To all the Venture Bros who sadly didn't make it:

The attached art is a high-quality scan from the book Go Team Venture!: The Art and Making of The Venture Bros.

For those unfamiliar, "The Venture Bros" is both glorious tribute & pointed satire to Hanna-Barbera's Jonny Quest, as well as dozens of other media franchises, classic tropes, as well as the gimmicky superhero industry. It originally aired on Adult Swim in 2003, and currently has an 8th season coming out soon, in the form of a movie called Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart, set for a late July '23 release.

The creators of Venture Bros are Doc Hammer (real name Eric Hammer), and Jackson Publick (real name, Christopher McCulloch). Below is an interview snippet in which they address the clonic, morbid nature of Hank & Dean: (i.e. the titular Venture Bros)

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JP: The dead clones running around was pretty hot. In the parade of zombie boys, many of them do match the deaths that we did see.

DH: We've gotten a couple of additional ones from what we saw previously, in the rundown of their various deaths. I don't think we had seen the drowning ones before.

JP: When Brock and Doc are talking about how many times they've done this, they name how many times the boys have died. But that doesn't mean that they each didn't have a death. It's not necessarily a total.

As to what they'd do if a Dean died but a Hank didn't die, it might depend on whether or not the Hank was around to see it happen. If Hank's out of the room, maybe they say, "Dean had to go away for a few days:'

We almost had a gag about Brock having to snap the other one's neck when that happens, which may explain why he's so quick to answer Hank when he's turning into a living bomb in season 1. Brock answers, without a thought. Probably because he's had to do it.

DH: These are the sorts of things that plague Dr. Venture—that he has murdered his kids so many times—but only on a very deep, subconscious level. It's something that he's so good at lying to himself about, and that's part of what makes Dr. Venture not Benton Quest. Benton Quest is a cardboard cutout of a human being. Everything he does is right and righteous, and everything that Doc does is kind of an inherited con-struct that he lies to himself about. And he lies to himself perfectly, so when you get into his subcon-scious, you have all the suppressed lies to himself. His inadequacies, the fact that he has to murder his sons, and just that sense that he doesn't quite know who he is and he has a soul divided.