fact that he wanted to know how it worked. When he submitted it, they hired him immediately, for a job he wasn’t even applying for.

On Adventure Time, there’s a villain called the Ice King who’s a bumbling, pathetic old man who spends the show kidnapping princesses and being generally useless. About halfway through the series, you find out he used to be a kind, gentle antiquarian named Simon Petrikov, and that a magic crown slowly destroyed his mind over decades while the people he loved watched it happen. Ian, as Storyboard Supervisor, was the person making sure that tragedy was threaded into the background of episodes going back years without getting lost between the script and the screen. That’s the kind of long-game storytelling that falls apart entirely if someone doesn’t hold the thread at every stage of production. On Steven Universe, holding together an enormously ambitious show visually and tonally across five seasons and two hundred episodes while Rebecca Sugar drove the overall vision is the kind of job that sounds like a supporting role until you realize the whole thing collapses without it. And on OK K.O.!, which he built entirely himself, he made a production decision that most studios won’t touch: he let the storyboard artists draw like themselves. Most animated shows sand individual differences down into a standardized house look because consistency is easier to manage. Ian didn’t, and OK K.O.! came out with the loose, hand-drawn energy of early internet Flash animation crashing into Dragon Ball Z at a strip mall, and avid animation enthusiasts will still tell you it’s the most alive-feeling cartoon Cartoon Network put out that decade.

Marceline hugging the Ice King via Cartoon Network/Boomerang
via Ian Jones Quartey


He’s now at SEGA of America directing Sonic the Hedgehog Presents: The Chaotix Casefiles which is an audio drama following Vector the crocodile, Espio the ninja chameleon, and Charmy the bee, who form a detective agency inside the Sonic universe that is, charmingly, always on the verge of not being able to pay rent. They are the working class of a world full of superheroes, which is exactly the kind of characters Ian gravitates toward. He’s been in the tank for Sonic since he won a PlayStation 2 in a Cartoon Network sweepstakes as a kid, and SEGA brought him in closer after the Sonic Mania opening animation he produced—Sonic Mania being the 2017 game that finally, after years of middling releases, made Sonic feel like Sonic again, and Ian’s two-minute animated intro for it made a lot of grown adults feel things they hadn’t felt since 1994. That he chose Vector, Espio, and Charmy over any of the franchise’s bigger names for his first major project makes sense once you look at his whole career. The Crystal Gems in Steven Universe, a team of magical alien rebels fighting an empire that has every structural advantage, are outnumbered and outgunned for the entire series. Lars Barriga, a side character in Steven Universe who starts out as an anxious, avoidant teenager working a dead-end job, ends the show as a pink-skinned space pirate captain after a genuinely harrowing arc about what it takes to become who you actually are. Ian has always been more interested in the people who figure it out than the ones born to win.

Now, the thing about Ian Jones-Quartey that most people have absolutely no idea about.

In 1957, Theodosia Salome Okoh entered an open competition to design the flag of a newly independent Ghana and won. She was 35, trained at Achimota School in the Gold Coast, and the daughter of Rev. Emmanuel Victor Asihene, one of the region’s earliest professionally trained art teachers, which means the family had been in the visual arts business for a generation before she came along. The flag she designed placed red for the blood of ancestors, gold for the mineral wealth of the land, green for the forests, and at the center the Black Star, drawn from Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line and placed there to stand for African emancipation and continental unity. Ghana became independent on March 6, 1957, and the flag has flown on every government building, school wall, and passport in the country every day since.

via Aware
via Aware Women Artists

Off the field, she was the kind of woman who, when the Ghanaian government tried to rename the National Hockey Stadium bearing her name, went after them so publicly and so thoroughly that they issued a formal apology and reversed the decision. Her husband Enoch Kwabena Okoh was Head of Civil Service under Kwame Nkrumah. Ian is her grandson, and when he talks about her as one of his greatest inspirations, it’s worth understanding what that actually means: he grew up in a household where making things that outlasted you was just what the family did.

Steven Universe was one of those shows that critics fell over themselves to cover. Rebecca Sugar became the first woman to create a Cartoon Network series, the show’s queer representation was groundbreaking enough to generate its own discourse, and it was emotionally ambitious in a way that made adults cry on public transport and then feel weird about it. All of that is real and worth saying. What nobody seemed to notice, because it required a particular kind of familiarity to catch, is that Ian had put an entire Ghanaian family at the center of Beach City, and he’d drawn them so accurately that any Ghanaian watching would have looked at their screen and gone: oh, I know these people.

