Publick Nuisance

What Did The Protagonist Miss?

Sun, 19 May 2013 19:04:14 GMT

After a long absence, Hollywood screenwriter and Friend of Venture Todd Alcott is back at his old game of analyzing episodes of The Venture Bros., and, completist that he is, he's hell-bent on catching up with everything he missed. Starting with, weirdly enough, 2003's pilot episode, "The Terrible Secret of Turtle Bay." Check out his website HERE.

We Love You,
JP

P.S. Shirt Club. Soon...

The March (or May) of Progress...

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 20:35:44 GMT

Hello again…

A belated "Merry Christmas" to you all, and a preemptive "Happy New Year." Apologies for not offering up a Venture Christmas song this season, but we converted to Mayanism earlier this year, so we no longer believed in Christmas and fully believed the world would end on December 21st. Also, we were super-busy with post-production on The Venture Bros. Season 5, as well as with decorating our giant stone calendar and practicing human head soccer.

So now it's back to post-production. Here's where we currently stand with the season: We've already delivered half of the fully finished episodes to the network, and the rest are in various states of post-production. This week we received the rough cut of the final episode from Korea (which is actually the second half of what will be our premiere episode) so I'm spending the day scouring it for errors and typing up retakes notes. Then tonight I'm headed to a final sound mix session for the 6th episode. We'll finish the picture edit for the 7th episode a day or two into the new year and turn it over to our sound engineer, then move on to editing the 8th episode.

Since we're idiots who decided to write and produce our hour-long premiere episode last, we can't start airing until the last episode is finished. I don't currently know exactly when our premiere date is. I've heard it could be as soon as mid-March or as late as early May, but we're racing to get that premiere special done in time for March.

And now that I've seen all of the episodes in one form or another, I can truthfully say it's going to be a great season. The crew in every department of the production really stepped up their game (and new crew members brought new game)--the show's never looked or sounded better. And as writers, Doc and I hit a really great, confident stride that, I think, combines some of the best qualities of seasons past with a uniquely season 5 freshness. A good mix of new characters and old (some of which haven't been seen in quite a while), high adventure in exotic locations and internal strife on the home front. You will like it!

(Incidentally, the guest voices this season include J.K. Simmons, Larry Murphy, Paget Brewster, John Hodgman, Wyatt Cenac, Tim Meadows, Gillian Jacobs, Bill Hader, and the kicking-ass-on-SNL-this-season Kate McKinnon!)

We're also looking ahead to next season. Doc and I have big plans for season 6 and are champing at the bit to get started writing it. But first we have to write the script for our proposed long-form Venture Bros. special. We've got a pretty epic story planned, involving an epic number of cast members in an epic setting, so it's a pretty epic task ahead of us. The story will bridge seasons 5 & 6, so our mission is to tie up a lot of threads from season 5 (and 4, and 3…) and start a few new ones in the process. The sooner we write that, the sooner we'll write season 6--and the sooner we do all this writing, the sooner we'll be back on the air. My hope, as always, is to tighten that interminable gap between seasons--because I don't like waiting to show you new Venture Bros. any more than you like waiting to see new Venture Bros. So wish us luck…

Anyway, I posted a bunch of season 5 screen grabs on my Tumblr, but here's a few more for you LJ loyalists…

We Love You,

JP

P.S. Thanks for all the cookies.

P.P.S. Happy New Year!!!

We're Ba-aaack...

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 16:35:49 GMT

Mo Art Mo Money

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 18:18:59 GMT

Too Art For TV is an annual pop-up gallery exhibition in Brooklyn, NY, celebrating the personal, art-for-art's sake work of dozens of animation industry professionals. You've probably seen me blog about the shows every year. The openings are fun and jam-packed, the community really rallies around them, and the work is always dazzling.

The Bunnycutlet Gallery was founded by Liz Artinian, Color Supervisor for The Venture Bros., and close personal super-friend. And this year she's launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to keep the gallery open year-round, in hopes of curating more exhibitions and building a hub for an even bigger, more energized animation art community in New York.

Many Venture Bros. artists are exhibiting, as well as artists from such varied animated favorites as Ugly Americans, SuperJail!, Metalocalypse, and China, Illinois. Some of them even created that stuff! So if you're a fan of any of those shows, or just neato art in general, click on the image above and check it out. and maybe give them some money. I'm unfortunately not personally exhibiting a piece in this year's show, but I've got a couple of prints available as pledge rewards.

Thanks...

We Love You,

JP

Tumbln

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 16:07:14 GMT

So I have one of THOSE TUMBLR THINGIES now...

Never had one before, don't know how much I'll use it, but click the bold blue words above, check it out/follow it/whatever you people do with these things...

Just a few season 5 screen grabs to whet your electronic whistle.

