Saturday Splash Page #73

"It's May, Tick," in Tick New Series #1, by Benito Cereno (writer), Les McClaine (artist)

I hunted this down in back issues a couple of years ago, because I remembered it getting some positive reviews when it was running 15 years ago. Jeezus, 15 years ago?

It ran 8 issues, which seems to be pretty good for a Tick book, over 15 months. Most issues are done-in-ones, although it feels like Cereno and McClaine were building to something involving either Chairface getting out of prison, or a shadowy, mysterious figure with plans. For example, in the first issue, the shadowy figure butts in on Chairface and a bunch of other criminals sharing near-triumphs to explain he's left a bomb among the gifts the superheroes are exchanging at their Christmas party, and that's he's just visiting the prison.

That plotline never went anywhere. Oh well.

There was a two-parter where Tick and Golden Age Tick get time-swapped, which I mostly remember for Tick describing the 1940s as the "Age of Dinosaurs", while Golden Age Tick responds to a question from Arthur about who's President with, "the guy dressed like Mr. Peanut?" Is that a sick burn on FDR, or a compliment on his classy accoutrements? Also, there's a five-panel gag of Arthur, thinking Tick's been disintegrated, just brokenly moaning "OOOOOOOOOO" while the other characters continue talking in the background.

The done-in-ones are funny, though. In issue 4, Tick sneaks out during game night in a flood to get involved in a massive battle between all the sea-themed characters, who are desperate to seize this moment to be relevant for once. Issue 3 results in a trip to the sewers, where they face the myriad horrors lurking beneath The City. The last issue focuses on Tick taking a pet-sitting job for all the superheroes' pets, who of course also have superpowers, but need his help to defeat their greatest foe. I will leave it a mystery for you to seek out the comic and learn yourself.

There's a good mix to the humor. Sight gags, clever one-liners, general silliness. McClaine can capture the goofiness of the characters easy enough, their dopey expressions or reactions. But on those rare occasions something needs to look more heroic or epic (like the big sea battle), he can swing that too. You can figure out who most of the characters being homaged are, but these versions still get their own distinct look.

Saturday Splash Page #72

"My City JEERS," in The Tick #4, by Ben Edlund (writer/artist), Max Banks (inker), Polio (letterer)

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.

What I Bought 3/7/2018 - Part 1

They build vending machines now to recognize if your selection didn't actually drop. When it senses that, it makes the little coil spin again, and then you can get two bags of Skittles for the price of one. It's a nice bonus that happens every once in a while. Some days at work, I take what I can get.

Tick 2017 #3, by Cullen Bunn and JimmyZ (writers), Duane Redhead (artist) - Welcome to the X-Men, Tick and Arthur, hope you brought enough pie for everyone.

Spotted Fever saves Arthur from the clowns and ninjas, and smacks some sense back into the Tick. She takes them to La Chambre Rouge where they find the newest batch of prospective heroes being twisted by Dr. Daedalus. Their attempt to escape runs them smack into an army of ninjas and clowns.

I feel this was a play on Larry Hama's Wolverine run, when Logan finds the Weapon X facility they staged a lot of his and the other victims' memories at. Mostly it was the scene when Tick wanders into a room he swears is Arthur's living room (although Arthur doesn't see it). I don't know if that's what Bunn and JimmyZ are going for, but given the Tick originally played a lot with spoofing Miller's Daredevil, it wouldn't surprise me. They've given the Tick a backstory of a nefarious doctor trying to turn him into a weapon, plus a lost love he didn't remember, plus speaking French all of the sudden. OK, that last one isn't a perfect comp to Logan's connections to Japan, but you get my point.

Redhead's artwork fits the story. It's still, at this point, a fairly straightforward superhero story, and Redhead has a clean, straightforward style. He can make the evil Doctor look sinister when he needs to, and the Tick is very expressive, and it seems like all the information that is supposed to be on the page is there, presented clearly. I would like a better look at the designs on those other heroes that showed up, especially The Gesture. I feel like his costume ought to evoke the era his moves supposedly come from, but the little bit we see of it doesn't suggest that.

I'm not sure if I'm planning to stick with the book going forward, though. Still not convinced we really needed the Tick's origin, assuming this doesn't wind up being some sort of fakeout or a false memory. Also, they write the Tick as very stream of consciousness. Was he always like that? Maybe it's all the buried memories. I guess we'll see.

