Episode 839 Talkback: BOMC: the Tick: Complete Edlund

I agree with most of what Murd says. I came to the series in ’88 when issue #3 came out. After flipping through it on the rack, I bought #3, a reprint of #1 and a back issue copy of #2. I read all three in one sitting and laughed my ass off. The Tick (along with Dr. Fate) is what got me heavily back into comics after losing some of my interest while in high school.

How much do I love The Tick? I have all the original issues, Chroma-Tick #1 (a color reprint of #1), both the original tpb collections, Paul the Samurai in the original issues and trade, Man-Eating Cow, the three issues of Circus of the Mighty, and the new Complete Edlund collection.

I loved the cartoon, too... even bought all the action figures and the small PVC figures — and the boardgame, come to think of it. And I enjoyed the live-action series well enough. But I still prefer the comics. There's just so much energy there. And it was such a change of pace from what I had read up to that point. Great stuff!

We read some of this on this episode, but here's Adam's full email on the Tick volume:

ADAM: This wasn't my first exposure to Ben Edlund's early Tick material, since I have a full-color trade of the first six issues, titled "The Naked City," that I bought and read nearly fifteen years ago, when the TV cartoon was at the peak of its popularity. My reaction back then was basically, "OK, keen, this is a lot like the show except a little darker and weirder, and maybe smarter too." Now, at over a decade's removal, I feel a little more capable of judging Edlund's comic as a work unto itself, although I fear it will never be able to step completely out of the shadow of the animated series, which defined The Tick for a generation. For those of us who became so familiar with The Tick and his antics through the cartoon, it's hard to be properly analytical about these stories, as we've come to take some of Edlund's brilliant comic innovations for granted: we've become desensitized to the inspired nonsense that I can only guess had a rather greater impact on those unsuspecting readers who experienced it first in its original form back in the '80s. On the other hand, I can imagine the understated genius of "SPOON!!" as a battle-cry being totally lost on me, if I hadn't heard it uttered aloud in Townsend Coleman's voice on TV first. So maybe prior familiarity with the cartoon helps as much as hinders appreciation of "The Complete Edlund." What do you guys think?

It was interesting to note The Tick's rapid evolution as a character from dangerous lunatic to earnest, childlike super-idealist. This personality shift is especially marked in issue #3, when a mellowed-out Tick practically has to be dragged into the fight between Oedipus and the Ninjas; compare this to Tick's self-professed violent hatred of ninjas in issue #1. The change is visual too, as Tick loses the fuzzy, Muppet-monster-like texture of his first appearance almost immediately, and the amount of black ink used to shade him decreases to reflect his lightening attitude. As Jamie will attest, though, the seeming swiftness of this change in portrayal probably had something to do with the long time-gaps in the publication of the original series: if The Tick's personality seems to adjust quickly from issue to issue in the early going, that's because Edlund had lots of time to rethink him from issue to issue.

The comic itself undergoes a tonal and topical evolution of its own. Like its fellow black-and-white '80s indy titles Cerebus and TMNT, The Tick starts out as a fairly focused genre parody, but it has too much offbeat creative energy to stay that course for long and it quickly develops into its own animal, so to speak. Another '80s superhero spoof, Don Simpson's Megaton Man, had major similarities to The Tick but never achieved the same popularity, and I think one of the reasons for this is that it never quite outgrew the "Ha-ha, Superman is a pretty silly idea when you think about it" phase of its development (although Megaton Man did poke fun at a lot of Marvel characters, too). The Tick gets past this in the first two issues, gets Frank Miller out of his system with the ninja infestation of issues #3-5, and after that, the sky's the limit!