We Love You,

JP

Kickstart the Adventure...

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 14:57:34 GMT

The Thrilling Adventure Hour is a super-fun live stage show in the style of old timey radio that throws down every month in Los Angeles. I've been lucky enough to see it maybe half a dozen times, even luckier to have befriended its creators, Ben Acker & Ben Blacker, and double-plus lucky to be a guest star in last week's sold-out shows here in Brooklyn. Your TV pal and mine, James "Dr. Venture" Urbaniak is just one member of the incredibly talented cast, the rest of whom I've slowly been poaching all year for Venture Bros. voices. Those of you who don't live in LA should check out their podcasts.

And now they're trying to raise funds to publish a hardcover graphic novelization of said thrilling adventures. Which maybe I'll get to do some art for.

Check out their Kickstarter page HERE, give 'em a bit of money, and get some cool schwag.

We Love You,

JP

Dragon Gone

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 18:54:53 GMT

Hello...

Have just returned from Dragon Con. Many thanks to those of you who attended our panel and/or dressed up as our most obscure characters and/or stopped by our signing to offer praise and gifts of cookies and robot heads. It is always a sincere and profound pleasure to meet you guys and suck up your groovy kind of love.

For those of you who did not attend, here's a small peek at some of the clips from the Venture Bros. Halloween special we showed at the panel, albeit a non-moving, non-speaking peek with no music or sound effects:

Over at Titmouse East, we're just wrapping up pre-production on season 5 of The Venture Bros. We ship our last episode (which is actually the second half of what will be the premiere episode) to Korea this week. All other episodes have shipped, and all of the art staff (except for few stragglers in the Color department) have gone home. We're received take one rough cuts of the first two episodes from the overseas studio already and are expecting the third this week. Which means we're about to start post-production. The Halloween episode is obviously the first one we'll edit and deliver, since it has to make it's October airdate (the official date has yet to be determined). JG Thirlwell has already completed his genuinely spooky score (we drew some inspiration from the soundtrack to Klute when we first met about this episode a few months ago) and we're just waiting on some animation retakes from Korea before Doc works his magic on the titling and transitions and adds his special sauce to select sequences.

Doc's currently on a train back from Atlanta, but when he returns to the AstroBase, we'll no doubt start talking more earnestly about writing our planned long form special, to be produced some time between seasons 5 and 6. We've already had a lot of "big idea" discussions about season 6 as well, so I'm hoping we get to work on all of this stuff sooner rather than later and we don't make you people wait 2 years between seasons again. Though, having begun season 5 production in January (having written day and night for several months prior), and having had maybe half a dozen days off in all that time, I'm sorely overdue for a vacation.

Hopefully this relative downtime means I can post some more updates on here in the next month or so, as we get closer to the release of the Halloween special and Season 5. Plenty of sweet art to show you, but it must be carefully reviewed for spoiler content.

We Love You,

JP

P.S. Also: thank you to all the adultswim folks who took good care of us while we were in town. And apologies to the ProV folks. I meant to come see your doubtlessly lovely table but had no idea where it was--nobody ever seems to think I might find a convention program or map handy when I come to these things.

Kickin' The New K-nowledge...

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 02:14:32 GMT

Please take a moment to check out a Kickstarter video from my pal (and occasional mentor) Howard Bloom, a real-life scientist, author and idea man who encouraged and inspired me while I was making the rounds with my Venture Bros. pitch book, some ten or twelve years ago (so this isn't entirely unrelated to The Venture Bros.)

Thanks!
We Love You,
JP

And if the link/video that's supposed to be above doesn't work, kindly go HERE:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1870526265/the-god-problem-how-a-godless-cosmos-creates-book

If You're In LA...

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 22:29:32 GMT

...so am I, briefly. And I'll be participating in this tomorrow:

...and We Still Love You,

JP

Happy Holidays from The Venture Bros.

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 18:34:15 GMT

(CLICK ME...then scroll down for our newest musical masterpiece)

We Love You,
JP

Re-Gifting (pt. 4)

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:45:14 GMT

So here are the last couple of pieces from the AstroArchives I'd like to share with you. They were created for two different art exhibitions and require a little bit of explanation, I think...

The first was for a comic-themed show at Maxwell's Maxwell's in Hoboken, NJ, curated by my Super-Pal Karl Heitmueller. Dubbed "Agents of P.O.O.C." (Panels Out Of Context), the artists' mission was to reinterpret one of our favorite comic book panels. Some guys did giant paintings, I think one guy did a stained glass window, etc...

Being a life-long Spider-Man fan, and in particular a Steve Ditko Spider-Man fan, I always loved the little full page backup features he did that taught you all about Spider-Man's powers and what his webs can do and crap like that. I also had recently bought An Ideal Boy , a lovely and entertaining coffee table book of Indian educational charts. I could not help but draw a parallel between these two brightly colored forms of childhood indoctrination and create a mash-up of them.

