The cartoon Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth was created in 1991 by artist Chris Ware, eight years before the premiere of Family Guy. Stewie, the football-shaped-headed child who loathes his mother and invents diabolical weapons on Fox's Family Guy, bears a striking resemblance to a comic-strip character: Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, a football-shaped-headed child who fears his mother and invents things to escape from her. Chris Ware has been drawing Jimmy since 1991... Says Ware, "I don't want a book of seven years' worth of my stuff to become available and then be accused of being a rip-off of Family Guy. The show's animation has come under fire by Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi, who expresses concern that the current generation of aspiring animators will be negatively influenced by the quality of animation in Family Guy. If you're a kid wanting to be a cartoonist today, and you're looking at Family Guy, you don't have to aim very high. You can draw Family Guy when you're ten years old. You don't have to get any better than that to become a professional cartoonist. The standards are extremely low. Kevin Smith and David Mandel, co-creators and executive producers of Clerks: The Animated Series, have gone on record as Family Guy haters. In the final episode of their Clerks they include a scene where a bad comedy writer consults a book entitled How To Write Cartoons by Seth MacFarlane, leading him to suggest the writers send the characters to Gilligan's Island and make gay jokes about them, parodying the heavy usage of pop-culture references and offensive humor on Family Guy (Family Guy actually stranded the characters on an island in the episode, "The Perfect Castaway"). On the DVD commentary to Clerks: The Animated Series, Smith refers to Seth MacFarlane as a nemesis, and Mandel calls the show "Emmy-nominated shit." When South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone were questioned about the meanest thing ever said to them, Stone replied "When people say to me, 'God, you guys have one of the best shows on television. You and Family Guy.' That fucking hurts so bad", to which Parker agreed: "Very well said. It's such a kick in the balls." On the DVD commentary for the South Park "Cartoon Wars" episodes, Trey Parker states "definitively" that he and Matt Stone truly hate Family Guy. They compare the show's reputation among other animated shows to the way serious musicians feel about Justin Timberlake. "Cartoon Wars Part I" aired on April 5, 2006.
Yeah! And you can obviously tell the references of The Simpsons in Family Guy. The South Park guys hate Seth, and so does Matt Groening. I'm on their side, Seth McFarlane sucks.
