Ian Jones-Quartey

Watch a fight in the early Steven Universe and notice how little work you have to do. Garnet is a block, Pearl a line, Amethyst a scribble, and when they move fast the shapes still tell you who is where. Ian Jones-Quartey was one of three directors on those episodes, with Joseph D. Johnston and Kat Morris, and the fights are quick, clear and over in seconds, which is the size an eleven-minute slot can hold. We had braced for cartoon combat to be noise and were surprised at how easily we could follow it; the credit belongs to the shapes, and to directors who trusted them.

He came to it by the technical route. He drew webcomics in the early 2000s, inked and art-directed on The Venture Bros. from 2006, then spent 2010 to 2013 on the Adventure Time storyboard desk. On Steven Universe (2013) he was supervising director and co-developer alongside Rebecca Sugar, credited on dozens of episodes through the middle of 2015. Then he left to make his own show, OK K.O. Let's Be Heroes (2017–2019), grown from a 2013 pilot called Lakewood Plaza Turbo, and has since drifted back towards Sugar: the 2019 Steven Universe film, a 2025 special called The Elephant, and an announced series, Steven Universe: Lars of the Stars.

What he believes is plain enough. He dislikes cartoons that stay on-model and go stiff; convincing people a drawing has come to life is, he has said, "one of the oldest magic tricks out there". So OK K.O. runs on storyboards, slapstick and faces that stretch past what the design sheet allows, drawn in a rough pencil line that looks like something done in the back of an exercise book. The premise, in his own summary, is three friends who punch robots until the robots explode. The influences are Looney Tunes, Hanna-Barbera, 1970s anime and video games, and the tone is cheerful and unembarrassed about it.

We have not reviewed OK K.O., so we will not pronounce on it, only name the gamble. A line that is allowed to change from episode to episode and artist to artist keeps a show alive, and it also removes the safety net; a loose drawing that is not funny just looks unfinished. The work we can vouch for is the work where the looseness sits on top of firm shapes, which is what Steven Universe did. That show grew, eleven minutes at a time, into a story about grief, and a director who keeps the action legible is part of the reason the quiet episodes could afford to be quiet.

Where he goes next looks like where he came from. Lars of the Stars puts him back beside Sugar, on a world he helped build. We would rather see him on a blank page, but a man who taught these characters to be read from their outlines is a reasonable person to hand them back to.