The second one was done a couple years later for the Too Art For TV Too show, printed at about 18" x 24" size, mounted on foam core, and displayed side-by-side with the first in a sort of "procrastinator's diptych."

...And that's all for now. Our annual Venture Bros. Christmas song should be available for your holiday listening pleasure in a day or two. In the meantime, you can enjoy all seven of our previous efforts, collected in one convenient location by clicking HERE!

We Love You,
JP

Re-Gifting (pt. 3)

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 13:53:45 GMT

"Pet My Danger" was my contrabution to 2001's Viva La Monkeysuit! , the third volume of the Monkeysuit (wow, that site's still up?) comics anthology series a bunch of us animation guys self-published together, back when I was still pretending to be Chris McCulloch.

I was living in L.A. while drawing this one (but finished it in New York) and had been in the network television trenches all year writing for The Tick live action series, so I desperately wanted to create something weirder, angrier and more free-form without having to pass it through several rounds of notes from three sets of executives. For some reason, I decided to tackle the "funny animals" genre I so loathe and had a Freudian field day with it.

Yes, The Sluggo Rabbit is basically Brock in rabbit form, and yes, that's supposed to be me at the end.

Enjoy...

We Love You,
JP

(Editor's note: I stole the title from my friend, the inimitable (and AWOL) Eli 5 Stone. Where are you, Choppy?

Re-Gifting (pt. 2)

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 16:20:53 GMT

Continuing my de-archiving and sharing of old comics work...

2003 was super-busy for me, what with The Venture Bros. Season 1 going into production, so my only contribution to that year's In Search of Monkeysuit (Monkeysuit vol. 4) was this back-cover single-page comic.

The sentiment is certainly a bit warmer than yesterday's entry... it's amazing how getting a TV show deal can cheer a guy up...

Enjoy.

We Love You,
JP

Re-Gifting (pt. 1)

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 18:03:48 GMT

Hi. Happy Impending Holidays and stuff...

No real Venture Bros. news to report, since we're just writing right now and I'm not going to tell you anything about anything we're writing. Except that it's all great. We're set to start production in early January, though, so I guess that's kinda news.

Have been on a bit of a cleaning spree at both the AstroBase and my home satellite Base (AstroBase Ice Cream Ninja) in some sort of procrastinatory "clean home, clean mind" bid for sanity while writing.

While optimizing the Soul-Bots' hard drives I've come across a few pieces of my old comic art, so I thought I'd share some of them with you fine folks, who vastly outnumber the people who bought the original comics or attended the art shows these first appeared in.

First up is "Oh, To Be Super!" A 7 page comic story done for The Bride of Monkeysuit , (under my Christopher McCulloch pseudonym) back in the summer of 2000, which should be evident by its pg. 1 reference to something called a "pager."

(Editor's Note: Apparently I pillaged the Beatles-inspired mustache joke on pg. 4 for "Powerless in the Face of Death" a few years later)

Enjoy...
We Love You,
JP

Click me and I grow big!

Most Wanted

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:08:35 GMT

Celebrity Cameo Room

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 17:04:33 GMT

The trailer (what?) for Hodgman's new book is up over at Funny Or Die, directed by Tom Sharpling and featuring a don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it "celebrity" cameo by yours truly (seated an appropriate distance from the grown-ups' table). Check it out, then BUY HIS EXTRA-FUNNY BOOK.

THAT IS ALL from John Hodgman

He'll Love You,

JP

Good Night, New York!

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 20:57:04 GMT

Thanks to you all who attended NY Comic Con, waited in line for our signings, and filled that massive IGN theater for our panel.

Here's a glimpse of us enjoying the calm before the storm in our Kubrickian signing quarters...

We Love You, Too...

JP

Tonight...

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 15:06:51 GMT

LIZ ARTINIAN--noted Brooklyn painter, Too Art For TV curator, Venture Bros. Color Supervisor, and partial Armenian--will be giving a talk tonight at Apple's flagship store on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. She'll be talking about the process of painting for animated television shows like ours and giving tips on Photoshop trickery. She might even mention Armenia and/or our dog, if you're lucky.

She Loves You,

JP

Ask and Ye Might Receive...

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 18:02:50 GMT

Doc and I will be appearing at the New York Comic Con on Friday, October 14th!

We'll be doing a signing in room 1E07 from 1-2pm, then some press stuff, and then our Venture Bros. panel is in the IGN Theater from 4:15-5:00pm.

Even if you can't be there in person, your presence can be felt and your questions answered. BY CLICKING ON OUR FACES...

adultswim has posted this page, where you can submit questions to Doc and me in the comments section. We'll peruse all the questions, pick our favorites, and then answer them in real life realtime at the panel. How will you know if we picked yours? I don't know...maybe adultswim will post video of it some time after the con. Here's hoping.

