Like many a person my age, I first encountered The Tick via the '90s cartoon show, which I dearly loved. I had no notion of him originally being a comic book character. I have a vague memory of seeing an original trade paperback collection of Ben Edlund's first Tick arc, the "Night of a Million Zillion Ninjas" in a Waldenbooks when I was a kid (and Waldenbooks was still a thing), but being confused by my brief flip through. At the time, I didn't know about Frank Miller's Daredevil, so the references and in-jokes about the proliferation of ninjas, the ninja girl named "Oedipus", were lost on me.
Edlund's Tick is more, "feral" is the word that comes to mind, than the one in the cartoon. There's still the burning desire to be a superhero, and the childlike glee when he gets to fight an actual supervillain (even if the Red Scare is a fake). He still decides "SPOON" is his battle cry, he still tears up Arthur's apartment trying to find all the secret crimefighting gear.
But he's a bit more aggressive, looming menacingly over a random bum that questions him, threatening the the Jimmy Olsen parody during his brief stint impersonating the crossword puzzle writer at The City's great metropolitan newspaper. When Oedipus is injured by a ninja attack, Tick goes to their theme park lair and tears the entire place down in a mixture of guilt and blind anger. He seems to seriously consider killing Oedipus' old guy ninja mentor when the guy dismisses her as "expendable."
A few issues later, Tick and Arthur are road-tripping to New York City and Tick's made enthusiastic friends with amoeba-sized aliens living in a meteorite that like condiment packets. Edlund's art is able to manage the difference easily enough. The Tick's a big character, so having him fill a panel and appear to be looking down at the reader can make him intimidating. Especially when the costume is heavily inked to appear dark. It's not even hard to make his huge, cheerful grin unsettling or even menacing.
And then, the art goes easy on the inks, lightening his appearance. He's backed off from the audience, more in the middle-ground, or he's looking up instead of down. The smile is back to being childlike, he's cheerful in the face of danger. He's sharing cheese doodles and "machine urine" for breakfast with a ninja-hating samurai who baked his katana inside a French loaf to try and beat airport security (the samurai was threatening to feast on a ninja's entrails just pages earlier, so Tick's not the only one with wild swings.)
The book more closely resembles what most people would associate with the Tick after the ninja storyline is over. Chairface tries to carve his name into the Moon, the road trip involves a superhero-hating, chainsaw-wielding maniac, and a town dominated by a monolith that bestows intelligence in megalomania in equal parts. New York is loaded with superheroes, to the extent they have to book appointments to have battles on particular streets. They encounter the "other" Tick, aka Barry, who not only surrenders his name when he's defeated, Tick gets his mansion and all his crimefighting gear. Except Barry hangs around as a deranged naked guy trying to murder Tick and Arthur.
There were a lot of subsequent series and mini-series about Tick or his supporting cast, most of which were worked on by people other than Ben Edlund. I didn't follow through on my initial plan to try them all after Karma Tornado didn't really set my world on fire, but I did eventually pick up one of them, which we'll get to next week.
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