John Evershed and the rabbit that became a business

The shoe is a particularly cheerful shade of green. A cartoon rabbit grins across its side, red laces run up the front, and the whole thing looks ready to escape a school locker. John Evershed puts it near the entrance to his professional life online. For an executive whose work involves financing, distribution and corporate strategy, this is an unusually good calling card. A spreadsheet can explain a licensing business. A rabbit on a sneaker makes you look.

The rabbit belongs to Happy Tree Friends, the Mondo Media series whose cuddly appearance conceals a gleefully disastrous universe. Evershed co-founded Mondo with Deirdre O’Malley in 1988. Over the decades, his job has involved getting strange little cartoons out of the studio and into places where people might actually encounter them. Sometimes that meant another company’s website. Sometimes it meant YouTube. Eventually, it meant television, a feature film and merchandise you could put on your feet.

There is an appealing practical question underneath that career: once somebody has made something funny, how does it find a life beyond the room?

A literature graduate meets the loading screen

Evershed graduated from the University of Toronto in 1981 with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. Before Mondo’s cartoon business, he worked on online content and advertising at Chronicle Videotex. His experience with electronic publishing therefore preceded the period when an internet company could raise money simply by having an interesting name and a plausible URL.

Mondo’s early work included digital production and the CD-ROM games Critical Path and The Daedalus Encounter. These were products of an era when interactive entertainment arrived on a disc. Moving pictures on a computer were still an event, rather than something that interrupted your attempt to read a recipe.

By 1999, Evershed was pursuing a different arrangement. Mondo would make short cartoons and distribute them through websites that already had visitors. The newspaper comic strip provided the model: a syndicate supplies the entertainment; an established publication supplies the audience. Portals could carry the cartoons without becoming animation studios themselves.

“We didn’t want to build the Next Great Site,” he said in 1999. It is a neatly deflating sentence from a moment when quite a few people did. Mondo was proposing a place inside the internet’s busy public rooms, with no requirement that viewers learn a new address first.

God, the Devil and the distribution deal

The early catalogue made its intentions fairly clear. The God and Devil Show turned the afterlife into a celebrity talk show. Thugs on Film assigned movie criticism to a pair of pub-going characters. Like, News sent a sarcastic teenager into encounters with public figures. Respectability was unlikely to become an urgent staffing requirement.

By March 2000, Mondo’s syndication network included 14 sites. Its partners included Shockwave, Netscape and AtomFilms. The company had more than 75 artists, and a financing round involving Macromedia helped support its expansion. For Evershed, executive production also brought an unexpected return to his undergraduate subject: the cartoons depended on writing.

“Our shows are so writer-driven,” he explained. Behind the software, the distribution agreements and the pitch for a new medium sat the old problem of making a scene work. A clever delivery mechanism could bring a viewer to a cartoon. It could hardly supply the joke.

Then the dotcom market collapsed. The syndication business that had looked so promising became much harder to sustain. Mondo adjusted, used advertising work to help carry the business and kept the internet central to its plans. Evershed’s career acquired a less glamorous qualification than early arrival: remaining at work after the enthusiasm had left the building.

“But I’m glad we hung in there.”

John Evershed, reflecting on Mondo’s long route to profitability in 2012

The rabbit gets past reception

Happy Tree Friends gave Mondo a property that could move between formats. Its visual joke was immediately legible: sweet-looking animals occupied a world spectacularly unsuited to them. You did not need a detailed cultural briefing to recognize that something had gone wrong.

By January 2005, the shorts were receiving 15 million monthly views. The business around them included DVDs, toys, clothing and television licensing. More than 350,000 DVDs had sold at retail. Those figures belong to that period, before YouTube became the familiar shorthand for online video success.

Evershed also described an unofficial part of the sales process. Executives considering a deal would take the material home and discover that their children already knew the characters. Sometimes a potential partner arrived with that knowledge already supplied. A formal presentation could begin after the household had done its own screening.

It is a useful anecdote because it gives the audience some agency. Mondo could negotiate a licence, arrange a release and commission more work. It could not order affection into existence. The children in those stories had reached their verdict before a parent opened a business discussion. For a cartoon company, that was a rather convenient form of advance work.

