Not much to say. Too busy. Doc and I are about to finish our collaborative script for the finale of season 4.2 and I'm literally on my way out the door to the final sound mix for the last episode of season 4.1.

As such I will soon be blessedly free from writing and post-production duties for a while. Looking forward to just being a director for the next several months--still a difficult, full-time job, but at least it's not three difficult, full-time jobs on top of each other.

I did want to say that tonight's episode is really really good, though. Probably my favorite of Doc's scripts in these first eight episodes. Much to enjoy in it, on the biggest and smallest of scales. And if you're not finally converted to Sgt. Hatred by this one, then you're never ever going to like the poor lug.

Also, the Williams Street online store has a ton of new Venture Bros. merch for sale. Get 'em now, before our request for freebies exhausts their limited supply!

We Love You,

JP



P.S. Two small items my perusal of various message boards these past few weeks compels me to comment upon:

1. Captain Sunshine = NOT an actual pedophile.

2. Brock's absence has nothing to do with Patrick Warburton. He didn't ask for more money, he's not too busy for us, he hasn't refused to come back or anything of the sort. It was a creative choice on our part, and Brock WILL be back in the show at some point. Just not this week. Or next.

The second episode of the fourth season of The Venture Bros. airs tonight on adultswim. Entitled "Handsome Ransom," it was the first script we wrote for this season--back when we still thought we'd be doing 13 episodes straight through and starting production immediately after pre-production of season 3 finished.

...Which also means it was written when Michael Jackson was still alive...



Too soon?

Anyway, those who were confused or annoyed by last week's convoluted premiere can relax...this one's a pretty straight forward comic ransom romp. It picks up a little while after the events of the premiere, and it's got The Monarch in it. So you won't have to think too hard and you can watch it all regular and just enjoy it and stuff.

Assuming the network actually shows both halves of it.


We Love You,
JP

Kevin "Batman" Conroy guest stars in this episode, and he was a total joy to work with. A real pro who was game for whatever we threw at him and, if anything, almost got a little too into the role.

Tonight's the night! Spark up a bowl of popcorn and set your Tivo to "stun," because at long last The Venture Bros. returns to the airwaves at MIDNIGHT tonight (EST...I actually have no idea when we're on anywhere else).

And really...set that Tivo...because this premiere is a strange one that might require additional viewings to fully comprehend. But we're terribly proud of it. The only hint I'll give you as to how to mentally navigate this episode's convoluted timeline is: keep an eye on Hank's hair.

As readers of this LiveJournal are well aware, we split our fourth season into two halves of eight episodes each, so this is the first of eight episodes airing consecutively through the fall. The second eight will air some time next spring...because we're making those now. How's that going? Pretty good, actually, though stressful as always. I've just turned in the sixth script, Doc's about to turn in the seventh, and then the two of us will collaborate, as we always do, on the finale. Some at the network have called these our "best scripts yet," so I guess we're doing something right. But you'll have to wait till the spring to judge for yourselves.

In the meantime, enjoy the first eight...


We Love You,

JP

P.S. Go see A Serious Man and Capitalism: A Love Story. They're both kind of a bummer, but they're both excellent.

Our good friend--and Honorary AstroBase Cadet--Ken Plume lost his mom this morning to a long battle with cancer. Having experienced an all-too-similar and all-too-common loss when I was ten, I some idea what he's going through.

You might remember it was nearly a year ago I posted a link with his request for get well cards and wishes on her behalf, as well as donations to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

Well, a lot of you showed the size of your hearts then. There's still cancer and there's still a Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, so please give if you can now by clicking on the link.

There are also massive medical bills and a not-so-great economy, so if you click HERE you can contribute to helping the Plume family pay some of those bills. And be sure to type "For Pat" in the comments window.

Sadly, I've never met Ken's mom. But she raised my very good friend, so she must have been something.

We Love You,

JP

</div>

Click on the image above for more information about the fourth annual Too Art for TV fine are exhibit for the animation industry. Featuring the dazzling, whimsical (and, in one case, downright creepy) art of many current and former Venture Bros. artists, and scads of other friends. Opening this Friday night in Brooklyn, NY, USA.

...And in Venture Bros. News...

