"Spooooooon!"
Ticks are usually
parasitic little
arachnids that burrow into your
skin and can only be removed by elaborate
home remedies. But if you're The Tick, you're in an entirely different
class, a class of kooky, lovable
superheroes.
Ben Edlund's The Tick began as a
spoofy send-up of the superhero
genre, until it ironically became a hugely
successful addition to the genre in its own right. The "
insect" in question was actually an unlikely, 400-pound superhero, clad in a
blue skintight
suit and looking for something to
defend. After crashing a Superhero
Convention in
Reno, NV, the bumbling crime fighter took a
bus to the City and never looked back. In a town full of superheroes, The Tick was the best man for the job, or so he told himself.
High on
energy but
low on
logic, he teamed up with
Arthur, a former
accountant dressed in a white
moth costume (complete with requisite eye mask), and together they somehow managed (barely) to clean up
crime.
On the half-hour
series, The Tick, standing 7-feet tall (including
antennae), was blessed with a
condition self-described as "nigh
invulnerability." This condition rendered our superhero
impervious to most traditional
weapons, like
punches,
kicks,
bullets,
swords,
hammers,
tomahawks,
gardening tools, and even the most biting of
insults.
Obsessed with becoming a
true superhero, there were times when The Tick seems more interested in the perks of
being one, like cool
gadgets and
secret hideouts, than actually saving
people-though he never shirked his do-gooder duties. He even acquired a small arsenal of
pointless gadgets, like the
Mighty Dinner Straw, the
Pez Dispenser of Graveness, and his
Hypnotic Secret Identity Tie, not that any of these came in handy in his fight against
evil.
The Tick and Arthur weren't the only superheroes in the City, and they had their work cut out for them when it came to
competition.
Die Fledermaus,
American Maid, the
Caped Chameleon,
Plunger Man,
Fishboy, and the
Sewer Urchin were just a few of the colorful characters The Tick and Arthur had to share the City with. There were also teams of
crusaders, like
The Decency Squad (Captain Decency, Johnny Polite, Living Doll, SuffraJet, and Visual Eye) and the
Civic-Minded Five (the 4-Legged Man, Captain Mucilage, The Carpeted Man, Feral Boy, and Jungle Janet). Occasionally our two
stars would join forces with the others to eradicate crime in the City, although American Maid was the only
real superhero among them with any
talent.
The more super heroes the better, since there was no shortage of amoral
villains plotting to destroy the City. Some of the recurring ones were such
evildoers as
Thrakkorzog,
Professor Chromedome,
Sub-Human, the
Mother of Invention,
Proto Clown,
Brainchild, the
Breadmaster, and the dreaded
clones of the Tick and Arthur.
The Tick garnered a
massive following, both in print and on
television, and made the world realize that even parasitic creatures deserve a chance at superhero-dom.
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