Gritty Chimp Interviews the Creators of Venture Bros: Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick! (part one)

Pic by Sara Brandau - Jackson Publick on the left, Doc Hammer on the right. (Voice of Dean Venture, Mike Sinterniklaas, is centre... but if you've watched the Comicom panel vids then you already know that)

So Swim asked me to write a bio piece on two of Adult Swim's greatest heroes, Jackson Publick (right) and Doc Hammer (left), the creators of The Venture Brothers. We're four seasons in and the show is firmly embedded as one of the greatest success stories in Swim history. The magical blend of cartoon action, great characters and a billion pop culture references has garnered fans all over the world and given the cosplay scene a new lease of life (if recent convention photos are anything to go by). Originally I planned to give you a detailed account of this great pair from info sourced from the internet but, being the cheeky chimp I am, decided to go straight to the horses’ mouths and hit them up for an intervie.

After some digging around and firing off a couple of emails I wasn't expecting much due to their crippling work schedules but here I sit on a perfectly ordinary Tuesday night about to have a mind-blowing, live Skype video chat with the slick duo, straight from the Astrobase...

You guys seem to have the perfect working partnership. How did you first meet?

JP: On the set of the Natalie Imbruglia video (laughs). That's the funny version.

DH: The funny version is we met on the set of the Natalie Imbruglia video because we saw a Natalie Imbruglia video with two guys who look identical to us, and it might have been us and it possibly happened.

Was that 'Torn'? You know, the first one?

DH: Oh yeah, like there was another video. Like there's a whole load of Natalie Imbruglia videos we don't know about.

She was surprisingly popular over here thanks to the show 'Neighbours' so we seemed to get a LOT of Natalie Imbruglia for a while.

JP: In 'Torn' I play the ex-boyfriend in the baby blue long sleeve t-shirt and he's (points to Doc) one of the stage hands.

DH: I play the guy who drops the chair

JP: But then we met again through Ben Edlund a mutual friend of ours, he's the guy who created 'The Tick' and we were college room mates. Ben and I had written together.

 

 

The Venture Brothers is a rare example of an Adult Swim show with a rich, long running continuity. How did you convince Mike Lazzo that this was the direction you needed to take?

DH: We didn't.

JP: Yeah, we just did it and then before he knew what was happening it was happening.

DH: and then before he could complain it was successful so we just kept doing it.

JP: I think, believe it or not in spite of all the kind of post modern, weirdo, lo-fi stuff that the network was bored with I think he's a really big fan of that stuff.

I know Dino Stamatopoulos had trouble convincing him on the whole continuity idea with Morel Orel due to the way the network likes to put shows out of sequence..

JP: I think if every season was a 13 part mini-series and you had to watch every single one of them in order I think they would have a problem with that. But we kind of.. They're a bit stand aloney and there's a sort of quiet continuity in the background. Lazzo's not in love with two-parters, you know because of re-runs and stuff like that but continuity is cool.

DH: Yeah, we do it with kind of a running thread but you can watch them in a modular sense if you had to. I don't want you to, I want you to watch all of them in a row... with your pants off.

With my pants off?

DH: The way we make them

JP: Yeah, pants off, pipe in hand. Just loving it.

How has the way you work together changed from the the early days of Season 1? Surely things must have got a bit easier for you now you're four seasons in, a bit more established, a couple more staff?

(DH and JP fall about laughing)

DH: Yeah it's easy now. We got the masseuse..

JP: You're talking specifically the way we work together or the way the show is put together? Because there's us here at the Astrobase and then there's life at the animation studio which is very different and some things have got easier, some things have got harder. I think we work better together now. We were kind of under so much pressure this past double season that I think we bonded more. I think the world became our enemy.

DH: We became mutually Stockholm syndrome. Because everybody was our captors we fell in love with our captivity and we're the people in the cage so we had nothing else.

