The Mantis-Eye Experiment

Astute reader '420guy' has noted in a comment thread here that Jackson left some juicy tidbits in the comments of his LiveJournal. Specifically a status report of sorts on the much anticipated (but always elusive) season 5 of Venture Bros. When asked by a loyal reader for a morsel from the season:

Sorry, man... nothing to show until the summer. We're just about to ship the first episode to Korea to be animated.

Which, to me anyway, implies you guys will get to see some stuff during convention season. The big three conventions, as always, are San Diego Comic-Con, Dragon*Con and New York Comic Con. Jackson and/or Doc are likely to make appearances at all three of them, possibly with clips and trailers.

Perhaps even more telling is the fact that the first episode was just shipped off to Korea (his comment was written on April 8th), meaning there are still a good seven or eight months before that episode is completed, which already puts us into early next year. Coupled with Jackson's other comment (in response to asking for the title of the season 5 premiere):

Sorry, but we haven't actually written the premiere episode yet. And since Doc wrote the "first" episode in the production order, I can't tell you the title. Because he totally hates when the titles get leaked.

Obviously the season can't begin until the intended premiere is completed, and even if Jackson and Doc suddenly wrote a script for it today there would still be around a month of pre-production, plus another 7 - 8 to get the animation finalized. So, my own (hopefully) educated guess is that season 5 will start sometime early next year, somewhere around March. The best I can do is speculate, though, so take that with some grains of salt.

The eBay auctions came about by accident. I kept the artwork because it represented a breakthrough for me as an artist, and because no one else on the production team wanted it. It migrated to milk crates in storage where it would have rotted away had I not noticed that fellow Venture vet Stephen DeStefano sold some of his paper Venture Bros. art on eBay. So I thought I'd have a go. Got Jackson's okay. The Venture fans are so happy to get this artwork that I feel the obligation to keep going until it's all gone.

The fate of the remaining characters depends on strong pre-orders. We will make announcements when each new character is about to go into production, whenever that may be. So in theory you may see more delays on certain characters, but eventually we hope to release them.

Okay, that's enough of that. Obviously Mantis Eye: The Original Mantis Supply Store was this year's April Fools' gag. Hopefully it was one of the less lame ones you witnessed today, on a day when the internet is traditionally completely untrustworthy. I assure you there are no legal battles going on for the name of this site.

In case you didn't know (and I doubt you do), the joke site was also based on Mantis Place, which is a real (though non-crazy) seller of real, live mantises. They also probably have more trustworthy information, mostly because I didn't make that site up. You can still check out the gag site if you like, though the Mantis Buyer achievement is no longer gettable. Thanks for visiting!