Daily Comics Digression #36:SPOOOON

Daily Comics Digression #36:SPOOOON

If you're a fan of superheroes and a child of the 90s, you're probably familiar with The Tick. A loving parody of superheroes, The Tick sees the titular character as a big blue guy who looks almost nothing like his namesake. An overly earnest do-gooder, Tick is equal parts superhero and mayhem causer. He's been the star of his own comic and multiple TV series, the most popular of which is a cartoon that aired on FOX.

A new Amazon series of The Tick just came out. It's...ok. It's not bad, but that doesn't mean that it's anywhere near good. For a show that's based on a parody, the tone of the new show seems scattered at best. One minute, characters are having silly conversations, the next there's someone getting his throat gruesomely cut.

This is every bit as ridiculous as it looks.

Oddly enough, the new show chose to do one overarching plot instead of going the one 'n done episodic format, which is strange for a comedy show. The pilot is quite funny, but the following episodes tend to get caught up with the characters unraveling the plot. Unfortunately, the plot is pretty silly, so the whole enterprise feels kinda pointless.

Also gone is the main thing that made the cartoon so amazing: the incredible puns and wordplay. Every episode of the cartoon was filled with characters with hilarious names like El Seed, Chairface Chippendale, or Eastern Bloc Robot Cowboy. The best that the new show can come up with is Ms. Lint.

If you have Amazon Prime, it's worth a watch, but it's not a good sign when it occurs to you that a cartoon from twenty years ago was much funnier.