Kenneth Plume

I adore The Venture Bros. It starts out feeling like just this silly, irreverent, slightly seedy parody of Jonny Quest and superhero comics, and then before you know it, it's sucked you into this incredibly dense, ridiculously complex, utterly batshit crazy universe while throwing jokes, story, deep-cut pop culture references, character, and continuity at you so incredibly fast that you basically have to watch each episode three times to even begin to get it all. But that's OK, because it will be completely entertaining every single time.

Anyway, now that the long-awaited series finale is finally coming out to wrap things up after the show's abrupt cancellation, it seemed like a good time to pull this book off my shelves and give it a read-through. It's pretty much exactly what it says in the title, basically taking you through the entire show (up through the end of season six, when it was published) with comments from the show's writers/creators/voice actors/general driving forces Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer, as well as lots of art, including backgrounds, character models, and reproductions of sketch-filled notes.

Is it going to give you deep new insight into the show and its universe and characters and creation? Probably not. But it's a lot of fun just to get a glimpse inside the heads of these two brilliant weirdos, and interesting to hear about the frankly incredible number of things they intended to do, but changed their minds about, or didn't have time for, or just sort of forgot about. And it looks great. It's a giant, hefty book with lots of room to really show off all the art stuff, some of which is incredible. Like, some of those backgrounds are beautiful in a way you can probably only appreciate fully when you're not distracted by violent, wacky shenanigans happening in front of them.

Anyway, I enjoyed it, and definitely recommend it to fans of the show.… (meer)