Okay, today I’m going to do something a little different: I consider the Venture Bros to probably be my favorite thing on television these days, so sometimes I like to read about it on the Internet. Now, I’m getting into a pretty big spoiler for the show here (though, one from the start of the second season and that was like forever ago), but I want to offer my own thoughts on the topic of the titular brothers, Hank and Dean, being clones. The idea is that the boys are so death-prone that their Super Scientist father has clones of them ready to go when needed and the boys’ beds record their minds as they sleep, so that the clones will have their memories. Simple enough. What I want to talk about today is… well, I occasionally see people on the Internet talking as though the fact that the Hank and Dean of today are cloned from the original Hank and Dean, it somehow means that these are not the “real” Hank and Dean, that they are, in fact different people who just happen to have the appearance and memories (in fact, Dean himself is going through a sort of existential crisis about that in the show as of this writing). So, in the interests of amassing evidence to argue against people who will never, ever see this website, here I will present my case:

Point I) In the universe of the Venture Bros, souls and the afterlife are confirmed to exist. Dr. Byron Orpheus, friend of the Venture family, is an accomplished necromancer and all manner of ghosts have been encountered (Abraham Lincoln in Guess Who’s Coming to State Dinner, Major Tom in Ghosts of the Sargasso, and a Native American tribe in Assassinanny 911, for examples). Knowing that the soul, in that world, is an actual thing, we would kind of have to say that who a person is would be defined by their soul.

Point II) The current clones of Hank and Dean have the souls of the previous incarnations. In the episode Powerless in the Face of Death, the episode that reveals the clonal nature of the boys, Orpheus travels to the afterlife in search of the boys’ souls and finds that their souls are not there. Continuing his search for the souls he comes to Dr. Venture’s lab, where he senses the souls within the machinery that Doc uses to record the boy’s memories. While Doc doesn’t believe in using the supernatural designation of “soul” preferring to think of it as just the boy’s “memory synapses,” but Orpheus is the expert in the supernatural and he says the souls are in there. It seems that one’s soul goes where a person’s “memories, hopes, and dreams” goes, and that’s what Doc has on store. Thus, with this information fed into the boys clone slugs every time they die, they are in essence carrying their soul with them.

To further my case, I point to The Family That Slays Together Part One, in which Hank notes that he “I jumped off my roof in a Batman costume. I think. I might have just dreamt it.” That was one of the ways that Hank died. Hank remembers this though it was probably not something that would have been recorded by his bed, and that indicates to me that he has carried a bit of memory from a previous body to his new one. It is especially worth noting that the ghost of Abraham Lincoln was only able to affect the physical world through objects that bore his image (statues, paintings, money, etc.). For the souls of Hank and Dean, their own cloned bodies would be a perfect fit.

To me, it looks like this: When the boys die, their soul goes to those Earthly things that most connect them to the world, their memories in Doc’s machinery, and then on into the clone slugs. That continuity of soul would mean that the clones of Hank and Dean now present are as much Hank and Dean as any Hank and Dean that ever came before. I fully agree that if we took a clone and let it live without downloading the souls into it, it would be a new person (look at D-19, the rejected Dean clone from Perchance to Dean). But the Hank and Dean of Season Four are still the Hank and Dean of Season One (and the dozen Hanks and Deans that died before that).

Here’s this month’s Little Choy

Today’s victim of Little Choy’s insult is a former Drug Store owner, whose business model apparently didn’t work out.

Anything else, we got? How about some Phone Guys:

Cut-Up

Cut-Up is a part time superhero, part time stand up comedian. His career in comedy began before the other one, in fact he was working at a small club in New York when he was one of dozens of people caught in an explosion caused by a supervillains doomsday machine malfunctioning. Some people were killed, some were wounded, but this comedian was instead changed: He found that he could transform any part of his body at will into blades or spikes. His minor celebrity and his newfound powers combined to lead him into the circle of superhuman celebrities (shapeshifting actors, cyborg stunt-men, super-strong wrestlers, etc.) but he found his experiences with them to be hollow or soul-numbing. It wasn’t until he met some actual superheroes and saw how they used their powers that he really understood what he could do with his life. He joined the Strange Squad and has served with them ever since, but not without taking time to do stand-up.

Cut-Up is another one of those superheroes I created as a kid. At some point I wrote down the name and the idea that he was a comedian, then did a little doodle (Cut-Up had hair then, but I figure he is older now). The decision to have him be a member of the Strange Squad was also I have to stress that if I ever made a comic with the Strange Squad, Cut-Up would definitely not be tossing wisecracks and acting wacky in the style of the “funny” members that every superhero team seems to have. Cut-Up would be dry and sarcastic, sure, but no more so than anyone else. I don’t seem to have ever given Cut-Up a real name as a kid, and I still haven’t.

Monstora

Monstora is the child of a monster and a heroic monster hunter who realized that they had more in common than they thought. She doesn’t know that, though, having been raised in an orphanage after her parents realized that they also had a lot that was not in common, then killed each other. Now called Carla Smith, she does not know the origin of her ability to transform parts of herself into monster-forms, but so far she finds it quite fun. Having used her powers to help people in her small town, she is making a name for herself as a superhero, but she has also caught the notice of a family of monsters who recognize the energy signature of the powers, and the notice of an ancient order of monster hunters who investigate such sightings. Now both of those groups are coming to that small town and Monstora will have a lot on her plate.

Monstora is one I made up on the spot. I basically just drew a hero with weird monster limbs and had to come up with something to do with that. Done.