Viewers Beware: The Time Is Finally Right For ‘The Tick’!

Considering how resilient he’s been, maybe the Tick should change his name to the Cockroach. Seriously, for a superhero not backed by Disney (Marvel) or Warner Bros. (DC), the mighty blue Tick has clung to pop culture for almost 30 years, only growing stronger as the decades wear on. His new Amazon Prime series, which bounds onto the streaming service today, reintroduces the Tick at a time when his bombastic, blustery presence is most needed. The time is finally right for The Tick.

1988’s The Tick #1 introduced the mountainous do-gooder in an unconventional situation: locked in a padded cell and bound by a straightjacket. The Tick busted free from his restraints in-between pages #1 and #2, leaping straight to The City armed with a grin, a View-Master, and a ton of muscle. The ’80s Tick comic was manic and madcap, a mélange of ludicrous superheroes and equally ridiculous villains. Ben Edlund, the mastermind behind The Tick’s initial 12-issue run, lampooned everything from Superman to writer/artist Frank Miller’s ninja-filled Daredevil run–and created a surprisingly timeless formula. The Tick survives as long as there are superheroes to latch onto.

The massive success of comic book cartoons like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, X-Men, and Batman: The Animated Series drew The Tick into the world of animation. Fox launched The Tick in 1994, a bizarre satire of Saturday morning superheroes. While the Tick’s darker edges were softened for animation, his gregarious nature and nebulous origin remained intact. Joining him in animation was his sidekick Arthur, a pudgy accountant whose only qualification for heroics was owning a winged moth suit. The cartoon put the Tick and Arthur up against foes like the mustachioed Dinosaur Neil, Chairface Chippendale, the Breadmaster, and a mucusy alien named Thrakkorzog.

A few years later, though, the superhero cartoon craze died down; those incarnations of Ninja Turtles, X-Men, Batman, and The Tick all disappeared from the air between 1995 and 1997. The superhero craze wasn’t dying, though. It was slowly moving to the big screen. After Joel Schumacher’s Batman films made movie superheroes groan-worthy, the genre got fresh blood in an R-rated vampire hunter named Blade. Two years later, the first X-Men film proved that adults in leather jumpsuits could be taken seriously onscreen.

While the Tick didn’t follow his super-brethren to the big screen, he did make the leap to live-action. Fox launched a live-action Tick series in November 2001. Patrick Warburton slid into the blue rubber suit, a look that transformed the barrel-chested and deep-voiced Seinfeld actor into a flesh and blood cartoon. The Tick sitcom only messed with the hero’s tried-and-true formula slightly, prioritizing low stakes banter between the Tick, Arthur, and the will-they/won’t-they duo Bat Manuel and Captain Liberty over fisticuffs.

But whereas the 1994 cartoon was nestled deep within the superhero craze, the 2001 series was exposed; there was nothing else like it on TV at the time. It was a single-cam comedy three years before The Office won people over to that format. It was a highly stylized live-action cartoon, with plot points that would make sense on later shows like Arrested Development, 30 Rock, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, or Difficult People. Most damning, it was a superhero TV show in an era when superhero TV shows bombed hard. The only successful superhero TV show of the ’80s and ’90s was Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, and even that show fell way short of the 100-episode goal line. The superhero movie genre hadn’t taken hold yet, either. Audiences had warmed up to Blade, the X-Men, and Spider-Man, but the big shared-universe boom was still years away. There was nothing like The Tick on TV in November 2001, and not even The Tick was on the air by February 2002. The show was canceled after nine episodes.

That’s why 2017 is the perfect time for The Tick to puff out his chest and holler nonsense at evildoers once more. Everything that stood in The Tick’s way 16 years ago has changed: single-cam comedies are now the default, mainstream comedy has embraced the Tick’s style of peculiar punchlines, and superheroes are ubiquitous in film and television. There’s now plenty of material for the Tick (now played by the maniacally jocular Peter Serafinowicz) and creator Ben Edlund to riff on. For one thing, the grim and gritty style of superheroics that conjured the Tick into existence in 1988 is back in full force. Amazon’s Tick–now an even darker comedy–draws on that influence, aligning more with Marvel’s street-level Netflix heroes or the grim heroes of Batman v Superman than the brightly colored cartoons of the ’90s.

A tick needs to feed on a host in order to survive. In that way, The Tick is actually the perfect name for this character, a hero that feeds on the superhero tropes around him in order to gain strength. Without a host, the tick dies. Between Marvel and DC’s various film and television franchises (and franchises of franchises), there are now plenty of prominent superhero iterations for The Tick to feed on–and may his belly grow fat on the blood of those heroes!

The first half of The Tick Season One is now available to stream on Amazon Prime.

Where to stream The Tick