THE VENTURE BROS. SEASON 4.1 PREMIERES OCT. 18th @ Midnight. (which is technically the morning of the 19th, I know, but whatever)

We're currently editing that self-same premiere episode, while writing the fifth episode of season 4.2, while designing the fourth episode of season 4.2, storyboarding the second and third episodes, and directing the first. Which means I'm too busy to write much, so I'll just show you a screengrab...



(that, by the way, is a 3D modeled Monarchmobile the Korean studio surprised us with)


We Love You,

JP


P.S. Thanks to everyone who came out to Dragon Con to see us. And thanks, too, for all the birthday wishes!

adultswim.com has finally posted The Venture Bros. Season 4 preview we cut together for the San Diego Comic Con...



In other news, we recorded episode 48 yesterday...

And the new Professor Impossible is...Bill Hader.

So it was 1997, and The Tick animated series had just been cancelled. I was living in Manhattan then, but had started on the show while still in college and living in New Jersey, and I never anticipated having a career in animation. So I kind of had no idea what to do with myself. A good friend, who had been the executive at Fox assigned to all Tick licensing products, got me a job on The King of the Hill as a storyboard artist, since her then-fiance was one of the directors. So I picked up and moved to L.A. to work on it.

Three months later, I'd had enough of L.A. (or, more accurately, missed N.Y. terribly) and had couch surfed my way through a few friends' places and gave notice on the show. For my last two weeks in town, I crashed at my new friend/co-worker Anthony Lioi's place...

Somewhere along the way, I'd picked up what I considered to be the funniest painting in the world at a local garage sale. It depicted a little boy standing on the moon and was obviously painted by a loving-if-misguided aunt or grandmother or something. The moon and spacesuit were clearly cribbed from a NASA photo, but the little boy's face inside the helmet bore the squinty eyes and hot glare of a family photo album snapshot, most likely taken at a Sea World or something.

Anyway, I cherished this thing. And as my last day in town approached, I didn't really want to wrap it up and send it to myself, so I decided to give it to Anthony, as a token of my appreciation for letting me stay at his place, and being a friend to me during what was kind of a psychologically tumultuous few months. It was my understanding that some day, when the time was right and he'd tired of it, perhaps during some future business trip to L.A., he would return the painting to me.

Then today, he sent me this link:




This is how my friends show their love for me.


JP


P.S. I cried a little.

UPDATE: Venture Bros. animatic editor/Animo re-compositer/much nicer friend Tom Bayne has posted this video response, in order to piece my soul back together:

I'm back from San Diego Comic Con. Doc, however, is still on a train...somewhere near Chicago at last report. The whole weekend was a resounding handshake, hug and cheer-filled success for Team Venture, and I thank all of you who attended and braved the lines and the wait to shake our hands, hug us and cheer for us.

Doc and I were joined on stage at our standing-room-only panel by Jon Schnepp, Mike Sinterniklaas and James Urbaniak. Among other enticements (a "best calves" contest, an arm wrestling competition, and much dick talk) we showed a 3 minute preview of the upcoming season, quickly cobbled together from a batch of unfinished rough cuts, a little bit of After Effects and a tasty slice of JG Thirlwell's music the night before Doc left town. Nonetheless, it was well received by our captive audience. Hopefully Adult Swim will post it in its entirety some time this week...but I'm sure those guys are busy as hell editing all kinds of footage from the various panels and parties over the weekend.

Tomorrow morning, the insanity begins anew. Even though we've barely begun post-production on the first half of The Venture Bros. Season 4, we start production on the second half of Season 4 at 10am EST, when the entire design department returns from their long hiatus to start making the magic again. It will undoubtedly be a hellish few months ahead, what with editing the first eight episodes while writing and directing the next eight, but I'm really looking forward to it. Honestly, too much down time just doesn't agree with my constitution. But also, getting to see the fruits of our labor in the form of finished animation at the same time as we're working on new ones adds a new layer of excitement to the process and cuts down on that detachment you can sometimes feel from the final product when your lead time is like nine months. And the stuff we've been getting back from Korea this season has been of uniformly higher quality than seasons past. Plus, I think the scripts we're starting with tomorrow are among our strongest so far, and they hint at more excitement to come.