JP: Yeah and so there's less pride and more openness. You know, we'll pee in front of each other now.

DH: We're less afraid of our bad ideas. Which is a big stumbling block when you're writing. You feel like a total tool when you go 'oh here's my idea' and it's bad and then you think 'oh god I'm the guy with the bad ideas'. But we have no problem just coughing up our crappy ideas to each other and then hopefully it'll spark a better idea or we can just laugh at our own incompetence.

JP: We're very judgemental people.

DH: All we do is judge!

JP: We're horribly judgemental and we both know this about ourselves and each other so you always suspect that the other guy's answer is going to be shitty.

DH: Yeah, but that's what writing is. Photography is mostly editing right? Writing is mostly being a judgemental asshole.

How do you go about planning a season? Do you have an ultimate endgame you're working towards?

DH: Right over there on stage right we have a giant dry erase board that has all our ideas for what we're doing in the next...

JP: ...the foreseeable future

DH: That's how we keep our ideas together.

JP: That's new, we just got that this year.

DH: Yeah before it was just phone calls.

JP: We have loose ideas for a season and we usually only get through half that list by the end of a season. We don't really plan it out as much as people might think.

DH: There are some characters who have long seasonal over-arching threads and some characters we plop out to tell a very specific story. So we don't know everybody's great big arc but we might craft one. Who knows?

So have you got a big finale idea, say if the network suddenly said you've got to wrap this up in five episodes have you got a final end point?

DH: We always talk about the way we could put this show to bed in four episodes.

JP: Yeah, so we have some moments we want to see in a last episode but those are up in the air. By the time we get there we might change our minds.

DH: Well that was kind of the first season problem, we didn't know if we were coming back so we killed our main characters. Then we came back and resurrected our main characters.

JP: That might have been an accidental segueway into your next question, don't you have a cloning question?

Well the next one is, are there any characters you've fallen out of love with over the years? Obviously you love them all but are there any that are particularly grating on you now but you feel compelled to bring out for the fans or to fit a certain certain story line?

JP: I would say the ones I've fallen out of love with are the ones I wasn't super smitten with to begin with and could never quite crack the nut. I was in love with the idea and then I never quite executed it the way I would have liked.

DH: I feel really bad talking about our characters in that sense. I mean I can't really name any character that isn't in good standing with me because they're very realistic to us. I don't want to say, “Oh guess what? I don't give a shit about your friend any more.” I can't do it. But yeah, I think there's one character in particular that has lost its allure, but in losing its allure you feel this slight debt to make it work.

JP: You want to torment that character in an entertaining way...

DH: Yeah, we've got to go over to his house and say: “We've got to do this” then bend him over his couch and show him the what what. You know what I'm saying? We've got to go back for seconds. It's like when you break up with a girl and then you end up sleeping with her one more time, that's my metaphor. I might go back and sleep with one of those characters... metaphorically.

 

 

Besides David Bowie, do you have any more heroes you are keen to immortalise on the show?

DH: We throw in a lot, we had Iggy Pop, Klaus Nomi...

JP: Aleister Crowley, Mark Twain, off screen Nikola Tesla. More historical figures than rock stars..

DH: We had Brian Eno

JP: We threw the idea of Freddie Mercury around for a little while.

DH: We wanted Brock to hang out with Lemmy from Motorhead, which would be great because you want to put him with the only person as cool as Brock.

Do you not think Freddie Mercury and Shore Leave could team up? Maybe there's some secret island where Freddie is still alive.

JP: Oh Freddie would definitely still be alive.

DH: That would be kind of awesome.

JP: Well we're living out our fantasies here. We want Freddie to be alive.

DH: Well he died of the same tragedy that befell Klaus Nomi and that didn't stop us from bringing him back. So in our world Freddie's fine.

Who is your barometer in terms of finding what works well on the show?