The Pizza family runs the pizza shop in Beach City. Kofi is the father, and he is the kind of man who will get into a genuine, weeks-long feud with a neighboring restaurant for adding pizza fries to their menu not because it affects his business in any measurable way, but because it was his idea first and he knows it. His twin daughters Jenny and Kiki are seventeen and have developed completely opposite survival strategies for living with him: Jenny is never home, and Kiki has decided that if she just does everything perfectly, the household will stay calm, a theory that has never once been proven correct. And then there’s Nanefua, Kofi’s mother, who doesn’t need to raise her voice because she’s the one who decides whether this conversation is over.

via Cartoon Network/Boomerang

Now here’s the part that made Ghanaian Steven Universe fans absolutely spiral when they figured it out. In Akan culture, children are given day names based on the day of the week they’re born, and those names carry historical personality associations that Ghanaians will recognize immediately. Nanefua is a contraction of Nana Afua: “Nana” being an Akan title of royalty and respect given to chiefs and grandparents of serious standing, and “Afua” being the day name for a female born on Friday. The name alone tells any Ghanaian viewer everything they need to know about her before she’s said a word. Kofi is the Akan day name for a male born on Friday, associated historically with leadership, resilience, and a passionate intensity that tends to express itself loudly when provoked. Kofi Pizza going to full commercial war with the neighboring restaurant for adding pizza fries to their menu makes complete sense once you understand the name he was given, and Ian knew exactly what he was doing when he gave it to him. If you know a Kofi, you know.

Nanefua’s arc in the show ends with her becoming Mayor of Beach City after the previous mayor, Bill Dewey, a man who responds to every crisis by performing concern rather than addressing it, proves, repeatedly and in public, that he cannot actually govern anything. She campaigns on accountability, wins, and runs the city the way Theodosia Okoh ran a room: with complete authority and zero interest in being argued with.

via Cartoon Network/Boomerang

Steven Universe: Lars of the Stars is in development at Prime Video with Ian back alongside Rebecca Sugar, his wife and creative partner of over fifteen years. The show centers on Lars Barriga, who ends Steven Universe as a pink-skinned space pirate captain after one of the more harrowing character arcs in the franchise, and picks up with him and his crew smuggling contraband across the galaxy while digging into the secrets of the fallen Gem Empire. It’s a science fiction epic with a non-white lead in a genre that has spent most of its history centering someone who looks nothing like Lars.

Adult Swim has a special called The Elephant that already aired in December 2025, and if you missed it, go find it. The premise was this: Adult Swim’s Senior VP of Programming challenged Pendleton Ward, Rebecca Sugar, Ian, and Patrick McHale—collectively responsible for Adventure Time, Steven Universe, OK K.O.!, and Over the Garden Wall—to each make a segment of the same special without knowing what the others were doing. Ward took Act 1, Ian and Sugar co-directed Act 2 together, McHale took Act 3, and the full picture only becomes clear once you’ve watched all three. It’s genuinely one of the stranger and more beautiful things that has aired on television in recent memory, and the fact that it exists at all is its own argument for what happens when studios get out of the way and let people make exactly what they want to make.

The coolest thing about Ian’s career is that it was never a statement. He was just a Ghanaian kid from Maryland who got really good at his job and kept going all the way to the top of an industry, with his grandmother’s flag flying somewhere in the foundation of everything he built. He took the Black Star energy of his grandmother and repackaged it for a global audience, proving that you can honor where you came from while building worlds that belong to everyone. The revolution will not be televised, but it might be animated.

Written By: HQ

In 2013, a Cartoon Network show about a boy made of light who cries a lot and fights aliens with his magical friends became the most emotionally devastating thing on children’s television. In 2017, a different Cartoon Network show about a kid working at a strip mall superhero supply store became the most kinetic, hand-drawn, alive-feeling cartoon on the network. Between those two things sits Adventure Time, which spent a decade hiding a story about nuclear apocalypse and human grief inside what looked like a comedy about a dog who could stretch his arms really far. Ian Jones-Quartey worked on all three. He was Storyboard Supervisor on Adventure Time, Co-Executive Producer and Supervising Director on the Emmy-nominated Steven Universe, and the creator of OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes.