Here's just a taste of what we've been seeing these past couple of months, and what you'll be seeing in a couple more:














We Love You,

JP

P.S....
Today's Huffington Post gave us a little shout-out, including a clip, in an article about the new G.I. Joe movie, of all things: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/28/icorneri-gi-joe-movie-not_n_246291.html

And here's a link to an interview with LA Weekly we did at Comic Con. Or, it would appear, that Doc did with me standing nearby saying one or two things every once in a while.
http://blogs.laweekly.com/style_council/comic-con-2009/venture-bros/index.php?page=1

P.P.S....
Whoever's twittering (tweeting?) as jacksonpublick is NOT me.

Our good friend John Hodgman deserves a standing information superhighway ovation for his performance at the Radio & TV Correspondents' Dinner this evening...




We can forgive him for failing to mention The Venture Bros. in his speech (despite the fact that appearing on our show has now twice proved to be the fast track to landing Correspondents' Dinner speaking gigs), for the simple reason that he made the Leader of the Free World talk about Star Trek, Dune, and Conan The Barbarian...on television.

Also, because he goes to the same hair stylist as Doc and I. And I would not things to get awkward at the salon.

By the way, this is what Hodgman will look like in Season 4...








We Love You,

JP

P.S. Buy this! It's amazingly good...

Wow. It's been a while. Apparently 11 weeks. I was busy, and then I was a lot less busy, and then I was really not busy at all, and now I'm busy again, having recently returned from my first vacation in 3 years. Went to Rome for a few days, then drove south all the way to Sicily over the course of a week and a half with 2 night stops in Positano, Giuncano, Tropea and Taormina before flying back up to Rome for a couple more days. Am hoping to finally get around to writing that Venture Bros. story that takes place in the Vatican I've been kicking around for years so I can write it all off. Anyway, it was an amazing trip and I actually got enough sun and rest to neutralize the dark green in the circles under my eyes, so now I can almost pass for a normal person who sleeps at night and doesn't feed off the flesh of the living.


ANYWAY...Here's what's going on with The Venture Bros.

Animation!
So far we've received four "first take" rough cuts back from Korea, and a new one arrives every two weeks...so the hits keep coming. They're looking really good so far. Even though it still takes a couple of days of repeat, frame-by-frame viewings to catch all the mistakes and type up a retakes list, the quality on the whole is very high--higher even than last season which, for my money (or adultswim's to be exact) is pretty damn good. This is the first time we haven't made some huge stylistic change from one season to the next, so we and the overseas studio were able to build on all of the solid groundwork we laid in season 3. Of course we couldn't resist making some minor stylistic tweaks, so we took a new approach to the inking style of the characters, who are looking more satisfactorily (and consistently) comic book-y than ever now, to my delight. So, now that we have some animation...


We have begun editing.
Doc and I (mostly Doc, of course) are currently editing the first episode of The Venture Bros. Season 4.1. "Handsome Ransom" is our fortieth episode (not including the pilot and the Christmas special), features the voice of Kevin Conroy, and for continuity purposes will probably air at least second or third. J.G. Thirlwell has already provided us with the music, and we'll be handing it over to the sound engineer in a couple of weeks--after Doc's had time to work some Final Cut and After Effects magic on it.

A few random, working titles for upcoming episodes: "Blood of the Father, Heart of Steel," "The Revenge Society," and "Perchance to Dean" (and yes... I've been wanting to use that last one for years)


We are also writing.
Doc and I are both writing scripts for the "second half" of season 4, which will begin production later this summer (once we have enough scripts to guarantee we won't fall behind again). We even finally caved in to Hollywood style writer's room protocol and purchased a giant Dry-Erase "Big Board" for the Astrobase, upon which we work out our ideas and storylines for many episodes to come. It's already paid for itself in Post-Its savings alone. Personally, I'm still kind of finding my feet in that phase of writing where I have a dozen ideas for halves of episodes and am still trying to figure out which pieces fit together best to form a coherent story with an A and a B plot (and sometimes, it's been noted, C, D and E plots). For this, the Big Board is indispensible. We have some pretty f-ed up stuff in store for these poor Venture bastards, that much I can tell you.


We will also be at Comicon.
Both Doc and I will be appearing at the San Diego Comic Con this year--one by air and one by rail, as is our habit. Don't know what day or what panel format or anything yet, but Mike Sinterniklaas is joining us for sure (you can't keep that kid away), and possibly James Urbaniak (can we get a confirmation, James?) and/or John Schnepp, who co-directed with me this season and who you probably already know and love from Metalocalypse. It is our fervent hope that we're able to concoct some sort of preview/spoiler/clip reel kind of thing from whatever episodes we have done by then to screen at this as-yet-to-be-confirmed panel, so...bring your camera phones and I'll try to look as self conscious and shiny as possible.


