In the premiere episode of the best superhero series on Prime Video, a spaceship falls on a father, crushing him in front of his young son. Out of the ship stumbles the members of the Earth’s greatest superhero team, their eyes bleeding because of weaponized syphilis. Before the heroes can recover, the supervillain arrives to shoot them in the head—well, only two get shot; the youngest simply has his hands crushed. The heroes murdered, the villain mocks the little boy before flying off, leaving him forever traumatized.
Fans of The Boys might be scratching their heads after reading that description. Something so nasty, so filled with ineffective superheroes must come from Prime Video‘s beloved (until recently) adaptation of the comics by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. Or maybe it’s from the animated series Invincible, which amps up the violence in Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker, and Ryan Ottley’s celebration of all things comics.
But in fact, it comes from the best superhero series ever produced by Amazon: The Tick. Canceled after two seasons and overshadowed by The Boys and Invincible, The Tick had a weird, resilient optimism (despite the scene described above) that’s needed even more today.
Heroes of the City
The death of the Flag Five at the hands of the Terror was just one of many ways that the Prime Video series differed from most depictions of the Tick. Created in 1986 by Ben Edlund for a newsletter distributed by his local comic book shop New England Comics, the Tick has spawned several comic book series, both in color and black and white, a beloved animated series that ran from 1994 to 1996, a short-lived Fox sitcom in 2001, and, finally, the Amazon series that ran for 20 episodes between 2016 and 2019.
The appeal of the Tick is simple. He’s a giant blue guy with nigh-invulnerability and super-strength who is fully committed to the idea of being a superhero. The Tick has no name, no motivation outside of justice, and no enemies besides evil. And ninjas, but they’re more of an annoyance than enemies. He’s joined by his doughy friend Arthur, a timid accountant in a moth suit that makes him look like a bunny. The Tick defends the City, a metropolis populated by heroes and villains.
Fundamentally, The Tick is about how superheroes are silly. Wonderful and cool and compelling, yes. But most of all, silly. The Tick can sometimes go to dark places, with a whole backstory that reveals the Tick’s past as a lunatic in an insane asylum. And the series loves its occasional satire of DC and Marvel, pairing him with Captain Wonder a.k.a. reporter Clark Oppenheimer or with the Running Guy, who is faster than 10 fast men. But the original comics were more interested in laughing with the weirdness of superheroes than laughing at them, so the Tick and Arthur spent time with less-specific oddballs like Paul the Samurai, Chainsaw Vigilante, and the Man-Eating Cow.
The animated series and sitcom retained the same manic energy, even if it added more direct superhero parodies Die Fledermaus and American Maid (renamed Batmanuel and Captain Liberty for the live-action series). Every incarnation of the Tick has been over-the-top, absurd, and utterly optimistic… except for the 2016 series, at least at first.
Big Blue Destiny
On the surface, 2016’s The Tick has everything you’d expect from an adaption of the comics. There’s Peter Serafinowicz as the titular guileless and energetic big blue hero. Griffin Newman plays Arthur as a nervous accountant in a grey moth suit that makes him look like a bunny. They live in an unnamed city, under threat by the villainous Terror (Jackie Earle Haley), and cross paths with other heroes like Overkill (Scott Speiser) and the Superman-styled Superian (Brendan Hines). Arthur’s sister Dot (Valorie Curry, perhaps best known today as Firecracker on The Boys) even appears.
But it takes only a few minutes for the series to establish itself as something very different from what came before, something realistic. We meet Arthur as a depressed young man trying to cover up his mental illness, a steadfast belief that the Terror, who killed his father and members of the Avengers-esque Flag Five 15 years ago, still lives, despite the promise that he’s been long since defeated by Superian. When Arthur gives in to his worst instincts and follows the villain Miss Lint (Yara Martinez) and a group of thugs to a warehouse, he’s intercepted by the Tick, an endless figure of excitement and glee in an otherwise dark world.
In the pilot and the first few episodes, The Tick toys with the idea that Tick is just the manifestation of Arthur’s intrusive thoughts. Yes, Arthur lives in a world with Superian and the Terror, but he’s just a broken man, and the Tick is his psychosis.
Unlikely as the premise is for The Tick, it made sense in 2016. The pilot was directed by Wally Pfister, Christopher Nolan‘s cinematographer, who shot all three entries in the Dark Knight trilogy. The first episodes feel like they’re trying to take the Tick in a similar direction, offering a more believable way to tell a story about a giant blue superhero who says things like, “Crime, nastiness and evil rear their fowl odorous heads in every corner of the globe, and that’s saying something because globes don’t even have corners!”
Pretty quickly, the show did away with that conceit and allowed the Tick to live in the world. However, it never abandoned the mental health aspect. In fact, it expanded to show how not just Arthur, but everyone—Dot, Overkill, even Superian—had some failure haunting them, some sadness they couldn’t shake. Thus the heroism of the Tick is less about his powers and more about his indefatigable commitment to doing good. He’s completely unbothered by disappointment or confusion. For example, when Arthur’s stepdad (Francois Chau) greets the hero by exclaiming, “Look at you,” Tick gleefully doesn’t stop to suss out the meaning. He just responds “Impossible!” and carries on.
The Tick’s embrace of all his weirdness became less a coping mechanism for living in an awful world, and more of a model for making the awful world better.
Going Sane in a Crazy World
Despite its gritty premiere, the final episode of The Tick features a host of superhero tropes. Supervillain the Duke (John Hodgman) has infiltrated the S.H.I.E.L.D. pastiche A.E.G.I.S., undermined the new Flag Five, and sent agents to kill Arthur’s family, all while Superian has an existential crisis on the Moon. Instead of leaping into action, however, Arthur and Dot get overwhelmed by past failures and mistakes, the same feelings of inadequacy that stall Overkill and Miss Lint’s turns toward heroism.
As always, Tick responds to the crisis with a monologue, full of hyperbole and mixed metaphors. But this time, there’s something truly inspirational in his garbled words. “The truth about the truth is that it’s a choice,” he declares. “Choose love or choose fear. Everything else is up to destiny.”
It’s a silly statement, to be sure, and the show recognizes the self-help cliches in Tick’s speech, just as it does the purple prose he usually spouts. But in that moment of self-doubt and despair, anything positive seems silly. Moreover, the fact that Tick says it with such sincerity, without even the hint of apologizing for who he is, becomes inspirational. As he’s done from the first episode, Tick invites Arthur to be who he is: not a broken man who copes with his trauma by dressing up like a moth/bunny, but a human who has both experienced hurt and makes weird, wonderful choices.
The finale of The Tick plays even better now, in the shadow of the finale of The Boys. The Boys underscored its central point about the inherently empty and pathetic pursuit of power (whether in the real or fictional White House), but it couldn’t make the switch from outrageous edgy humor to genuine human emotion, no matter how much Homelander offered to degrade himself.
By the end of its run, The Tick also turned its superhero tropes into something relevant, by reminding the viewers that there’s no such thing as normal, no such thing as a broken person, just a bunch of freaks who will make the world a better place when they they let Destiny get all up in their puppets.
The Tick is streaming in its entirety on Prime Video.
