By Kent M. Beeson
*(I know, ticks are arachnids, not insects. Sue me.)
Being a new dad, I don't get to watch as much TV as I used to (really, I don't get to do anything as much as I used to), so my televisual knowledge might be a bit skewed. Still, there's only four television shows in the world right now --
Mad Men,
30 Rock,
The Office, and
The Venture Bros. -- and the rest are paste. All four are dear to my heart, and that's usually the death knell for any TV show. (I killed
Profit. It was me. Sorry.)
That all four are also doing well is pretty amazing, and even moreso for something like
The Venture Bros. Originating as a parody of
Johnny Quest,
The Venture Bros.'s crazy, dense, omnivorous vision has encompassed everything from the codependent nature of hero/villain relationships to the homoeroticism of
G.I. Joe to a particularly acidic take on the Fantastic Four.
With this last, brilliant and exasperating season, Jackson Publick (née Christopher McCulloch) and E.A. "Doc" Hammer have sketched out a dizzying alternate universe, all around the simple idea that some people, especially celebrity scientist/adventurers, shouldn't be parents.
But nothing emerges unique and fully formed like Athena from Zeus' head (er, other than Athena), and Publick and Hammer's lovechild is no exception. Much of that groundwork was laid almost twenty years ago by
The Tick.
Created by Ben Edlund (Hammer's college roommate) as a comic shop mascot,
The Tick followed the farcical adventures of the eponymous blue hero and his sidekick Arthur, in their attempts to protect The City from the some of the most surreal villains ever created (Exhibit A: Chairface Chippendale, who literally has a chair for a head).
In the span of thirteen years, from 1988 to 2001,
The Tick was a veritable mayfly, undergoing three rapid life-cycles: first as a comic book, then an animated series, and finally a live-action TV show. Although remembered fondly, neither the comic nor the two shows ever really found the kind of success that leaves a giant footprint on pop culture.
The Tick was, at best, a termite -- quiet, hidden, its effects felt years later.
Clearly, though, there was something about the property, some core element, that convinced Fox TV on two separate occasions to bring a somewhat obscure indie superhero to the small screen. What was the attraction? Or better put: what makes
The Tick, well,
tick?
At the risk of sounding pretentious, The Tick and Arthur make up what those Harvard-educated
Itchy & Scratchy writers refer to as a "dramaturgical dyad", their similarities and differences interlocking into an near-inseparable whole. The Tick and Arthur's costumes are remarkably similar, both skintight, making them seem almost nude, offset by the visual rhyming of the Tick's blue antennae and Arthur's white moth feelers. (In the drawn versions, both have blank, goggle-like eyes as well.)
Yet the Tick is tall and muscular, super-strong, and nigh-invulnerable, while Arthur is small, weak and soft, a man-sized baby in a pair of white jammies. The Tick is certitude and self-confidence, yet lacking smarts and judgment; Arthur is unsure and neurotic, but guides his partner through the world with a steady hand. The Tick is earthbound, forced to travel by foot, his heaviness reeking havoc on the rooftops; Arthur, despite his belly, floats around on his moth wings, his lightness magnified by gracelessness, like a feather in free-fall.
And yet while The Tick is constantly clambering up buildings, attempting to reach heights he cannot scale, he is unburdened by any definite past, as if he stepped out of the ether whole. Arthur, meanwhile, has a mother and a sister, and a past life as an accountant he can't shed fast enough.
One is a hero without a secret identity (or any identity, really) while the other is an identity without a hero name. They're brawn and brain, god and man, idealized self-image and schlubby reality. They need each other, because on a profound structural level, they're two halves of the same person.
So when I picked up
The Tick: The Naked City, a collection of Edlund's first six issues, I was surprised to find that Arthur doesn't even show up until issue #4, and doesn't become his sidekick until #5. Not surprisingly, Arthur's absence is keenly felt.
