Spoonful of Sugar: The Tick #101 Review

It takes a bold man to introduce any form of pathos to The Tick, a character that two generations of comic readers automatically associate with the battle cry of “Spoon!” or perhaps with being trapped in a dinosaur’s wild moustache hair.

The concept of introducing any kind of sorrow to a character who has battled a man-eating cow and a dude with a chair for a face takes a lot of balls, because if you do it wrong, you’re running the risk of seriously fucking up a character that has worked for a quarter century on a very simple level: be a goofy, naive superhero parody who says silly shit while battling ridiculous villains with his fat, incompetent sidekick. Get your giggles, get out, and hope that some kind television suit forgets that underrated live action TV show so The Tick gets another chance on television somewhere.

The Tick #101 opens with Arthur having been killed. The issue deals, in large part, with how The Tick deals with that loss. And we get emotional internal monologue of how the loss affects The Tick, including how, without Arthur or someone to help guide him, he is simply muscle pointed in no particular direction. These are issues and character points that could go wrong on a light-hearted character like The Tick in a real fucking hurry; watching The Tick contemplate mortality and is own shortcomings could very quickly go the way of watching Honey Boo Boo try to redefine Pi while her mother’s held at gunpoint: morbidly entertaining, but out of place and uncomfortable if done incorrectly.

Well, not to worry, because writer Benito Cerino strikes one hell of a balance between addressing the relationship between The Tick and Arthur, while still commenting on the innate ephemeral nature of any superhero’s death in comics these days, and chucking in plenty of jokes about mimes. Douchebag, douchebag mimes. And he uses the guest appearance of Mike Allred’s Madman as a catalyst to get into the more emotional, touching elements of the story, while never forgetting that this is a Tick story, which means that we get plenty of bombastic catchphrases and liberal use of words like “dink.”

The story opens immediately after Arthur was killed by a martian (bearing a suspicious resemblance to Marvin) in The Tick #100. As The Tick, predictably, begins to slide into hysteria, he is visited by Golden Age Arthur – a patchwork of artificial body parts, time travel and big guns in a bunny suit that somehow manages to be only slightly less ridiculous than Cable. Golden Age Arthur’s time travel device then fires, causing Madman to be summoned to the world of The Tick. Together, they battle Sewer Mimes and try to make sense of Arthur’s sudden death, only to realize that The Tick has known where Arthur is all along.

That, my friends, is one shitty and incomplete plot summary, because the plot doesn’t really matter here. This issue is a parody of all the Death Of Insert Superhero Name Here stories we’ve been spoon-fed by the Big Two since Superman’s temporary early 90s dirtnap. We get riffs on all the classic moments here: Arthur being thrown through time a la Batman after Final Crisis. Five different returning version of Arthur – one with a mullet – like in the Death of Superman. Chuck in the Golden Age Arthur / Cable pastiche, and you have all the elements of every superhero resurrection story, ever.

And it is funny. I don’t want to give away too many jokes here, but seeing Tick’s vision of Arthur being propelled through time, like Batman in The Return of Bruce Wayne, and becoming a pirate, a pilgrim and a suffragette, was just spot on. In addition, the sequence where Madman comes up from a sewer grate to Tick shouting, “Guh – CHUD!” actually made me laugh out loud, which, as a former stand-up comedian, it takes one hell of a lot to get me to do. So as a parody of superhero death stories, this issue is hitting everything you’d want.

But there is some surprisingly effective pathos to this issue, based on the fact that The Tick is an idiot. Meaning that, while everyone in this story knows that superheroes just don’t stay dead, The Tick doesn’t. He’s not smart enough to really understand it. So no matter what anyone tells Tick about superheroes never staying dead, as far as Tick is concerned, he has lost his best friend. And while Cereno never lets the book become maudlin – after all, we’re talking about The Tick, who will always break into a goofy smile when he sees someone do a yo-yo trick… for justice! – he also makes it abundantly clear that The Tick thinks he has lost his best friend. And by making The Tick (rightly) too dumb to know that Arthur’s death is only a plot device, Cereno allows the story to show us just how much Arthur really means to The Tick. It’s sweet… and most importantly, Cereno accomplishes it without letting it get in the way of hearing Tick say things like, “Hmm. A mime-enlarger should be a real boon to society.”

Les McClaine’s art on the issue is what you’d expect from a Tick comic, in that his characters look like Tick characters; you’d be hard-pressed to tell a ton of difference between the art on The Tick #101 and any issue of The Tick that came after the earliest Ben Edlund issues from the mid-80s. However, here he also needs to present Madman, a character created and drawn by truly distinctive artist Mike Allred, and McClaine does the smart thing: he doesn’t try to ape Allred’s style. McClaine’s Madman looks like a more realistic character in the cartoony world of The Tick, establishing him as “other” in the world very effectively. Further, in action scenes, while Tick fights in his normal, long-strided and exaggerated style, McClaine has Madman move more acrobatically to further set him apart from normal Tick action. Throw in a surprisingly good-looking double-paged spread that reminded me strongly of the iconic images by Alan Davis in Alan Moore’s Mad Jim Jaspers story in Captain Britain, and what we have here is impressively effective art on what amounts to a superhero goof story.

The Tick #101 is a surprisingly good comic book. It delivers everything you want from a Tick story – big laughs, goofy dialogue, but, sadly, no cry of “SPOON!” – but it delivers it with a goodly amount of heart. It humanizes The Tick in a way I don’t ever remember seeing before, and it does it with a light touch that doesn’t get in the way of the bombastic superhero parody laughs you expect from the book. This is a good one; better than you’d expect. Give it a shot.