NYCC 2015: ‘The Venture Bros’ Press Interviews

I’ve been on the cartoon beat for a few years now, and have met a lot of the names and voices behind shows both small and large. I’m generally pretty relaxed when it comes to interviews, but I’m not ashamed to say that prior to my talk with The Venture Bros masterminds Doc Hammer & Jackson Publick, I was fucking terrified.

When your job is asking questions, the last thing you want to hear about your subjects beforehand is they are notoriously difficult to interview. Doc & Jackson are known for answering as little as possible about the show, going off on wacky tangents, and even poking fun at the askers themselves. The Venture Bros panel occurred immediately before the press hour, and there were many examples of this to strike fear into my heart. As I settled into my seat and started pondering the fact that I was the only one both wearing a tie and drinking a beer, I suddenly considered myself an easy target for any shenanigans our guests might pull. Momentarily, I thought to myself, “This is it. This is the interview I will cry at.”

Fortunately, Doc and Jackson were lovely human beings. Yes, they lived up to their reputation for being stingy with answers. There were a lot of “maybe” replies and discussions of topics like comic books, superhero film adaptations, the Fantastic Four DVD commentary (Jessica Alba apparently talked about her UGG Boots constantly), and the Dr. Strange movie that the guys wanted to do (“It would be slightly funnier than it’s probably going to be. It would be a lot darker.”)

But the two also discussed their relationship with each other. “It’s a marriage. I love him,” Doc said of his partner in crime. “I would call him my best friend, but it seems like we’re more than that. ‘Best friend’ seems like at any point he could be like, ‘Who are you dancing with?’ Like, it could fall apart. So he’s not really my best friend; he’s family.”

That’s when we made our slow, careful transition into show-related queries. We started with a question about the status of the Guild, and Doc replied, “That’s what we’re going to learn in season six. What happened to the Guild.”

Dead end there. This was definitely tricky. In fact, the duo are so secretive about information, Jackson even turned to Doc after one of the latter’s non-answers and asked, “We don’t kind of address that?”

Without hesitation, Doc’s answer was a resounding, “Nope.”

But Jackson gave us a little more info. “You see the makings of the new Guild,” he revealed. “They have some changes to go through, they’re downsizing and reforming a bit, and we cover a lot of that this season. More at the beginning than once we got to the middle and kind of get caught up with our other stories.”

And that was it for spoilers. How about some themes instead? Like the abundance of strong female characters on the show.

“First, it’s two males writing the show,” Doc said, explaining the reasoning. “It’s a mommy-less universe in that show. There’s a lot of mother problems. Also, in my life when I have rational people that are actually guiding me, they’re almost always women. So it just happens. And it’s a better foil. I mean, the men are such infants that if you pair them up with anybody, that happens. It happens with Billy [Quizboy] and [Pete] White – two men that one of them is going to be responsible and the other one is going to be irresponsible. So I think it happens in all of our pairings, unless they’re poorly constructed. Like Watch and Ward. They’re the same [person], there’s nothing different about them. It’s a poorly constructed pairing. And were we to give them an episode, you’d find out that one of them is not that good at [something which] the other is very good. That’s just pairings.”

But the number one theme that gets brought up is failure, because way back when, Doc & Jackson said that’s what the show is about. They’ve had to backpedal and explain themselves further in almost every interview since, and this was no exception.

“The show is about failure only because we wrote a show and looked at it and said, ‘Wow, I think it’s about failure.’” Doc clarified. “We never set out and said, ‘Let’s do something about failure.’”

In fact, the show isn’t any more about failure than everyday reality is – which is a point they really tried to drive home. “Failure is a big, beautiful thing,” Jackson said. “If you’ve never had failure in your life, or not learned how to deal with failure, you’re a monster. I don’t know you. So failure is really life. When we say the show is about failure, what we’re saying is: the show is about their lives. And we think about the fact that life does not go as it’s supposed to be planned. That’s what we mean by failure.”

And they don’t intend to change anything about this formula. “We’ll never be able to drop it until life learns to drop it,” Doc said. “And then we’ll be robots, and that’s not real. And then we failed. We failed our humanity.”

I think it’s safe to say life won’t ever drop it, people will never be able to lose their emotions, and thus Jackson Publick, Doc Hammer, and The Venture Bros. will never fail.

The new season is slated to debut in January 2016 on Adult Swim.

[Photos by Becca Green]