In the world of The Venture Bros., things like supervillains, secret agents, and the undead are so commonplace that they have their own unions, in a sense. The world is divided into heroes and villains for the purposes of knowing who should be fighting against who, but this delineation failed to take morality into account. There are "heroes" who are just as immoral as the villains, and many of the villains are only villainous because that is their job.
Perhaps the most ingenious creation of Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer is the Guild of Calamitous Intent (which came four years before Joss Whedon's Evil League of Evil in Dr. Horrible), which serves as the supervillain bureaucracy. The Guild trains and assigns "arches" (short for archenemy) to heroes. The purpose? I'm not quite sure, but it is probably to (1) give villains a legitimate job and (2) to give heroes someone to be heroic against. The Guild specializes in appropriately tailoring arches to heroes in order to avoid mismatched level of aggression/intelligence and making sure that the hero-arch relationship remains in a stalemate. The purpose isn't for one to kill the other, but for the hero and villain to continue fighting in an endless game of sorts. This situation doesn't really work with the Monarch, though, because he truly hates Dr. Venture, or at least he convinces himself that he does. His failure to kill Venture isn't based on Guild rules; rather, it is incompetence that prevents him from reaching his goal (once again, more on that in the Themes post). During Season 3, when The Monarch is reassigned to other heroes, he kills them because he wants to work his way back to Venture.
The Guild functions like most real-world bureaucracies: there are extensive rules and by-laws that members must follow, it provides its members with healthcare and dental (the only reason The Monarch joined), and it sends form letters to heroes when the hero is to be assigned a new arch. It even has a town for its members to live in if they don't have their own bases (I think that is a parody of Mark Millar's comic book Wanted, not to be confused with the film adaptation). I'm unclear as to whether or not the Office of Secret Intelligence (O.S.I.) is aware of the Guild's presence (in a flashback to Brock's early days in O.S.I., they were still trying to gather proof of its existence), but I'm pretty sure that they do. However, the Guild has become such an ingrained part of society that O.S.I. cannot take it down without causing serious chaos as a result.
Speaking of which, O.S.I. is a G.I.Joe parody. Their purpose is to act as a protective force in the world, but they are just as violent and crazy as the people they fight. Most agents aren't particularly bright, and they aren't honest either. In the same episode as referenced above, they sent Billy Quizboy on a mission to discover whether a certain person was a Guild member (as we all knew, the target, Phantom Limb, was a high-ranking member). They sent Billy in on a mission he wasn't prepared for and lied about putting a wire on him. Furthermore, they basically kidnapped and conscripted him into service.
There are also other teams that run around the Venture-verse with their own motives. Once again, most of these organizations fall on one side of the spectrum or the other (in the abstract at least; both the original and current Team Venture are supposed to be heores, but both are certainly less than heroic). Molotov Cocktease is a mercenary who claims to have no affiliation (and a late-third season twist will probably elaborate on her motives in Season 4), but these neutral people are few and far between. There are other organizatons like the Guild, but they have been basically muscled out by the Guild and/or destroyed by the efforts of O.S.I. and the original Team Venture. The original Team Venture was an organization devoted to protecting people and furthering scientific endeavors. In addition to the superscientist Dr. Jonas Venture, the team is composed of numerous superhero archetypes/parodies, such as the Action Man (Captain America), Otto Aquarius (Aquaman), Humongaloid (Ant-Man/Giant-Man), and Col. Horace Gentleman (Allen Quartermain). The current Team Venture, led by Rusty Venture, is more concerned with making money and adventuring that protecting anyone, but I don't think viewers would have it any other way. After all, much of the humor is derived from watching Rusty's moral bankruptcy, Brock's brawls, and Hank and Dean's absolute cluelessness. Finally, Dr. Orpheus heads the Order of the Triad, a magical trio devoted to upholding the integrity of reality and protecting people. However, the three members are middle-aged and cannot always make it to practice, which leads to poor performance in the field.
Up next: Interlude...
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