Empowered and Sistah Spooky's High School Hell #3, by Adam Warren (writer), Carla Speed McNeil (artist/letterer), Jenn Manley Lee (colorist) - I'm glad my high school bathroom experiences were not like that.

After surviving a sing-off against in the music room, Spooky and Emp wind up in the ladies' room, where Emp finds herself stuck in a stall that is filled rapidly by her own tears, and Spooky's being torn apart by cutting words from another girl as it cracks her reflection. But Emp has dealt with enough cruel taunts that she's able to bust out and kill both their tormentors. That's six more down, total.

Last issue, I wondered why no one was trying to backstab the Queen Bee, Ashley. I guess it's because she's more powerful than the others, with her Absolute Solipsism Field, and they're just terrified of her. It's seeming more and more likely she expects our heroes to kill all the others so she gets all of Spooky's power, and it might be interesting if that didn't go as planned. I can't shake that feeling Spooky's going to be offered a chance to rescue Hannah if she'll just betray Emp, and I'm not sure how that's going to play out.

The other part that's come up again is how for the most part, these girls are stuck in the same patterns they had in high school. They haven't changed their tactics, and think their targets haven't either. Spooky was nervous about singing, but the shit the girls hurled her way only irritated her. The insults Olivia whispered to Emp might have worked when the series started, but she's come far enough to know it's not true and not surrender. Brooke's insults didn't start to have the maximum impact until she attacked who Spooky is now, as opposed to how she looked back then. Attacking her survivor's guilt, her regrets, that seemed to take Spooky's will to fight.

McNeil and Lee did a heck of a job on that bit with Spooky trapped in front of the mirror. The way the cracks show in her reflection as these red voids, and then appear as cuts on the real her. The way the red that saturates those panels contrasts the blue that's threatening to drown Emp. Hannah's image appearing in the mirror, but mostly not showing the red hue, even though it's supposed to be part of Spooky's torment. The panels that have Spooky in them keep moving in closer as her situation goes downhill, even as Emp's move back as she takes control of hers. And the number of panels per page goes up a little near the end of it. Not a lot, from five to seven over the course five pages, but it works. Time is running out, the tension goes up. Surprise, Carla Speed McNeil is good at this drawing thing.

What I Bought 12/27/2017

I was hoping to grab all three comics that came out this week, but the store was missing one. I should have it by next week. Hoping to review the remainder of December's books then, so I can do all the Year in Review posts the second week of January. Will I manage it? Eh, probably not.

Despicable Deadpool #291, by Gerry Duggan (writer), Scott Koblish (artist), Nick Filardi (colorist), Joe Sabino (letterer) - Deadpool using those stupid filters for his selfie is the most heinous act he's ever committed.

Wade presents Stryfe with Old Cable's heart. Then Regular Cable bursts in and there's a fight. Wade gets a call during the fight from Stryfe, standing over Eleanor as she dies of Madcap's bioweapon, threatening to withhold the cure. So Wade turns on Cable, telling him he planted a bomb to kill Hope at some point. Cable leaves in a huff, Wade goes home to sulk.

There are a few points that are enjoyable. Wade being 'ported into Stryfe's HQ in the middle of pissing in a phone booth, while drinking a beer. Mostly for Stryfe's appalled look. Heck, Stryfe has a blimp HQ, which is way cooler than I ever would have given him credit for being.

Part of me thinks this is an extremely long-con between Wade and Cable. Meaning, they know Stryfe would still be wary of Deadpool double-crossing him at this stage, so they're pretending to have a dramatic falling out to ambush him somewhere down the line when he doesn't have vampires or whatever planned. I doubt it, since I think Duggan intends to burn all Wade's bridges, but I'm always suspicious of the swerve.

I'm not sure that's a good idea. Leaving Wade isolated and friendless sounds suspiciously like what Daniel Way did with him, and that wound up being a meandering, pointless run. Wade is hopefully going after Nazi Cap next issue, so fingers crossed he guts that guy like a fish, then defiles the corpse. Then we can all agree to pretend Nazi Cap never happened, OK?

The quiet moments at the end, when Wade is left alone, those I like. Koblish shows him being carried along by the water passively. No energy in him. Just tired. It's been a different look for Deadpool, who even when depressed usually shoots something or drinks and swears loudly. He doesn't even have the drive for that. Koblish and Filardi handle those well. Colors are dark, but calm and fairly monotone. Wade, when he does move, has his shoulders slumped, leaning on the wall for support.

The overall idea Duggan's going with is one in theory I want to see, but the execution so far, not hitting it out of the park.