I am told the Season 3 DVD has been selling well...
...better, in fact, than seasons 1 & 2 did, which I'm also told is relatively unheard of in the DVD biz. Which means I should thank you all for buying it and apparently spreading the Venture word from season to season.

Other than the above, I've been spending my time watching every episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, reading about gladiators, reading Jason's new graphic novel "Low Moon," helping out with new SuperJail scripts a little bit, enjoying my new Red Dragon e-cigarette, and trying to pick a color for my living room walls. So, you know...busy.


We Love You,

JP

THE VENTURE BROS. SEASON THREE IS NOW AVAILABLE ON DVD AND BLU-RAY!!!




They are available wherever fine video disks are sold. But most especially at Williams Street and Amazon, where I hope your orders will drive our sales rank to at least something above Jillian Michaels' "30 Day Shred."

The Blu-Ray edition includes a bonus disk featuring The Venture Bros. Soundtrack by JG Thirlwell. The soundtrack album can be purchased and downloaded digitally on its own in a number of places, but the only place you can buy the actual, physical CD separately right now is here. They also have a special, limited edition (and slightly abridged) vinyl release available.

IN OTHER NEWS...

Jeez, a lot has happened since I last posted. Which is pretty much why I haven't posted. Much happening equals much busy--busy making The Venture Bros. for you! First things first...

WE BROKE SEASON FOUR.

Or, rather, we've cleft it in twain. But, like the fabled Planarian worm of so many junior high school biology experiments, rather than dry up and die on your desk, each half of Season 4 has grown. Instead of producing 13 episodes in a row--which would have killed us and/or forced us to delay the premiere until January or February of 2010--we've decided to split the season into two halves of eight episodes each. So Season Four Volumes 1 & 2 (as I like to refer to them) will comprise a total of 16 episodes. Volume 1 will hit the airwaves this fall--October or November, I'm not sure yet. We're are just about to wrap up pre-production on those eight and will start getting them back from Korea next month. In the meantime, it's back to our laptops for me and Doc to write the eight scripts which will someday be known as The Venture Bros. Season Four Volume 2, which we'll begin producing this June with an eye towards a June, 2010 premiere.

PRESS ON!

We've done a few interviews lately. Here are a couple of them:

Animation World Magazine

ToyFare Magazine
(includes a bunch of super-old doodles I pulled out of a box in the bottom drawer of my desk. The print edition has many more of these)

Newsarama.com This was an on-camera interview we did in the magnificent Sky Box, high above the Jacob Javits Center during this year's New York Comic Con. I had an incredibly bad flu that day (Doc was fortunate enough to catch it from me several days later, when no cameras were there to capture it for super-forever internet posterity), but "the show must go on" and all that crap. Marvel, if you will, at the deep-socketed, soul-dead eyes of a man pumped so full of DayQuil he hardly has anything useful to say, and his writing partner just wants to talk about Bam-Bam. We die for you a little bit each day, Ventureroos! Now give us your money!

We Love You,
JP

P.S. More updates coming soon. For now, here's a neat background painting.

Honorary AstroBase Cadet (second class) Ken Plume is right now, as we speak, is trying to raise money for Comic Relief the only way he knows how: by staging a 24 hour, live-streaming internet telethon in honor of "Red Nose Day" (which is some kind of English holiday) from his bedroom.*



Go there. He is just now entering his tenth hour. Doc has already called in once, and the two of us will be calling in again later this evening. You just missed Jonathan Coulton, but John Hodgman is expected to make an aural appearance some time in the wee hours.

We Love You,
JP

P.S. I promise an actual Venture-related post in the super-soon. But for now, click the image above, watch as long as you can stand it, and then donate money.

*Note to fans: Ken Plume's bedroom was the model for Henchman 21's bedroom! And it is way better than cartoon bedroom.

Hello, Merry Christmas, and God Bless Us Everyone!

