The horrible truth about super-science: Jackson Publick of The Venture Brothers on superheroes, satire, and the '60s.

• Author: Weigel, David
• Position: Culture and Reviews - David Bowie - Interview

MR. FANTASTIC is a sociopath who hides his super-powered brethren in a giant Arctic laboratory. The Scooby Gang is a collection of addled misfits with a talking dog that barks ominous commands only his pill-popping master can hear. And David Bowie's shape-shifting powers have helped make him the world's greatest supervillain.

This is the universe of The Venture Brothers, a series on the Cartoon Network that's currently in production for a third season. It's not the breakout hit of the "Adult Swim" lineup of late-night shows for older viewers. That would be the series that brought Boston to a standstill, Aqua Teen Hunger Force. And it's not the first Cartoon Network series to mangle the characters and conventions of classic cartoons and paste them back together like a William Burroughs cut-up. The first episode of Space Ghost Coast to Coast debuted 13 years ago.

The Venture Brothers is a different beast. It flaunts all the elements required of a cartoon for hipsters: irony, social satire, pop culture parodies, uncomfortable pauses. But at its heart, as creators Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer frequently explain, the show is about failure. It's about the vision that inspired the science fiction TV shows of the 1950s and '60s, the optimism of the space race, and the baby boomers' beloved, indulgent idea that they could achieve anything they wanted.

These were ideas that satirized themselves. Giving its 1966 Man of the Year award to "the Young Generation," Time's editors saluted the boomers as the folks "who will land on the moon, cure cancer and the common cold, lay out blight-proof, smog-free cities, enrich the underdeveloped world, and, no doubt, write finis to poverty and war." Forty years later the boomers have disappointed no one as much as they've disappointed themselves.

This explains why Dr. Thaddeus "Rusty" Venture, the failed boy genius and father of the series' eponymous brothers Hank and Dean, is such a screw-up. As we learn in flashbacks across the series' 27 episodes (so far), Venture pere was a Jonny Quest figure who solved mysteries under the wing of his brilliant father, his friend Hector, and their bodyguard Swifty. His '60s were an era of superhero teams, super-science, space stations, and helpful robots. As Rusty grows up, all of that peters out. He drops out of college (after palling around with two other super-scientists and a Doctor Doom analog named Baron Underbheit), loses portions of the family business, and enters middle age trading off his family's successes while reluctantly raising his two rather dopey boys. When the Monarch, his butterfly-fetishizing archfoe, breaks into Venture's lab, the villain can't find anything worth defiling or smashing. "What can I do to this guy that life hasn't already?" he sulks." I almost feel sorry for him."

Hank and Dean don't know all of this. They believe that their father is a genius and that the adventures they stumble into are legendary. They think nothing odd of the fact that he wears a one-piece "speed suit" and that they dress, respectively, like the Scooby Gang's Freddy and like Buddy Holly. They don't seem to notice that the villains they battle are poseurs or trust fund kids who usually belong to a hamstrung, bureaucratic supervillain union called the Guild of Calamitous Intent. They're blissfully unaware that nothing important has been invented for a long, long time. But when they inevitably screw something up or get targeted by one of their...