Tick 2017 #2, by Cullen Bunn and JimmyZ (writers), Duane Redhead (artist), Jeff McClelland (back-up story writer), Alex Harris (back-up story artist) - I can't imagine the Tick is very good at chess. Then again, I wouldn't have thought he could play the piano, either.

Tick and Arthur reach Canada, where the Tick is flooded with memories of being a regretful lumberjack and fledgling hero as part of some superteam-in-training. Which means he's not much use to Arthur when the clowns and ninjas show up again.

That's pretty much it, as far as plot goes. How much they plan on having the Tick's current personality and character be a result of who he was is something I'm curious to see. Sometimes writers have the character become entirely different when they lose their memory (see Mitch Shelly in either version of Resurrection Man). Other times certain things are retained, or leak through whatever the blocks are. With the Tick, he seems to have retained his desire to uphold justice and fight evil, but had forgotten French.

Redhead seems to draw almost all the other characters with more detailed faces than the Tick and Arthur. Even the ones with masks have more shading and inking. Except Spotted Fever, which seems significant. Redhead's art works pretty well, although panels seem crowded and almost claustrophobic at times. Which could be the Tick being overwhelmed by all these memories. He spends the entire issue rushing from one place that he now remembers to another, Arthur struggling to keep up (and unable to understand the Tick's French).

What I Bought 10/4/2017

Of the two books I was looking for that came out last week, the first issue of the new Tick series was not the one I expected the store to have. Really, I didn't expect it to have either book. One is better than none!

Tick 2017 #1, by Cullen Bunn and Jimmy Z (writers), Douglas Paszkiewicz (artist), Erika Rolbiecki (colorist), Jeff McClelland (writer, back-up story), Duane Redhead (artist, back-up story) - I've read Arsenic Lullaby often enough I recognize how Paszkiewicz draws heads, in that peculiar manner that makes them look kind of flattened front-to-back. Those ninjas should probably be more in a ready stance. They have to know it isn't gonna end well for the ones on the crane.

Tick and Arthur survive a combined assault from Murder Clowns and ninjas, but a shipping container is dropped on the Tick, and the combination of head trauma and all the pulverized sugary cereal unlocks repressed memories. As well as the ability to speak French and play piano. The next day, Arthur returns home from a food run and learns Tick's booked them a bus ride to the Canadian Rockies, in search of La Chambre Rouge, which is The Red Room, correct? Why couldn't it be German?

The back-up story is about a poor ninja who tries to bluff our heroes about the contents of a small case he's carrying. It ends with the Tick stealing his lunch, which doesn't seem very heroic. But the universe rights itself as the lunch contains circus peanuts, and neither of our heroes enjoy the horrible taste.

So we're going to explain the Tick's origin? This seems like one of those things that's only been hinted at for so long, the imagination of the each reader has come up with their own answer better than any someone else can devise. 'Course, there's no guarantee we'll get answers. The Tick may even be remembering someone else's memories. That seems like the kind of bizarre thing he'd do. I suppose the important part of the story will be the friends they make along the way. Or enemies, more likely.

 I enjoy Paszkiewicz' art, the little touches he adds. One of the clowns is pulling a ten-pin to use out of his mouth, like a reverse sword-swallower. The box on the wall in Arthur's room labeled "Emergency Wings". And he really captures Arthur's schlubby, nervous demeanor in the body language. The big fight scene that comprises much of the issue is fine; I don't think that's necessarily Paszkiewicz' strength as an artist, but he can get the job done. Knows when to draw back for a wider shot to give a sense of the number of foes, or go close-in for a bunch of narrow panels of the Tick dispatching enemies.

I kept expecting some sorts of punchlines. Reach the end of a page, here's a joke or a gag. Not really the case. Maybe if Paszkiewicz (one of these times I'll remember the "z" the first attempt) was writing it also. I'm curious to see how Bunn does, although I don't know the breakdown of labor on the writing between him and Jimmy, or how Paszkiewicz is involved in that side of things. I haven't been terribly impressed with the stuff I've read of Bunn's in the past, but it was all Marvel stuff, and much more serious in tone than this. So we'll see.

He Doesn't Get A Spoon Until Issue 7

I picked up The Tick: The Complete Edlund collection a month or so ago. There are a lot of Tick comics, I was curious, and starting at the beginning seemed like the best idea.