As usual, Ken Plume twisted our arms into providing Quickstop with another holiday song. This one comes from Henchman 21's personal archives, and we are fortunate enough to get to hear the dulcet tones of Henchman 24 one last time, in that he and 21 had the foresight to get their Christmas shopping done early this year (in anticipation of a holiday trip to Cancun, which has of course been cancelled since). Click on the image below for extra yule-tainment:



I have shopping to do yet, and a drive to Boston ahead of me, so there's no time to post more. Season 4 of The Venture Bros. is coming along, slowly but surely, after many delays and much tardiness on my and Doc's part in the script department. Election obsession, apartment hunting, failed attempts to quit smoking...these are just some of my many excuses I needn't get into here and now. But we're hard at work.

One fun note: Christmas came to The Venture Bros. early this year as we pulled off something of a casting coup: Patton Oswalt, Seth Green, John Hodgman and Brendon Small were all kind enough to lend their talents to the most recent episode we recorded. That pretty much kicks ass right there, and they were all super-sweet and funny to work with. Thanks, boys. My only regret is that I had to record three of them over the phone.

LASTLY, SOME PLUGS:

It's probably already way too late to even call these "last minute gift ideas," but you should go and buy these fine quality items, all created by my talented super-pals (click on hotlinks to find out where to buy them):

1. WEEP'S "Never Ever." When he's not writing The Venture Bros. (or painting), Doc Hammer makes music. Listen to it!



2. More Information Than You Require. When he's not schilling for Mac or being a resident expert on The Daily Show, John Hodgman is a writer of note. Read it!

3. Zombie Tales #7 When he's not co-directing The Venture Bros. or directing Metalocalypse, John Schnepp dicks around with comics and zombies. Feast your eyes!

4. ...and speaking of Metalocalypse, the second season is now available on DVD.


Happy Holidays!
We Love You,

JP

Might I suggest you attend THIS...



(CLICK IMAGE FOR MORE INFO)

We Love You,
JP

My good friends, Misters Karacas, Warbrick and Augenblick, proudly present the warped fruit of their labors beginning this Sunday night on adultswim...






...please watch and enjoy!

We Love You,
JP

Since adultswim.com will be premiering the final episode of The Venture Bros. season online this afternoon, and since our season finales tend to be rife with big plot revelations, I implore you all not to ruin things for those who choose (or are forced) to wait until Sunday night's television broadcast of the show by posting spoilers here before then.

...and in that self-same spirit of not spoiling anything, we've decided to postpone the release of this week's Shirt Club design until MIDNIGHT (EST) on Sunday because it, too, contains a spoiler. And we want everyone to have a chance to see the episode first...at least on the East Coast. So don't go checking out the Shirt Club page on Sunday until you've seen the episode, or you'll be sorry you did!

• • • • • • • • • • • • • •

But for now, on behalf of Doc and myself, we thank you for watching...


We Love You,

JP


P.S. Doc and I also hope to see some of you at DragonCon in Atlanta at 2:30pm on Saturday, Aug. 30, which has just been confirmed.

If you've never watched one of our episodes on adultswim.com, this is your week to do it!

Why? Because it's the only place (short of the season 3 DVD anyway) to see a full extra two minutes we had to cut out of the broadcast version. Far from the usual "padding" or "meandering bullshit" we normally cut from our episodes, these two minutes are actually an action-packed, hilarious and entirely self-contained scene that you will not want to miss! The new episodes usually premiere online at about 6pm EST, but sometimes they're up earlier than that.

. . .

So here we are again...about to launch into another epic two-part season finale. Season 3 has been a long haul, and it's not even over for us yet. We still have to mix the final final episode and deliver it to the network, which will happen around Monday. We've not had a break since April or May of 2007, and though my load has been lightened in recent weeks, it doesn't look like we'll get a proper one until Season 4 is finished...

...but we haven't exactly started Season 4 yet. Well, we have and we haven't. It seems we were a bit premature and overly optimistic when we launched headlong into production over a month ago. Doc and I struggled to turn our first two scripts in late, and it was immediately apparent that we would not be able to continue on through the season in that vein. So the first two episodes were designed and storyboarded, we recorded one of them (with special guest star, the legendary Kevin Conroy!), and then we sent everyone on the staff home for six weeks. Which is easily the suckiest thing I've ever had to do on this show. The deadlines on the last few season 3 episodes were just too tight, and we were just too exhausted to start sprinting into production full steam right away. Aside from being impossible, the quality would have seriously suffered, so we're taking this month to finish post-production, rest a bit, regroup and recharge. Our plan is to get a couple of scripts ahead and then resume production in mid-September. I'm not sure yet where that puts us in terms of a Season 4 premiere date, but I'm guessing we're looking at next Fall.