This original version of the Tick is an escaped mental patient (the way it's presented, it's possible that everything is happening in his head) who goes to the City to be its protector. Edlund flounders his way through these first issues, setting up shrill, uninteresting parodies of Superman and Perry White, and using the Tick's mental instability as an excuse for non sequiturs and random acts of senseless stupidity.
It's supposed to be funny; instead it's painful. The Tick wanders through these early stories like a bored kid with A.D.D., his attention constantly drifting. Is it any wonder that secondary character Paul the Samurai ends up with as much spotlight time?
Luckily, the final issue in the book is a huge jump in both Edlund's storytelling abilities and thematic concerns, a tight little satire about a fly-by-night company that sells fake villainous encounters to publicity-starved heroes. It's the kind of insouciance towards superhero conventions that would become the bread and butter of later adaptations, and it ends the book on a positive note. I wish I could've procured the rest of the series (particularly the Christopher McCulloch-penned
Karma Tornado stories), just to find out how far Edlund's vision grew before partnering with writer Richard Liebmann-Smith for the cartoon. Alas, no doin'.
So when I say that the animated version is the best, most artistically-successful expression of
The Tick to date, you should take it with a grain of salt. But no, really, it is. Running for three seasons (the last of which is, unfortunately, still unavailable on DVD), the Fox Kids cartoon inducted a generation of children and college students into the pleasures of superhero satire.
Around this time, Spielberg's
Animaniacs and
Freakazoid! were also finding success by appealing to both kids and adults, but where those alternated between silly slapstick and winking pop culture references (a trend continued by DreamWorks' execrable
Shrek series),
The Tick located its funny bone in the heart of absurdia.
Much of the show's adult comedy came from the simple juxtaposition between epic heroism and everyday reality -- Tick and Arthur, living together in a cramped apartment (Tick sleeps on the couch, barely), too poor to own a vehicle, constantly taking the taxi or bumming rides from fellow heroes.
Then there were the villains and other supporting characters, some of the most fever-dreamt creations to ever grace the screen: the mad baker who planned to destroy the City with a enormous soufflé; Babyboomerangutang, a hero in an ape outfit who threw kewpie dolls at opponents; Blowhole, the gigantic, anthropomorphic whale that annually jogged across the country. I still don't know if I really get that last one, but that's the thing --
The Tick rarely resorted to the cheap laugh.
But while the cartoon was funny, what set it a league apart from the comic was Townsend Coleman. A veteran voice-over artist best known (outside of
The Tick) as That NBC Announcer Who Tells You What's On Must See TV, Coleman created the definitive Tick, simply through his vocal chords.
This Tick, no longer saddled with the stigma of insanity, is simply full of zeal, his primary passion administering justice. But he brings unbounded enthusiasm to
everything he does, whether it's going on rooftop patrol, folding laundry with Arthur, or listening to an awful cabaret act.
This is who this Tick is -- he's a goofy bastard, but he loves life and he's unapologetically honest about it. But this
joie de vivre would fall apart without the voice to hold it together, and Coleman's bombastic, over-the-top, theatrical performance breathes life into a character that otherwise wouldn't make a lot of sense. When he booms Tick's battle cry -- "Spoon!" -- like a dada Michael Buffer, it leaves an indelible mark, greater than any ink.
This isn't just added value, though; this is key to understanding the cartoon
Tick's achievement. Compare him to the City's other heroes. Die Fledermaus is a coward and a poseur. Sewer Urchin is possibly mentally-handicapped, and pretty much useless on the surface world. Big Shot, a brutal parody of the Punisher, has serious emotional problems. The Civic-Minded Five are civic-minded and not much else.
Even the citizens of the City, the ones the Tick has sworn to protect, are stupid, shallow and banal. The Mayor and the chief of police are fools. The City's TV reporters are named Sally Vacuum and Brian "rhymes with Sinéad" Pinhead. Brainchild's parents are fluffy-headed idealists, blind to their son's supervillainy. A little tyke, heading for an amusement park gift shop, has only one line of dialogue: "Consume!" (The only notable exceptions are Carmelita, Arthur's love interest, and hero American Maid, who nonetheless is always overwhelmed by the messes she's supposed to clean up.)
