The third season, out March 24 on DVD and Blu-ray, is in HD for the first time too.

One big change for season four is that it's being split up into two sets of eight instead of one set of 13. "The first eight should be on the air this fall," Publick offered. "We're just finishing making those. We're going to write for a while and start our production again in the summer to hopefully get the back eight maybe by the following summer. So you get three more episodes and you get stuck waiting six months in between them, which is better than the year we usually had to wait."

"Our fans are really freaking forgiving," Hammer added. "They should really complain or bail on us when it takes so long between seasons, but they don't, they just stick with it, so... We're not abusing that, but we're happy that they do that."

Fan loyalty may also be behind their controversial decision to kill off Henchman 24, one of the Monarch's most loyal minions and a fan favorite. It was an idea that Hammer actually had to sell to Publick.

"I wanted it," Hammer said, "because it was a great, epic, bad idea, to have a comedy team, and then you kill Dean Martin."

"It worked out for Jerry Lewis and I think it'll work out for 21," Publick added, referring to 24's chubby counterpart.

According to Hammer, it's the next logical step after the deaths of title characters at the end of season one and the dramatic two-parter that closed season two. It's also pulled some of the focus away from other events with even bigger consequences for the show as a while.

"People only see it as '24 dies,' but I think we made three sweeping gestures," Hammer said. "One, we destroyed all the clones, so now the boys are real. So that's a sweeping gesture. And then we had Brock quit, which nobody wants to believe, and we have a death that isn't going to be rectified. There's no cloning."

As recently as the New York Comic-Con in February, fans were asking Publick and Hammer whether 24 could be brought back somehow and speculation has run rampant on message boards since the season finale about how that could be accomplished.

"We do kind of read what people predict for what the next season is going to be and it can kind of influence us," Hammer said. "Not that what they say should happen, we make happen, but if a lot of people predict one thing, well, obviously we avoid that thing to give them their entertainment."

Venture Bros. has gotten more painterly and less Flash-y as the seasons have progressed.

Another way that they keep in touch with their fans is through Publick's LiveJournal, Publick Nuisance, which he uses to give updates on their progress when the show is between seasons and, as it gets closer, offers teasers in the form of background images and new character designs.

"The strange thing is that's a holdover from when we had to do our own promotion, really," Jackson said.

"The first season we were all but trying to generate our own press," Hammer added. "We were on boards talking about how great we were. And nobody gave a crap. They were like, 'Aqua Teen Hunger Force is the best.'

"I think it was season two where people just took up our retarded mantle of going on and blogging about ourselves. You don't really think about how popular your dumbass show is because you're too busy making it, but when we went to Comic-Con in New York and there were huge crowds, then you realize, 'Oh my God, people are watching the show.'"

It must have come as something of a surprise to the network, too, since it took several months for Adult Swim to renew the show after the first season ended.

"The one beauty of it was that they reran the show so many times that we found new fans," Publick said.

"We were always afraid of how geeky we were," Hammer said. "And then, since we came on the air, the geeks took over the culture at large."

With superhero movies like Watchmen, Iron Man and The Dark Knight making a big splash in theaters and television shows like Lost, Battlestar Galactica and Heroes capturing viewers' imaginations, it's easy to see their point. Go Team Venture!

Craig J. Clark is an occasional contributor to AWN. In his spare time he watches a lot of movies and writes about them on his website, Craig J. Clark Watches a Lot of Movies, which can found at dada.warped.com/movies.