In Other News...
• I had a blast at the San Diego Comicon this year. As usual, the fans were fantastic--a pleasure to meet and sign for--and I saw some hysterically great Venture Bros. costumes. The rest of my time was spent drinking with old friends, drooling over turn-of-the-century prints I'll never be able to afford at Century Guild Gallery's booth, ogling Hayden Panettierre from afar, perusing The Watchmen's Owl Ship, and discovering that Patton Oswalt has a huge geek chubby for The Venture Bros. I also received the coolest, weirdest gift from a fan ever--only to discover it missing from my mysteriously open suitcase when it came around the baggage carousel back at JFK.

• Doc and I will be attending DragonCon down in Atlanta together, as it turns out. We're set to do a panel on Saturday--though I don't know what time yet, or who else will be on it--and we'll undoubtedly arrange some sort of signing during the weekend as well.

• The Dark Knight was really excellent.

• I don't know where I've been for the past few years, but I finally discovered and got hooked on Brian K. Vaughan's Ex-Machina comic series last week and blew through every trade paperback and uncollected issue in about two days. Check it out. Especially if you're a New Yorker.

• Persepolis and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly were pretty great. Best DVD double feature I've enjoyed in years. Way better than the night I got In Bruges and 10,000 B.C. on Pay-Per-View.

Lastly, A Quick Update About Shirt Club...
A very small minority of you Shirt Club members have fallen victim to American Apparel's continued ham-handed customer service in that a handful of the Dean, Camp Rusty, and Order of the Triad orders are still outstanding. The full supply of Dr. Girlfriend shirts are shipping as I write this, though, and the O.S.I. shirts are on-track for on-time delivery. The Original Team Venture shirts will probably suffer some delays, however, as ringer style t-shirts always seem to give us the most trouble. Again, apologies to all those affected by these delays, and thanks for your continued patronage.


We Love You,

JP



Life imitates Art, courtesy of The Venture Bros. and Siobhan Mullen's deft camera. Click on Siobhan's name and check out her blog for more delightful photos and the occasional Venture Bros. behind-the-scenes post.

Hey,

Just a few words for you Shirt Club subscribers and enthusiasts, since I've been getting a lot of questions about it here in the comments section...

Though Shirt Club has been running extremely smoothly--especially considering the haste with which we established it and the unbelievable volume of orders we've received--we have experienced some unexpected and unavoidable production delays with some of the shirts, leaving some of you shirtless, baffled and maybe even a little hurt.

For instance, we actually blew out American Apparel's entire nation-wide stock of eggplant ringer tees with our Billy Quizboy T-Shirt. So, while most of those orders shipped, some of you won't receive yours until American Apparel makes more and gets them to us, which we're told will be this week.

The Rusty's Day Camp shirts experienced a slightly different problem: American Apparel shipped us nine boxes of navy t-shirts with white rings instead of our full order of white t-shirts with navy rings. So we had to delay the print job on that shirt, and we'll be starting it next week.

A very small percentage of the Sgt. Hatred t-shirts were printed with misaligned logos, so rather than send crooked designs to people, we're having some of them re-printed.

Lastly, a tiny minority of you loyal Subscribers are still waiting on your Brock Samson Kodokan Blood Judo bonus shirts. Again, this is because American Apparel didn't have quite enough of them in stock at the time we ordered them.

And so, we humbly apologize to all of you affected by these shortages and delays. We appreciate your patience, we haven't forgotten about you, and we fully intend to honor each and every order just as soon as supplies become available.

Hopefully this post answers most of your questions, but in the future, the best place for you to direct any Shirt Club-related correspondence is vbshirtclub@gmail.com. But please...DO NOT email us at that address unless you're a Shirt Club customer with a legitimate Shirt Club issue! It is not a mailbox for fan mail, complaints about the show, or requests for internships, interviews or answers to your burning questions about Dr. Girlfriend's gender!

...but enough about business...

