Whether it's a zombie Abe Lincoln reborn with stem cells or gay Martians with severe heterophobia, the world of SuperNews! promises one thing: if it's making headlines, it's ripe for animated parody.

Originating with the launch of Current TV back in 2005, SuperNews! is the brainchild of Josh Faure-Brac who, in addition to creating the series' unique up-to-the-minute lampooning style, also writes nearly every segment and provides voices for a majority of the characters.

"I did the first one just in my apartment," laughs Faure-Brac, whose show has only this year expanded from shorts to a weekly half-hour collection of sketches, "It was very rudimentary, rough animation. Kind of unrecognizable to what the show looks like now."

As production increased early on, Faure-Brac quickly found a creative partner in Director of Animation and Lead Character Designer Steven K.L. Olson (who came to him through, of all places, a simple posting on Craigslist). Trained as a classic animator, Olson sketches early impressions of characters in pencil the minute they leave Faure-Brac's head, usually moving from rough sketches to finalized characters in a matter of days.

"He definitely brought some legitimacy to the look of the show," says Faure-Brac, "It was just us and a very small crew for a few years, actually. We just did these shorts every week or every couple of weeks for Current and every once in awhile they'd sort of go really big online."

Faure-Brac and Olson try to skewer each side equally (not unlike South Park) so that everyone will be up in arms.

It's thanks in no small part to the online presence of SuperNews! that the series has been able to build up such a fan following. Faure-Brac explains that a lot of the time people may not recognize the series as a TV show at all, but have seen individual sketches through e-mail chains or message board postings.

"People pass it around," he suggests, "Like our one on Megan McCain. She Twittered about it literally hours after it went online because someone sent it to her. She ended up following my Twitter and I followed hers... It's kind of crazy how quick and instantly the stuff goes out and bounces right back at you." The immediate nature of the humor is the central idea behind the show's origin in news-based sketches. It's vitally important to stay up-to-date and to offer audiences something they can't get anywhere else. Though Faure-Brac cites other programs like Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show as examples of comedy built on current events, SuperNews! is unique in that, just a few years ago, animation with this kind of speed would have been impossible, let alone with this small a crew.

From a modest two-story office, the SuperNews! team of 12 (with, now and then, one or two more working freelance) can write, design, animate and edit a full sketch and have it on the air in less than a week's time. Often, the animation process begins even before the script is fully complete. In a recent sketch that parodied Rush Limbaugh, Faure-Brac knew that he wanted to go with a Star Wars gag he called "Jabba the Rush." Before a single line of dialogue was written, Olson was already moving forward, designing the characters and background based solely on the premise.

Once the design is locked, the team begins creating each character in Flash.

Fully created in Flash, SuperNews!' characters only have 3/4 of a head with multiple mouths created so they can emote correctly.

"We completely build out characters," explains Olson, "My New Year's resolution was that all characters have complete turns. We're crude so we only have one view of the head. It's a 3/4 view that we'll just flip it back and forth. We make sure they all have at least two sets of mouths to emote properly."

Voice recording is done in-house and Faure-Brac is usually joined by a few guest-voices like, for instance, Mad TV star Jordan Peele and his dead-on Barack Obama impression.

Once voices are fully recorded, work begins on syncing animated mouth movements to the audio. For this, freelancers are often called in, sometimes working remotely from way outside Los Angeles.

"One of our best dudes is in Hanford [California]," says Faure-Brac, "and we just send him files via FTP. He does our lip-sync while we're sleeping and in the morning it's done."