(DH and JP both smile and point at each other)

JP: Each other, occasionally the guy I'm editing the animatics with. You know, if there's dead silence... but it doesn't really affect what I do unless I'm feeling sketchy about something and then I'll be all like “Does that work?” That's about it. But the crew like totally different episodes than the fans do.

DH: Even the fans like totally different episode than the fans do

Do you think we'll ever see a feature length Venture movie?

JP: Sure. It's not happening but I'd like to think it will happen.

A season feels like a particularly long movie if you watch it in one go so I could see it working.

JP: I think we've definitely got it in us.

DH: Do you see it as live action or animated?

Live action would be pretty cool but it's casting the right type of people isn't it? You've got to get that spot on otherwise people would be like “That's not Brock”. I guess you two could play every character, like on the show, if you went down the Monty Python route.

DH: I couldn't really play Hank, I couldn't play Dr Girlfriend..

JP: I'm not skinny enough to play the Monarch...

DH: I could bulk up and play Shore Leave

JP: Yeah, why not?

This season you worked with Metalocalypse's Jon Schnepp. What did he bring to the table and how was he to work with?

DH: He's huge!

JP: He's a giant man, he's like 6' 5'' and I shared an office with him. He brought... a smaller office.

DH: He brought his constant conversations about zombies. Jon loves zombie movies.

JP: And I'm not that into zombies so I couldn't go there with him all the time.

DH: I'm moderately into bad films but not at all into zombie movies. So he really did bring a Metalocalypse flavour to our world. But to the show?

JP: To the show he helped me tremendously with editing. He's a sort of editorial director so he would take an animatic, which is like the radio play with words under it, it's what we start the show with, that's five minutes too long and he would get it down to four minutes too long or one minute too long without losing anything. If I were to start that process I'd be like 'oh crap we've got to lose three scenes' and somehow he'd get all the air out of everything and get things down, so he helped me a lot in that capacity. He also helped me with some drawing stuff. He was really good moral support during a very tough season, and just a lot of fun to be around. It was great to not be alone in that office.

DH: He also came to see my band play. Like, nobody else did. Nobody ever goes to see my band and Jon did. I thought he was bullshitting me but he actually wanted to come see my band play. So that was nice. He's that guy.

 

One of the big game changers was the evolution of The Monarch's henchmen. Whose idea was it to kill off 24 and make 21 such a beefcake?

DH: It was a combination of our ideas actually.

JP: Yeah, Doc pushed to kill 24, so you can blame him for that and I said we'll do it as long as I can fuck 21 up in the way that we ended up. I think what sold you was when I compared him to...

DH: Glenn Danzig?

JP: Yes (laughs)

DH: and when he became this kind of, well he'll still be a nerd, he'll just be all beefy. You know, tragic nerd.

JP: yeah and trying to talk like Wolverine

DH: but still effectively cool in spite of himself.

JP: yeah

DH: yeah

DH: We work it out together, whatever arguments we have we hash it out then walk away believing in what we're doing. We have to.

JP: ...or we undo it in the next script

DH: or we break it again

Death is a muddy issue in comic land and dying is rarely the end. In the show, the prospect of a quick cloning offers up near immortality. How do you decide when enough is enough for a character?

JP: First of all I disagree because I don't think we've opened up cloning to every character. That's a kind of proprietary Venture technology that he's a bit ashamed of...

DH: In the history of the show he's done it to the boys and once he used one of the boys to make a kid that died at a day camp resurrect. We don't know if that even worked, it was a horrible, horrible barely alive glob he handed to the parents but he wanted to give them tissue at the end of the day.

JP: So we purposefully kind of destroyed most of the possibility of cloning ever again by shattering all the tubes and killing all those corn boys and stuff, we didn't want that. It's much more fun to come up with a dumb reason why somebody survived an explosion if we want to bring him back. Or how they were just in a diabetic coma.

DH: In the comic book form, for me it's more exciting to come back to something and the next shot is them hanging off the side of a cliff grabbing onto a little branch that was sticking out than it is to resurrect them through hard-to-describe science.