While you wait for your Shirt Club shirts to arrive (and by the way, you are soooo gonna want this Sunday's offering!), why not while away the hours enjoying our latest episode? The delightful, Doc Hammer-penned "Tears Of A Sea Cow" (formerly "Murder O'Clock"), is already available for online viewing at adultswim.com...


We Love You,

JP


P.S. Some of you out there have found a way, intentional or not, to coax a full subscription order out of PayPal. Don't even try it! Your money will be returned immediately and the order will not be honored! Subscriptions were only available for a limited time for the specific reason that we do not make a habit of over-printing these intentionally ultra-limited-edition t-shirts. So we cannot honor orders for expired shirts because there simply aren't any extras.

P.P.S. Don't be suckered by eBay offers on official Shirt Club shirts. I've seen the same seller hawking ten copies of the same shirt in like four different sizes, and no individual ever ordered that many of any of them. Not saying for sure they're fake, but it's pretty damn likely. And come on...no shirt is worth $75. Okay, maybe that sleeveless New York t-shirt that John Lennon actually wore, but that's about it.

Man oh man we are busy...

I really haven't posted anything in quite a while, have I?

This is because we are desperately racing the clock to edit each new episode in time for broadcast, and...

THE VENTURE BROS. SEASON 4 HAS BEGUN PRODUCTION!!!

Yup, the character/prop/background design teams and production team started work at World Leaders several weeks ago...and we didn't even have a script for them. I turned in my first script (Ep. 40, "Handsome Ransom," if you're keeping track) a little over a week late, keeping the artists busy in the interim with judiciously doled out spoonfuls of design assignments for characters and locations I was pretty sure would make it into the final draft. And Doc is just now turning in the second episode of the season...which we're supposed to finish designing in like three days. Neither of these scripts, by the way, are for next season's premiere episode. As usual, we probably won't get to that one for a little while...

We have never tried this business of overlapping seasons before, and I must say it is hell on all of us. Nevertheless, I'm quite pleased with what we've all turned out so far on both the art and writing fronts. Episode 40 is already being storyboarded and we're set to record the voice tracks next week, keeping our fingers crossed in hopes of getting a special guest voice to play a major role, which I will not spoil.

Now I have less than a week to get the next script in. Guess who will be late again?



If I hadn't been so busy, I'd probably have written a bunch of stuff about all the episodes we've shown so far. Like about the various songs we tried unsuccessfully to license for the last montage scene of "The Invisible Hand of Fate..."

...Or how all the photos at the beginning of "The Buddy System" are of Doc, me or my brother circa 1977. Because you can't put pictures of other people who were children in 1977 on TV unless you can track them down and get them to sign a release form, no matter how public a place your dad snapped the photos in. So take that, "Josh," you could have been on TV, but Noooooooo...

...Or about all the real and fictitious celebrities hanging out at Jonas Venture's house in the key party scene of "Dr. Quymn, Medicine Woman..."

...or how Dr. Entmann in this week's episode was recorded three different times by two different actors, after we were turned down by a third semi-celebrity (who shall remain nameless because he apologized profusely)...

...but I guess I'll save that stuff for the DVD commentaries, which someone is bound to make us start recording soon, because we don't have enough to do. Then they'll bleep it all out for legal reasons.

In other news, Ep. 33: "What Goes Down, Must Come Up," is now available online at adultswim.com for your viewing pleasure, and will of course be broadcast in its full glory this Sunday night at 11:30pm EST. It's another solo effort by yours truly (and a weird, dark one at that) and features the voice of our beloved "Art Director" (I prefer "Storyboard/Design Guru," but apparently that doesn't fly on Linkedin) Stephen DeStefano, whose lovely blog can be found by clicking here, and who probably speaks in that accent at the office roughly 38% of the time.

Next week's episode will be Doc Hammer's "Tears of a Sea Cow," the working title of which was "Murder O'Clock" just because.

The network tells me our ratings are excellent this season, with each episode scoring higher than the highest-rated episode of any previous season. The Family Guy continues to kick our ass, of course, because it would seem many many many more people would prefer to watch a Family Guy rerun for the tenth time than a brand new episode of our show. That, or a lot of people go to bed at 11:29 (EST) on Sunday nights.

And Shirt Club continues to rock the worlds of our overworked interns, and the bodies of fandom...



We Love You,

JP

P.S.
Oh, and Happy Belated 4th of July, everyone...