Choose Your Heroes Carefully (The Tick Edition)

I loved The Tick cartoon in the mid-90s. The idea of a superhero who was as tough as Superman and as irreverently funny as The Kids in the Hall was – and still is – pure magic to me (psst. You can catch all three seasons of the cartoon on Hulu).

Amazon did a live-action reboot in 2016, which after the 2001 live-action show, you (like me) might have missed/skipped.

Don’t.

Without spoiling anything –

This is a show about who we look up to.

It’s a show about listening to the call of destiny and not fighting against the opportunities life puts in front of us.

It’s a show about how we figure ourselves out largely based on who our heroes are (aka whoever we look up to).

Most of the time, our heroes are tightly packed versions of our ideals, simplified by some larger-than-life persona. That’s every comic book hero in a nutshell.

But oversimplified isn’t overly honest. Life is far richer than any physics-defying superpower we can dream up.

Within our human constraints, we don’t grow until we see the limits. We don’t grow beyond our heroes until we understand their nuance.

We won’t personally advance until we accept their flaws, as well as our own.

Most importantly, we don’t grow until we realize we exclusively are the hero of our own story.

The Tick reboot only made it two seasons. Brian Edlund, the brilliant creator of the characters when they were simple comics, decided this show would focus on the life of Arthur, the non-super+unlikely hero sidekick of The Tick.

If you need a laugh, or if you’d like a more heartfelt version of The Boys, give this one a shot.

It’s tragic we only got 2 seasons of this – but who knows, maybe more of us will discover it and see what it has to offer. Check it out. And if you already did (or you just want to trade riffs from the cartoon) – let me know.

(Spoon!)