When it comes to animating the movement of the characters, SuperNews! has the advantage of dealing with very short (usually three to seven minute) sketches. In traditional animation, a single animator will work with a chunk of footage disembodied from the whole. Here, animators are able to work with extended segments, giving them a better feel for the flow of the scene and a single animator is usually able to tackle 1,000 frames (roughly 40 seconds) in a single day. That includes tweening by hand with keyframes on the twos. Motion tweening is only employed for very action-heavy sequences, though resourceful animators have created code that mathematically position keyframes, speeding up the already-rapid process.

Other custom scripts that have been created within the SuperNews! office include an in-program camera, much like in a 3D software program, that allows for shots to be chosen pre-rendering. A normal Flash cartoon will export the entire scene in an extremely high resolution and select final shots in Adobe After Effects. Skipping that step, SuperNews! is able to render only the end result, saving a significant amount of render time and enabling the segment's directors to call the shots without relaying orders through a technician. To this end, SuperNews! doesn't use storyboards of any kind, calling instead upon the omnipresent "camera" within the program itself. The final step has each sketch exported as either QuickTime or .AVI and edited accordingly. Because it's meant to be viewed as a complete short, SuperNews! never exists in a .SWF format, even when it's placed online.

Once the episode goes out, both on television and on Current TV's website, the internet then again becomes a resource for providing instant feedback from fans.

"We try to read every single comment that a cartoon has," says Olson, "It's kind of the current way to be steered by the audience. We have, for example, a miniseries about Britney Spears within the show and we had one made and three more in development. We don't know if we'll do all four of them so we go to message boards to see how people respond to the first one. If they like it, we'll make more. If they're indifferent, we'll sort of phase it out."

When it comes to analyzing the audiences' response, Faure-Brac takes a lot of pride in his aim to remain as politically indifferent as possible.

"You can go on YouTube and see us being attacked by angry Republicans on the 'Jabba the Rush' thing and angry Democrats on the first Obama thing we did.

"The best thing we can achieve," adds Olson, "is when we find that people are arguing to each other on both sides that our cartoon is proving their point. We see that on the message board a lot, 'Yeah, they proved my point! Immigration is terrible!' and someone else says, 'You're stupid! They obviously said that immigration is great!' That's when we feel like we've nailed it."

Of course, SuperNews! isn't 100% late-breaking stories. A number of sketches are considered "evergreen" gags and, though they still deal with modern issues, the jokes are set up in a way in that, with some luck, they'll still be relevant months or years down the line. These (their Twitter cartoon, for instance) have been planned out well in advance of the season and can balance out more immediate jokes in the half-hour block.

Now in the middle of its first full-episode season, SuperNews! is already set to return for a second season with an as-of-yet-undetermined number of episodes. Faure-Brac and Olson are both hoping to try some new things, including potentially devoting a full-episode to a single half-hour story. No matter what, though, it's important to the whole team to stick by Faure-Brac's personal mission statement.

"[Sometimes] we have to take a step back," he explains, "and let the characters breathe and let the characters just bounce off each other rather than make any kind of massive, amazing point. It's something that's very loose and something we have to kind of play with as these stories evolve. It's about weighing it out. If the story is so big that we feel like we have to do something on it, we'll do a quick gut-check and say, 'Is everyone already doing stuff on this?' And, if so, and we decide that we can't do something different from them, we'll take a step back and just say no."

SuperNews! airs on Current TV Friday nights at 10:00 p.m. ET with episodes available online at www.current.com/supernews.

Silas Lesnick is a freelance writer and critic. Now living in L.A., he graduated from Emerson College with a degree in media arts and has spent time working with the American Film Institute in Washington, D.C.