Adventure Time via Cartoon Network/Boomerang
OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes via ScreenRant

If you’re trying to draw a line through the best decade of American animation, you keep landing on the same name. Calling him an animator, though, is a low-ball offer.

The story that Ian tells animation students the most goes like this: he’s at his day job at World Leaders Entertainment, still fairly junior, and he walks past a supervisor’s desk and notices a stack of technical animation tests being sent out to prospective applicants for The Venture Bros.—Adult Swim’s hyper-detailed, reference-dense action comedy that was running at the time. He has zero connection to the production. He asks to look at one out of pure curiosity, the supervisor hands him a copy, and Ian takes it home and spends the next week and a half completing the whole thing after work every night, teaching himself the show’s entire visual style from scratch for no reason other than the fact that he wanted to know how it worked. When he submitted it, they hired him immediately, for a job he wasn’t even applying for.

On Adventure Time, there’s a villain called the Ice King who’s a bumbling, pathetic old man who spends the show kidnapping princesses and being generally useless. About halfway through the series, you find out he used to be a kind, gentle antiquarian named Simon Petrikov, and that a magic crown slowly destroyed his mind over decades while the people he loved watched it happen. Ian, as Storyboard Supervisor, was the person making sure that tragedy was threaded into the background of episodes going back years without getting lost between the script and the screen. That’s the kind of long-game storytelling that falls apart entirely if someone doesn’t hold the thread at every stage of production. On Steven Universe, holding together an enormously ambitious show visually and tonally across five seasons and two hundred episodes while Rebecca Sugar drove the overall vision is the kind of job that sounds like a supporting role until you realize the whole thing collapses without it. And on OK K.O.!, which he built entirely himself, he made a production decision that most studios won’t touch: he let the storyboard artists draw like themselves. Most animated shows sand individual differences down into a standardized house look because consistency is easier to manage. Ian didn’t, and OK K.O.! came out with the loose, hand-drawn energy of early internet Flash animation crashing into Dragon Ball Z at a strip mall, and avid animation enthusiasts will still tell you it’s the most alive-feeling cartoon Cartoon Network put out that decade.

Marceline hugging the Ice King via Cartoon Network/Boomerang
via Ian Jones Quartey


He’s now at SEGA of America directing Sonic the Hedgehog Presents: The Chaotix Casefiles which is an audio drama following Vector the crocodile, Espio the ninja chameleon, and Charmy the bee, who form a detective agency inside the Sonic universe that is, charmingly, always on the verge of not being able to pay rent. They are the working class of a world full of superheroes, which is exactly the kind of characters Ian gravitates toward. He’s been in the tank for Sonic since he won a PlayStation 2 in a Cartoon Network sweepstakes as a kid, and SEGA brought him in closer after the Sonic Mania opening animation he produced—Sonic Mania being the 2017 game that finally, after years of middling releases, made Sonic feel like Sonic again, and Ian’s two-minute animated intro for it made a lot of grown adults feel things they hadn’t felt since 1994. That he chose Vector, Espio, and Charmy over any of the franchise’s bigger names for his first major project makes sense once you look at his whole career. The Crystal Gems in Steven Universe, a team of magical alien rebels fighting an empire that has every structural advantage, are outnumbered and outgunned for the entire series. Lars Barriga, a side character in Steven Universe who starts out as an anxious, avoidant teenager working a dead-end job, ends the show as a pink-skinned space pirate captain after a genuinely harrowing arc about what it takes to become who you actually are. Ian has always been more interested in the people who figure it out than the ones born to win.

Now, the thing about Ian Jones-Quartey that most people have absolutely no idea about.

In 1957, Theodosia Salome Okoh entered an open competition to design the flag of a newly independent Ghana and won. She was 35, trained at Achimota School in the Gold Coast, and the daughter of Rev. Emmanuel Victor Asihene, one of the region’s earliest professionally trained art teachers, which means the family had been in the visual arts business for a generation before she came along. The flag she designed placed red for the blood of ancestors, gold for the mineral wealth of the land, green for the forests, and at the center the Black Star, drawn from Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line and placed there to stand for African emancipation and continental unity. Ghana became independent on March 6, 1957, and the flag has flown on every government building, school wall, and passport in the country every day since.

via Aware
via Aware Women Artists

Off the field, she was the kind of woman who, when the Ghanaian government tried to rename the National Hockey Stadium bearing her name, went after them so publicly and so thoroughly that they issued a formal apology and reversed the decision. Her husband Enoch Kwabena Okoh was Head of Civil Service under Kwame Nkrumah. Ian is her grandson, and when he talks about her as one of his greatest inspirations, it’s worth understanding what that actually means: he grew up in a household where making things that outlasted you was just what the family did.

