You need to watch the best superhero parody on HBO Max ASAP

If you didn’t realize The Venture Bros. was even on the air for that long, it’s probably because it only had seven seasons spread out across nearly two decades.

Publick and producer Doc Hammer write, direct, and voice characters in every episode, which explains the show’s extended production schedule.

In fact, they were still writing season eight when news of the cancellation broke, two years after season seven aired.

The show follows Dr. Rusty Venture (son of famous adventurer Jonas Venture), his two socially stunted sons, and their terrifyingly efficient bodyguard, Brock Samson.

From its simple start, the show introduces a supervillain guild led by David Bowie, the Doctor Strange knock-off Doctor Orpheus, and later plot points that make those first two sound totally normal.

There was hardly a hint of what The Venture Bros. would become when its pilot premiered in 2003. Like Sealab 2021, it looked like a simple parody of Jonny Quest and other older adventure cartoons.

Even into its final season, Venture Bros. still had plenty of superhero parodies and dick jokes, but they were backed up by the weight of a ludicrously dense continuity.

That makes the show hard to hop into for random episodes, but extremely worth binging the whole series.

Adult animation today is full of cartoon characters dissatisfied with and broken by real life. Venture Bros. just did it earlier, and arguably better.

Venture Bros. goes to some dark places — abandonment, drug abuse, and so much murder, to start with — but the show itself never really feels dark.

Partly because there was no one else to rein them in, Publick and Hammer take some wild swings with later seasons of The Venture Bros. One-off gags turn into crucial plots points and characters reinvent themselves on a moment’s notice.

The lightness of early seasons makes later stakes feel higher, and recognizing jokes that spin out into multi-episode arcs feels like knowing the show’s secret handshake.