I won't say much more for now, for fear we'll have nothing to talk about at the panel, but I'll give you this quick update:

Doc and I are writing now. And we're writing some pretty good shit, if I do say so myself.

Production on Season 5 will begin very soon. The budget and schedule have been set, we're ordering computers, and we're currently hip-deep in the process of finding and hiring the right artists for the right jobs.

SEE YOU IN NY...

We Love You,

JP

NOW AVAILABLE...

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 06:43:05 GMT

Wherever fine music is sold...

More news to come...

We Love You,

JP

P.S. Also, I enjoyed A Bit Of A Chat with Honorary AstroBase Cadet 2nd Class Ken Plume recently, which you can eavesdrop on HERE.

Music To Pee On Mummies To...

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 16:46:03 GMT

The esteemed J.G. Thirwell has just posted some video highlights from last summer's Steroid Maximus concert in Prospect Park on his website. Enjoy as J.G. brings the music of The Venture Bros. to shuddering, white-knuckle life with the help of twenty or so of his henchmen and henchwomen. Enjoy...

...and then tool around his website, and buy some of his records or something. Then and only then can you write to adultswim and demand they release a second volume of The Venture Bros. Soundtrack!

We Love You,

JP

P.S. SuperJail! Midnight tonight!

SUPERJAIL!

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 01:52:40 GMT

Season 2 Premieres TONIGHT!

Check local listings, but here on the East Coast it starts at midnight...

we love you,
JP

This Friday Night In Breuckelen...

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 04:15:08 GMT

(Click above image for more info)

Een Draght Mackt Maght,

JP

Countdown To Wow-Town

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 05:25:05 GMT

The Venture Bros. Season 4 vol. 2 DVD
and The Venture Bros. Complete Season 4 Blu-Ray hit the shelves today!

(But you already knew that.)

And so...

Hello again. I've been promising Big News for a while, but have had to keep it under wraps. Mostly because contracts take a long time to work out (even when all parties agree to their contents) and the PR department* would prefer to be professional and make a proper to-do about the timing and presentation of said Big News.

However...

It just occurred to me that Doc and I mouthed off about our big news all over the DVD commentaries, assuming when we recorded them in November/December that this would all be public knowledge by now. And since our fans seem to enjoy listening to the commentary tracks the day our DVDs come out--and then immediately discussing them on the internet (FIRST!)--this particular cat will soon be out of this particular bag anyway. So who better than this confessed cat person to deliver it safely?

Herewith the cat:

We've recently signed a new contract with adultswim to produce two more seasons of The Venture Bros.

Doc and I officially started writing last week. Though, in truth, we technically started writing season 5 last year when we accidentally brainstormed a handful of (we think) pretty hot new stories while we were writing the season 4 finale. Our goal is to have enough scripts to comfortably begin pre-production by June.

But wait...that's not all!

Our contract also includes a long-form (60-90 min.) Venture Bros. special. Don't ask me when we'll make it, what it's going to be about, or whether it'll be on TV or direct-to-DVD, because we don't have a clue yet. Nevertheless: good news!

Tell them what else they get, Jackson...

We've been secretly working on an 11 minute Venture Bros. special for the past couple of months. A sort of light-hearted, one-off little aperitif we're producing and animating entirely in-house at Titmouse Studios in NY and LA. It will premiere some time this summer.

I think that's enough for you to chew on for a while. More news later as it develops. Now go buy some DVDs or something...

We Love You,

JP

*Apologies to the PR department for the whole cat thing. And also for incorrectly referring to you as the "Puerto Rican Department"** in several emails. I have since been informed that PR stands for "Public Relations."

**Apologies to Puerto Ricans, and Puerto Rico. Please disregard all those emails. They were intended for the Public Relations department at adultswim.

Ho Ho H-almost...

Fri, 24 Dec 2010 07:44:35 GMT

Our annual Christmas song hasn't gone live yet, but I'll probably be in a car on my way to Boston when it does. So below is a preemptive link to your digital stocking. Keep checking that page, and by tomorrow night you'll receive a gift of musical holiday cheer, courtesy of Shallow Gravy and friends. And in the meantime, you can open all the other stocking stuffers you find there, from many of our entertainment super-pals, including one by James "Dr. Venture" Urbaniak himself!

(Click me for your amusement.)

Merry Christmas
(We Love You)

JP

P.S. One last Christmas gift: I promised "news" the last time I was here. And though I'm not at liberty to disclose the full details just yet, I am happy to at least be able to tell you that we were not lying in the end credits of our season finale: The Venture Bros. will indeed return. More on that later... Happy Holidays!