On April 5, the second season of The Tick starring Peter Serafinowicz and Griffin Newman started streaming on Amazon. With all of its mainstream success, the comic book history of The Tick is frequently forgotten, like how the character literally only exists due to direct sales shops. Ben Englund was only 17 in 1986 when the character he created became the mascot for the New England Comics comic shop chain newsletter. And like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Tick comic book came out of the Black-and-White Boom of the 1980s.
In an interview on Indiwire, ‘The Tick’ Creator On Season 2 and What Superheroes Represent Today, Edlund explained that his accumulated experience working as a screenwriter, television producer, and television director on series such as Firefly, Angel, Supernatural, Gotham, The Venture Brothers, and Powers had helped him nurture that emotional reaction and help the audience connect with the characters. With the previous incarnations of The Tick, the focus had primarily on been the villain of the week, he explained, and "…it was always at the same volume of interactivity. The emotions were not further engaged with than you would have been last week. There was no crescendo, or it wasn’t operating like a story, it was operating like a ritual or something."
As to What Superheroes Represent Today, according to Edlund it’s that superheroes no longer represent "purity and wish fulfillment." And that "superhero fiction is now an instrument through which we are processing our own god-like power, and our angst about it." Which is a pretty accurate summation of the series itself. Oh, it's still a funny-strange satire of superheroes and their doings, but like a lot of other streaming television at the moment, The Tick can also be intense, dark and (sometimes) disturbing.
While Arthur is still nervous and mild-mannered, here he's also sad and troubled and The City he lives in is a pretty fair reflection of what unfortunately passes for reality for us at the moment. But the series is neither heartless nor hopeless; according to Edlund, The Tick is "a positive person who is showing up in a love-filled universe that’s forgotten that it is a love-filled universe." The Tick "…hears the music and he shows up to make other people hear it, too. I like things to mean things, and I think that we’re missing some of that and ‘The Tick’ does, too. So if you sense an upbeatness and hope and warmth in this, it’s because it’s drenched in it. Down to the marrow."
While The Tick is still a funny take on an outsized, operatic battle between good vs. evil ultimately, it's more about the choice between two more fun-sized diametrically opposed principles. Love and fear. Which is what makes this, as the headline of the review on the Vox website puts it; Stream This: The Tick is the perfect superhero show for our times. I only wish that more comic books could provoke this level of participation in their readers.
* Including "Spoon!" I owned one once and deeply regret that I no longer do. For everyone else who let this wonderful artifact slip through their fingers, it can be had on eBay for $50.