Lincoln Peirce Interview as Big Nate Debuts on TV

Big Nate gets involved in new shenanigans as an animated tv star today.

The beloved comic strip Big Nate by cartoonist Lincoln Peirce has evolved quite a bit from a newspaper comic strip  first debuted in 1991 to a full-blown media franchise that includes illustrated novels and even a stage musical. After more than three decades though, Big Nate is ready to hit the small screen with the new animated Big Nate series from Nickelodeon.

The Beat interviews Big Nate creator Lincoln Peirce ahead of the animated show’s premiere,
also with the animated show’s executive producers John Cohen and Mitch Watson.

Taimur Dar: The end credits feature original comic drawings by you. Aside from that, how involved are you in the day-to-day operations of the show?

Lincoln Peirce: When they were first working on the initial character designs they asked me to take a look and create some draw turnarounds and to create a template for the way that Nate moves in 2D. And then they incorporated some of those drawings in their character designs when they were essentially creating the 3-Dimensional models. I’m more involved in the writing part. We have a great writers’ room and they create the outlines and the first drafts of the scripts and then I see the scripts. They call what I do “punching up the scripts.” I’ll add some jokes or rewrite some dialogue to make it sound more consistent with the way characters speak in the strip or the books.

Big Nate premieres on Thursday, February 17th on Paramount+.

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