That makes sense, so you don't reckon 24 is going to make his way back through some horrible cloning procedure?

DH: No.

JP: I'll say right now, Dr Venture will not clone 24.

DH: I'll say right now, 24 actually died. His presence in the show is either spiritual or a completely psychotic thing. So because we can do that he seems to be alive to the viewers but he's dead... but he does have a look-alike brother...

JP: (laughs)

Who also speaks like Ray Romano? Hank and Dean seem to be finally forging their own personalities and look like they could make it to adulthood. Was this always the intention or something that happened naturally over the past two seasons?

JP: A bit of both I guess?

DH: Yeah

JP: In terms of getting different personalities from each other we started that towards the end of season one I guess, and that was kind of a mandate of the network, we knew we wanted to do that anyway just because it was kind of boring to write them the way they were, where they were interchangeable. As far as maturing we just realised that our show has actually been moving forward in time like you know we've done an episode where it seems like nine months go by and so we've kind of got to do something with them.

DH: You know, gone is the days of The Flintstones or The Simpsons where every character is the age they were created and they have these incredibly long lives and every day is always exciting. We like the idea of pushing our characters into the next year and they have the information and the things that they've done, it's more exciting for us to write for people that grow. I think it's more exciting to watch people that grow too. Although I also think it's a bit challenging and a bit sad for people to lose the things they fell in love with. Hopefully they'll gain new things to fall in love with.

But change is really difficult for a viewer, it's really difficult. You don't want to have to deal with new characters yet at the same time you would complain if it didn't happen. It's the problem with second, third albums. A band makes an album; you fall in love with it, all this crap happened to you. You had sex to it, you had a Christmas and it was playing in the background, everything was awesome. Then they put out the next album and you immediately go “Crap!”, “Sell-out!”, “Garbage!” and then the third album comes out and you listen to the second album again and you go “oh this is great! Sounds just like it! This third one sucks ass! It's a total sell-out. I hear keyboards everywhere” and then the band breaks up, and you hear this third album again that you can't remember because you put them all on your itunes and it sounds like it came from the first album. You don't remember.

JP: Why did I not like that once?

DH: Yeah, that's what I think will happen.

JP: That said, bands that break up after three albums get back together and make another album five years later.     

DH: And they suck!

And then they have a reunion tour with the original band members..

DH: and it's kind of depressing and you wish they were making new material. Then when they do make new material like Duran Duran, you ignore it. It could be good, you don't know. So we're going to keep moving on so people will have to deal with that thing.

JP: Season Five – Electric Barbarella. Coming your way

DH: Like when Adam Ant came out with Wonderful. Why not? We all think he's a wash-up then Boom!

JP: Wonderful

DH: Wonderful! It's a hit Then he paints his hands red and breaks into people's stuff and then they lock him up.

JP: ...and then he's in a car with a gun.

DH: I tell you this, if they ever go back on tour I want to play guitar for them. Fuck Marco Pirroni. Marco's got better things to do. I want to be that guy. I'll wear a crappy pirate outfit, I don't care. Adam can be the cool pirate. I'll be the pirate that wears yellow, he can wear the black pirate outfit. I don't give a shit.

You know what I think he's done some shows in the past couple of years on one of these 80's revival tours. They've got, like, Kim Wilde..

DH: No! No! I'm saying we should get the pirate ship out and do the whole Prince Charming review beginning to end. It would be awesome!

Not this horrible watered down shit you see these days.

DH: None of this lame 80's revival stuff with him and Phil Oakey

and Bucks Fizz..

DH: Yeah.

Ok, now this is a pretty big serious question.

DH: Go ahead. Is it about my mom?

 

No, but it's going to be very personal. During your writing sessions when you're writing The Monarch and Doctor Girlfriend and you're in character, has it ever got... weird?