I'm pretty sure I'd read some older collection of some of this in a bookstore in the '90s, because I remembered the Tick fighting lots of ninjas and being very confused by that (my only experience with the character having been the cartoon up to that point). Early on, Edlund pokes at Superman a little bit by having the Tick meet a Clark Kent analogue called the Caped Wonder (from the planet Otter Creek) who believes himself the protector of The City. Shortly after that, it shifts to more of a Frank Miller Daredevil pastiche with "Night of a Million Zillion Ninjas" (also, "Early Morning of a Million Zillion Ninjas". Complete with a lady ninja in a familiar (albeit color-swapped to yellow) outfit named Oedipus. Oedipus Ashley Stevens.

Arthur, the Tick's sidekick, doesn't appear until near the end of that story, and he asks to work with the Tick because he wants an extraordinary life and was finding that difficult to manage on his own, even with the flying suit. They leave the City shortly thereafter (because there's very little crime), get into a few hijinks on the road, and eventually reach New York City, where there are so many superheroes they have to reserve a section of street ahead of time to patrol, and there's still almost no super-villains to fight. By the end of all that, Tick and Arthur decide they want to go back to the City, though the next collection was Karma Tornado, and they didn't do it there. Because that was sort of a placeholder while people waited to see if Edlund came back to work on the characters some more. I wasn't as enamored with that one, maybe because it felt a little too obvious it was spinning its wheels.

It's interesting how different Tick is initially. Maybe it's due to the story opening with him escaping from a mental institute, but at times he's almost sinister. While he's working at the newspaper (as Mr. Nedd, the new crossword editor) he seems to delight in tormenting the Jimmy Olsen analogue, and in making life difficult for the Caped Wonder. I'm not sure how much of it is meant to be purposeful, and how much is the Tick unwittingly using his power of dramatics. Apparently his presence will make any situation more dramatic. So maybe he's behaving that way to try and spark a hero versus hero brawl. But when it nearly happens, he immediately breaks Clark's glasses, and here comes the Olsen analogue, so Clark has to stop fighting and come up with some ludicrous way to maintain his secret identity. It's like Tick's genre savvy without realizing it.

Some of the Tick's more ominous air is probably the inking. The book is all in black and white, and for the first half of it, the Tick's costume is basically presented as black. Which makes him this huge dark presence on the page. In the latter half, after he and Arthur have teamed up, he's mostly presented as being lighter, with occasional shadows where appropriate. He's a brighter presence at that point. In general, I think Edlund's linework gets stronger in the second half, and he cuts down on the hatching and some of the excess little lines, relies on shading more. I think it works better. The Tick plays out as kind of an old-style superhero, and so the more solid look, with fewer lines fits him well, as a square-jawed do-gooder.

Though the Tick's do-gooding is mostly incidental. As he remarks at one point, he doesn't want to stop crime, he wants to fight it. He's really excited when he gets a super-villain to fight. When an innocent person gets hurt, he responds by getting depressed, questioning his purpose, and then destroying stuff.

There was one sequence in the book I couldn't quite decide on. When Tick first accompanies Arthur back to his apartment, there's a moment where Tick becomes concerned Arthur is. . . funny. Arthur responds that no, he isn't. . . funny. They both agree heroes shouldn't be. . . funny. Then decide they need beers. Manly beers. So is Edlund commenting on the people who makes jokes about two guys in spandex living together, or on the writers and fans who are so eager to assert that no, there's nothing like that about it all, or is he making the "hurr, hurr, two guys in spandex living together" joke himself? The fact that it's Tick and Arthur each getting very eager to prove they aren't. . . funny, by getting beers makes me think it's the second one, but I'm not sure. I just could not decide what Edlund was going for there.

That brief bit aside, it's an interesting book for watching the shift in the Tick over time, and the second half of the book provides the kinds of Tick stories I was expecting. It also introduces a lot of characters and plotlines that made it into the cartoon (though they were often recombined in new ways on TV), as well as some that didn't, but that I would very much like to see followed up on. The first half of the book, while not what I was expecting, was still pretty cool just for seeing the Tick in a story where he seemed so out of place. A battle to preserve or destroy the soul of ninjutsu is perhaps more deep (or attempting to be deep) than what you'd expect for him. Bad guy tries to carve his name into the moon with a laser? Sure, that sounds like something for the Tick. A story about whether opening up something to any schmoe with a few bucks cheapens it, and whether that gives someone who truly loves it the right to destroy it, that's a little more heavy. So it's neat in that it's unusual, and it does give the Tick the opportunity to fight a whole lot of guys all at once, which is something that suits him.