Another flaw of Megaton Man that The Tick avoids is that it was too angry, too edgy, too mordant, and perhaps too narrow as a parody--it wallowed in its creator's distaste for the politics, economics, and mainstream comics market of the 1980s, which stunted its conceptual growth and made it a bitter pill for many readers to swallow. While The Tick certainly isn't afraid to foreground and lampoon the inherent absurdity of certain superhero genre conventions, it also sort of celebrates them at the same time, and it doesn't get bogged down with overt satirical commentary, making it a gentler, more fluid and more accessible superhero parody. Yet the stories never go too far the other way and degenerate into free-form episodic silliness, either; there is a definite structure here, a long-term plan, complete with foreshadowing (please note the very subtle background appearances of Arthur, beginning in issue #1, page 13!) and development of character and theme, that proves that Edlund was doing more than just making all of this up as he went along.

Edlund seems fairly ambivalent as to his attitude toward superheroes throughout the stories collected here. It's as if he wants to ridicule them, but there's a part of him that loves them too much to land the killing stroke. Edlund's subversive deconstructionist leanings find expression in the Chainsaw Vigilante, the rather literal "antihero" who bullies superheroes into retirement--kinda hypocritical of him, since he's no less absurd/extreme than the "heroes" he targets. The Vigilante's opposite number is, of course, The Tick himself, embodiment of all that is good and fun and exuberant and vital and crazy and lovable about superheroes! While the Chainsaw Vigilante is a reactionary, hero-hating killjoy, The Tick represents a joy in reading superhero comics that just won't die--when the two come face-to-face, The Tick defeats the Vigilante without even trying. I find it significant that one superhero convention that Edlund declines to spoof through The Tick is the obligatory origin story: while other characters in The Tick's world seem willing to spout the full details of their "secret origins" at the drop of a hat, The Tick's own stubborn lack of a concrete back-story or secret identity allows him to function as a pure archetype of "superhero-ness," almost a kind of conceptual deity, Edlund's living, breathing, punching, nigh-invulnerable love letter to the superhero concept. It's for this reason that I almost hope no _serious_ attempt is ever made to fill in the "blanks" in The Tick's origins; to do so would only diminish him.

Last big thing I'll mention, before this turns into a full-blown term paper: My favorite thing about Tick comics is the galaxy of goofy supporting characters, which The Tick begins to amass almost immediately. Most notable, of course, is good ol' Arthur, straightman nonpareil, Sancho Panza to The Tick's Don Quixote, whose Walter Mitty-ish yearning for and incompatibility with high adventure draw him to The Tick, whose stodgy sensibilities and practical nature balance out The Tick's insane zeal and help to keep the stories grounded, whose moth/bunny costume (which he won in an auction and can't even use properly) is one of the best ideas in the history of superhero satire, and whose intuition that there's some higher cosmic import to The Tick's epic blundering isn't too far off the mark. Beyond Arthur... well, if The Tick is a streamlined, purified version of the Big Silly Iconic Superhero, all of the less "pure," less desirable, dross aspects of superhero-dom have to manifest themselves somehow in The Tick's universe, and so we're treated to dozens of wonderfully weird superhero bit-players representing a whole spectrum of crimefighting dysfunction, from Brachiating Man to the Civic-Minded Five to the immortal Barry Hubris, the "Other Tick." This zany diversity even inspired a short-lived spinoff anthology, "The Tick: Heroes of The City," which shone the spotlight on a few of The Tick's lesser-known colleagues. The more of these second bananas The Tick draws into his mighty orbit, the more they reflect back his own greatness, and I'm happy to see many of them on display in this collection of his first adventures.

Favorite story in this edition: "Villains Inc.," featuring the "evil" of the Red Scare, the duplicity of The Running Guy, and a Louie DePalma lookalike! Favorite moment: either The Tick's defeat of Barry, or his confrontation of the genius hillbillies, when he calls them "sickos" and tries, unsuccessfully at first, to put a stop to their experiments. There's something thrilling about The Tick's righteous indignation, when a synapse fires properly in his brain and he actually, finally, recognizes a legitimate threat, gets mad about it, and starts hitting people who deserve it!!

This gets four out of five Frekin' Sweers from me; I'd love to read later volumes someday and learn where Edlund's understudies take the story from here. Great choice, Matt!

Spoon!,
Adam

P.S. - The Hanna-Barbera-inspired "Perfect Place" short story in the back of the trade? Ingenious.

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