DH: You know what, when we write in character we are usually doing secondary characters because they're the ones that are usually easier to have crap happen to. When we write Dr Girlfriend and The Monarch, I don't think we've ever written it together.

JP: Yeah, I don't think so.

DH: I'll write the scene or he'll write the scene. We don't write it together.

JP: We never actually write together. Even when both our names are on a script we're trading scenes, we're taking turns. We make shit up together. We riff and improvise then write some stuff down but we don't actually write and for some reason we never riff on those two. It's more of our comedy teams we do that with.

DH: If you saw the episode where 21 and 24  are suiting up to rejoin The Monarch? And the.. (JP and DH burst into 'Mars') Duh duh duhduhduhduh duh duh duh duh. That routine we did with each other in character for almost four hours. That could run for four hours.

THAT would be a DVD extra.. It'd be an extra DVD!

JP: Only we started with the Superman theme but we can't afford that. But that said, if you're asking if we had sex with each other when we were writing...

Well, just if it ever got a bit too pervy in the heat of the moment? You're passionate guys, you love the characters, maybe it turned a wrong corner but obviously not...

DH: No, it turned a right corner, a greasy right corner on all four wheels.

So four seasons in, are you guys able to take much time off these days?

DH: I haven't.

JP: No, we actually turned the finale in yesterday. It airs Sunday and today we're doing a fucking interview.

(JP and DH laughing – thankfully!) So no, no time off. Time off is like my half hour subway ride where nobody can call me and I don't have to write or draw. playing scramble on my iphone.

DH: Time off for me is gauging in the future when I might have some time off and then it becomes this vacation that I'm going to take and then when it passes I kind of like, bump it and then I can't remember if I took the vacation. I get all the excitement, it's always Christmas Eve in my world. Christmas never comes. But if you think about it Christmas is a let down where the big gift isn't the bike, you know what I mean? It's like a piece of furniture for your room. You're a kid and furniture shouldn't come from Heaven. You don't know about furniture, it's like getting a coupon for food. You know, you feed me, don't give me coupons. It's meaningless to me. I'm a child, it should have been a bike or (JP and DH in unison) an ATAT walker. Yeah. It should be something totally cool.

JP: You had parents who gave you shitty presents. I got the ATAT walker so I've had a good Christmas.

DH: I got one toy and I was allowed to pick it out. I always picked out the weird, like, do you remember the show called Space 1999?

Yeah.

DH: It was awesome! I got the big Eagle that fits the characters inside the little thing. But, my parents never gave me the characters. So I had this giant Eagle ghost ship where I would kind of open the door and put my hands in and go “this is where the guy would go if I had him”.

JP: That's why you like Event Horizon so much because it reminds you of childhood. “I had a big empty spaceship when I was a kid, and they made a movie about it!”

DH: And it's true they'd give me a character or an action figure that didn't have its other guy. So I'd have the R2D2 action figure but no C3PO and R2D2, because I was only allowed to get X amount of toy presents a year. I'd get one big one. This is how it went, one big one, one small one and the rest was practical presents. My parents were teaching me about want and about let-downs and about hatred for other kids and jealousy that my next door neighbour had fucking everything and I had to pretend to like him to play his video games. It was a horrible, horrible existence.

JP: So why didn't the get you the Eagle and then Martin Landau or whoever it is?

DH: I'd give them a list with the large thing I would want and here are the small things. So I would get the Eagle and then the Spiderman web maker. They didn't realise that if you already got me the Eagle, get me Martin Landau. So they'd get me the Spiderman web maker, but they didn't get me a Spiderman suit. Two unrelated gifts. (To JP) You're parents loved you more or wanted you to love them more. My parents don't care if I like them. My opinion of them meant nothing. They provided for me, they fed me and they would give me crappy gifts like clothes and stuff. A lot of kids in the family, but let's move on...

Yes, let's. Part Two tomorrow...