It's a dark, sardonic take on human nature, but not an unusual one -- for starters, it's the engine of nearly every Coen Brother movie -- but it's why the Tick's monomaniacal focus on justice and goodness is so important. He (and by extension, Arthur) represent the best humanity has to offer.
The emphasis on good deeds, the generically-monikered City, the insect imagery that metaphorically makes the Tick and Arthur (a moth) so small in a gigantic universe, the virtual nudeness of its two protagonists, as if they were brand new people, untainted by the world -- underneath it all, the show is almost a kind of Everyman play, a guide to living disguised as a superhero cartoon.
I can't quite call this version of
The Tick perfect -- the animation could be rough, the stories sometimes too bedazzled by their own goofiness (see also: "The Tick vs. The Mole Men"). But it's close enough to wonder if anyone should ever bother trying again.
That didn't stop director Barry Sonnenfeld from bringing a live-action version to Fox, five years after the cartoon's cancellation. It's easy to see what drew Sonnenfeld to the material. His movies are often set in an absurd milieu: an office for dealing with expatriate aliens, a creepy/ooky family, modern-day Hollywood.
The Tick, I'm sure, looked like the perfect opportunity to bring
Men in Black's oddball sensibility and blockbuster potential to the small screen. And while I like a lot of Sonnenfeld's work (particularly the first
Men in Black), I'd be remiss if I didn't admit that a lot of it feels like a hollow Whopper.
He loves outlandishness for its own sake, sometimes (like
Wild Wild West) at the cost of narrative. Sonnenfeld began as a cinematographer (for the Coens, natch), and it shows; there's a fussiness to the image that leaves the impression of someone who's only moderately interested in the rest of the film. Basically, a Sonnenfeld film feels like a Coen Brothers film, only with its distinct comedic philosophy sucked out of it. And this void seeps through into the protagonists themselves -- they're often so cool-headed they seem disengaged from the the story.
So it's a minor miracle that, after the disastrous Sonnenfeld-directed pilot, the show turned out to be pretty good. The writing staff featured not only Edlund, Liebmann-Smith and McCulloch, but also former
Seinfeld writer and future
Borat director Larry Charles. Patrick Warburton (Brock on
The Venture Bros.) is a comedic genius, one of the few actors blessed with the skill to play stupid in a smart way, and, with his commanding physical presence and deep voice, probably the only person who could play the Tick.
The show promoted American Maid and Die Fledermaus to co-star status, and for what I can only assume are bizarre legal reasons, renamed them to the colorless "Captain Liberty" and the asinine "Batmanuel", respectively. Liz Vassey and Nestor Carbonell spin silk purses out of these bad choices, though, and end up making the show worth watching.
Here, Captain Liberty is the quintessential working girl, good at her job as a government-funded vigilante, but a total wreck in her personal life -- The Comedian as Elaine Benes. Vassey nails the character's oscillations between stern mother figure and creepy, clinging emotional meltdown on feet.
Carbonell (probably best known as the mysterious Richard Alpert on
Lost) is an incredibly underrated actor, and I seriously think he gives one of his best performances as Batmanuel. The character is still a poseur, as well as, unfortunately, a "Latin Lover" stereotype, but the joke is he's so comfortable in his skin, nothing fazes him. Carbonell delivers every line under his breath, tossed-off, as if he's above all this superhero nonsense even as he exploits it, as if he knows this Casanova stereotype is, in effect, just another costume -- whatever it takes to get the ladies. Based on the terrific performances and some top-notch writing, Sonnenfeld's
Tick could be called a success.
Except it's not. A number of factors weakened it bit by bit, concept by concept, until it repudiated everything that made the animated series such a triumph. The source of the problem was, like a lot of things in life, money.