Steven Universe was one of those shows that critics fell over themselves to cover. Rebecca Sugar became the first woman to create a Cartoon Network series, the show’s queer representation was groundbreaking enough to generate its own discourse, and it was emotionally ambitious in a way that made adults cry on public transport and then feel weird about it. All of that is real and worth saying. What nobody seemed to notice, because it required a particular kind of familiarity to catch, is that Ian had put an entire Ghanaian family at the center of Beach City, and he’d drawn them so accurately that any Ghanaian watching would have looked at their screen and gone: oh, I know these people.

The Pizza family runs the pizza shop in Beach City. Kofi is the father, and he is the kind of man who will get into a genuine, weeks-long feud with a neighboring restaurant for adding pizza fries to their menu not because it affects his business in any measurable way, but because it was his idea first and he knows it. His twin daughters Jenny and Kiki are seventeen and have developed completely opposite survival strategies for living with him: Jenny is never home, and Kiki has decided that if she just does everything perfectly, the household will stay calm, a theory that has never once been proven correct. And then there’s Nanefua, Kofi’s mother, who doesn’t need to raise her voice because she’s the one who decides whether this conversation is over.

via Cartoon Network/Boomerang

Now here’s the part that made Ghanaian Steven Universe fans absolutely spiral when they figured it out. In Akan culture, children are given day names based on the day of the week they’re born, and those names carry historical personality associations that Ghanaians will recognize immediately. Nanefua is a contraction of Nana Afua: “Nana” being an Akan title of royalty and respect given to chiefs and grandparents of serious standing, and “Afua” being the day name for a female born on Friday. The name alone tells any Ghanaian viewer everything they need to know about her before she’s said a word. Kofi is the Akan day name for a male born on Friday, associated historically with leadership, resilience, and a passionate intensity that tends to express itself loudly when provoked. Kofi Pizza going to full commercial war with the neighboring restaurant for adding pizza fries to their menu makes complete sense once you understand the name he was given, and Ian knew exactly what he was doing when he gave it to him. If you know a Kofi, you know.

Nanefua’s arc in the show ends with her becoming Mayor of Beach City after the previous mayor, Bill Dewey, a man who responds to every crisis by performing concern rather than addressing it, proves, repeatedly and in public, that he cannot actually govern anything. She campaigns on accountability, wins, and runs the city the way Theodosia Okoh ran a room: with complete authority and zero interest in being argued with.

via Cartoon Network/Boomerang

Steven Universe: Lars of the Stars is in development at Prime Video with Ian back alongside Rebecca Sugar, his wife and creative partner of over fifteen years. The show centers on Lars Barriga, who ends Steven Universe as a pink-skinned space pirate captain after one of the more harrowing character arcs in the franchise, and picks up with him and his crew smuggling contraband across the galaxy while digging into the secrets of the fallen Gem Empire. It’s a science fiction epic with a non-white lead in a genre that has spent most of its history centering someone who looks nothing like Lars.

Adult Swim has a special called The Elephant that already aired in December 2025, and if you missed it, go find it. The premise was this: Adult Swim’s Senior VP of Programming challenged Pendleton Ward, Rebecca Sugar, Ian, and Patrick McHale—collectively responsible for Adventure Time, Steven Universe, OK K.O.!, and Over the Garden Wall—to each make a segment of the same special without knowing what the others were doing. Ward took Act 1, Ian and Sugar co-directed Act 2 together, McHale took Act 3, and the full picture only becomes clear once you’ve watched all three. It’s genuinely one of the stranger and more beautiful things that has aired on television in recent memory, and the fact that it exists at all is its own argument for what happens when studios get out of the way and let people make exactly what they want to make.

The coolest thing about Ian’s career is that it was never a statement. He was just a Ghanaian kid from Maryland who got really good at his job and kept going all the way to the top of an industry, with his grandmother’s flag flying somewhere in the foundation of everything he built. He took the Black Star energy of his grandmother and repackaged it for a global audience, proving that you can honor where you came from while building worlds that belong to everyone. The revolution will not be televised, but it might be animated.

Written By: HQ

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