Two stick figures, 5,616 backers

YouTube gave Evershed another place to build an audience. By June 2012, Mondo’s channel had accumulated nearly 1.5 billion views. The company commissioned work from about 20 production teams around the world. Its channel was a means of bringing those teams’ work together and giving viewers a reason to return.

The financial details mattered as much as the view counter. YouTube’s original-content initiative offered advances against revenue sharing, giving Mondo money to test pilots. Evershed was interested in the relationship between financing and experimentation: a new show required resources before anybody could discover whether they liked it.

Dick Figures, created by Ed Skudder and Zack Keller, made that relationship particularly visible. Six Point Harness backed the early episodes, and Mondo distributed them. Red and Blue, its two stick-figure friends, attracted an audience large enough to support a proposal for a movie.

The campaign ran in 2012 and raised $313,411 against a $250,000 goal. The film followed in 2013. Its release combined paid digital access with a free, serialized version on YouTube. Fans could pay to watch without waiting, while viewers who followed the chapters could still see the film.

That arrangement understood something about the audience beyond its size. People had different amounts of money and patience. A distribution plan could accommodate both. Evershed helped make a business around characters drawn with a degree of anatomical restraint that would have embarrassed a stick insect.

A bigger room for the cartoons

The relationship with Six Point Harness eventually became a merger, closed in late 2015 and publicly announced in 2016. Mondo brought distribution and its audience relationships; the Los Angeles studio brought production experience. The combined business opened a 16,000-square-foot studio in Echo Park.

The names survived with different jobs. Mondo faced consumers and distribution partners, while Six Point Harness supplied production services. Evershed initially headed the combined company. By 2018, Brendan Burch was CEO, with Evershed remaining on the board.

In 2016, Evershed also negotiated Mondo’s move onto VRV, a subscription platform assembled by Ellation. The opportunity involved longer stories, a paying audience and programming beyond short comedy. Financing that work required co-production partners, tax credits and international sales - arrangements with rather less immediate comic appeal than the shows themselves.

His television work included financing Night Sweats, a compilation format involving Adult Swim Canada, Blue Ant Media, YouTube and Mondo. Gary and His Demons emerged from that development path. He also worked on a Happy Tree Friends television series and Like Share Die for Fusion. The web could serve as a place where an idea gathered enough support to attempt a longer life.

Counting the shows that weren’t sitcoms

At High Concentrate, Evershed turned that experience into research and advisory work. His Adult Animation White Paper, supported by Toon Boom, examined the expanding market for animated series aimed at adults. A second edition appeared in 2021, accompanied by a database covering shows, creators, buyers and the origins of their underlying ideas.

The research gave a numerical shape to his interest in animation beyond comedy. Of 103 upcoming original animated series tracked in the research discussed in June 2021, Netflix had ordered 25 and HBO Max 17. Comedy still represented about 60 percent of the upcoming slate. Drama, science fiction and action offered other directions.

He saw an audience growing up with video games, elaborate fictional worlds and stories that could move across borders. Making the research freely available gave creators and producers a way to inspect that argument for themselves. Alongside his work assembling projects, he was making a map of the places where they might go.

The next picture has actors in it

Evershed joined Trioscope as an adviser before becoming chief strategy officer in 2021. The company combines live-action performance with stylized animation; its work includes Netflix’s The Liberator. His responsibilities cover corporate strategy, financing, international co-productions and business development. The production method had changed again, while the practical questions remained recognizable.

In April 2023, he joined the Thinking on Paper podcast to discuss hybrid filmmaking, storytelling and new production tools. In June 2024, he published a LinkedIn article examining generative AI’s use in film and television pitch decks. After years spent getting cartoons onto new screens, he was still looking at what a new tool might let a storyteller show somebody else.

Evershed’s personal site offers a compact declaration: “I like building brands. I like building channels. I like building companies.” The pleasure in that description is its choice of verb. There is work to do between the drawing and the audience. He has spent much of his career in that space, making arrangements for imaginary creatures to travel. Occasionally, one gets a pair of shoes.