It would be impossible for a live-action
Tick to duplicate the massive slugfests and sheer visual weirdness of the cartoon on a TV budget, no matter how big, so the scope of the show was narrowed down, focusing primarily on Arthur and the Tick's apartment, their favorite Chinese restaurant, and other small locations. So when you remove all the action, what you're left with is a bunch of people in crazy costumes, sitting around gabbing. Or, a sitcom.
Nothing wrong with sitcoms, of course -- some of my favorite shows are sitcoms. (I'll lay it on the line: I'm a big
Friends fan. Adjust your bookmarks accordingly.) But Sonnenfeld chose
Seinfeld as his model, a show famously about "nothing", for a genre that's
always about something. Doing so turned it into a
reductio ad absurdum -- a show about superheroes who never fight crime.
Seinfeld was a great, great show, but what made it work was its scathing cynicism and the characters' boisterous passion -- think how spastic they were! -- in justifying their solipsism. Jerry and the gang could get away with this, because, in the context of the show, they were completely ordinary.
But Sonnenfeld's
Tick, by its superhero nature, cocoons these men and women who dress up in spandex and capes, separating them in a distinct way from the rest of the world, and it makes them both strange and unappealing, especially since their crimefighting is shown to be inept, half-hearted or accidental. It's easier to identify with the frequently exasperated "normals" who put up with this nonsense than with the so-called heroes.
This approach may,
may have worked, if the show was willing to branch off from its
Seinfeldian roots and make the Tick not only the main character, but its thematic center as well. But they chose to make David Burke's Arthur the primary protagonist (per most Sonnenfeld stories, which feature an outsider character navigating a strange new world), and worse, they never defined Warburton's Tick.
In the comic, he was insane -- a choice that didn't work, but a choice nonetheless. The cartoon, he's the ultimate goody two-shoes. But here, he seems to change slightly, depending on the writer and the scenario. Despite his loquaciousness (a constant throughout all three versions), he's usually a bit dim. But sometimes he isn't; sometimes he's just naive. But then sometimes he's razor sharp.
In "Arthur Needs Space", his insistence on following Arthur around everywhere (literally, like a shadow) and his incapability of understanding sex make him look borderline autistic. (It wouldn't surprise me if autism was the only way some of the writers could explain the Tick to themselves.)
This isn't to take anything away from Warburton's performance, who's as good here as he could possibly be. But this mercurial, ill-defined Tick ends up making the character insignificant, in effect locking him out of his own show. The result is something much smaller than the sum of its parts, and probably just as well that it only lasted nine episodes.
The Tick seems destined to remain a cult item. Unlike its spiritual descendant
The Venture Bros., the characters are trapped in amber. They're not really designed to change. Perhaps that's best -- its pleasures are great, but not deep.
Nevertheless, I would hate for its contributions to go unsung. As we are now in the midst of a superhero movie golden age, where filmmakers are trying to get the perfect iconic take on a character, the next step -- perhaps foreshadowed by next year's
Watchmen -- is the deconstruction of same, which can only happen when film audiences are immersed in the rules, contrivances and expectations of the genre. If and when Hollywood gets to this point,
The Tick is an almost Platonic example of how to do it right.
I don't think there's a better or more emblematic moment in the entire
Tick canon than the ten-second scene in the cartoon's third episode, where one of the City's cut-rate heroes, the Human Bullet, abandons dinner with his wife and son to help deal with the rampaging Dinosaur Neil. After being launched from his suburban home ("Fire me, boy!"), the scene ends with the sad, hilarious cutaway to the wife, who continues picking at her meal with a deadpan stare and a muffled sigh, her rage long extinguished.
It's that gap between idealism and failure that
The Tick broke open,
The Venture Bros. is mining, and quite possibly represents the future of mainstream superhero entertainment.
Kent M. Beeson is a former contributor to ScreenGrab and is a long-time cinephile and comic book lover. He maintains a film-related blog called This Can't End Well.
The Watchman is © Kent M. Beeson, 2008
