Sonny Strait

Sonny Strait, who has worked in Voice Acting, self-published a comic, staff writing and directing, will be appearing at AFW4.

About Sonny

Sonny began his career in entertainment in 1987 when he and partner-in-crime William (call me Bill) Foster, self published a mini-comic. In 1989 they had their first professional comic story, a ten-page punch-em-up tale called The Atomic Punk, was published in Mangazine by Antarctic Press in 1990. The boys immediately slammed into their next project and 1990 saw their self-published series Mr.Average. The story, about a cue-ball headed hero in a suit had a great grass roots following and received a special write up in The Comics Journal. They went on to be published by several other companies apart and together and Sonny now has 15 published works.

Sonny, a drama jock from age 14, loves acting and has appeared in numerous plays in professional, scholastic as well as the north Texas community theater scene. It was in community theater circles that Sonny stretched his acting, writing and directing skills and created many programs, some of which still run to this day, including an acting program for teens (The Back Stage Players) and a traveling puppet theater troupe (The Puppahams). Disappointed by the lack of cutting edge theater companies in the Dallas/ Ft. Worth area Sonny founded, Impulse: Theater of the Fearless with partner Chris Buchner.

In February of 1999 Sonny auditioned for his first voice acting role, Krillin, on the wildly popular anime series Dragonball Z for FUNimation Productions. He landed the part and it lead to many others. He has since played Tom the Toonami robot announcer for the Cartoon Network, Masaru, Mikael, and Kai for Digital Manga's I'm Gonna Be an Angel, as well as numerous others for FUNimation including Bardock (Dragonball Z), General Blue and Bandages (Dragonball) and Lupin III (Lupin III anime movie series).

In august of 2000, while doing an autograph signing at Comicon in San Diego, he met ElfQuest creator Wendy Pini and her husband, co-writer and publisher Richard. Wendy happened to be a Dragonball Z fan and she drew pictures of the DBZ characters with her ElfQuest characters and gave them to Sonny, Sean Schemmel (Goku), Christopher Sabat (Vegeta) and Stephanie Nadolny (Gohan). Sonny decided to surprise Wendy and returned the favor, drawing the attending DBZ voice actors' characters with Wendy's central ElfQuest personality, Cutter. Wendy hired Sonny on the spot and in 2001 saw Wendy and Sonny's sold out summer special ElfQuest: Wolfshadow. Immediately it was followed in 2002 with the best selling graphic novel Elfquest, In All But Blood. Using the skills he gained from his mentor Wendy, Sonny's new comic series from Toky o Pop came out in August, called *We Shadows, and Book 2 will be out this summer!

Recently Sonny's FUNimation duties have increased by becoming a staff writer and director.