The Tick is mighty! So mighty that he got me to break my rule of only reviewing trades as we look at New England Comics latest Tick comics including Issues 1-4 of the new series and the Free Comic Book Day issue.
Transcript:
The Tick is Mighty. Join us as we take a look at the latest comic book adventures of The Tick.

The Tick is a much-beloved character, probably best remembered for his 1990s Fox animated TV series; and there'd been two subsequent live-action series, one of which will have new episodes. I believe in February 2019 we'll get Season Two of the Tick for Amazon Prime. Now most people know that the Tick began as a comic book but the Tick’s relationship to a regular publishing schedule is a bit strange. The first issue of the Tick appeared thirty years ago, and in those thirty years there have been 100-odd issues of the Tick. Some of those actually were very odd but, be that as it may, that averages out to just about three to four comics per year. There have been quite a few ongoing Tick series as well as years where there haven't been any Tick comics published at all. During the last five years all we'd gotten were free comic day books.
The Tick is not owned by Marvel or DC, nor is it published by a comic book company that publishes multiple titles like Dark Horse, Dynamite, IDW or Boom. Rather, the Tick continues to be published by New England Comics, a chain of comic book shops in New England, thus the name. I've actually read either in trade paperback or in some other form every previous Tick Issue, so I was excited that we were finally going to get some new Tick comics with a new series starting in late 2017 and written by Cullen Bunn who has written a lot of work for Marvel Comics. We'll be discussing Issues One through Four of this Tick series that were published in 2017 and 2018, as well as the 2008 Tick free Comic Book Day comic.
Well first, on to the ongoing series and we'll talk about these four Issues and we'll talk about the ongoing main story written by Cullen Bunn with art by JimmyZ, and then there are backup stories in each comic and we'll talk about them as well. The story opens with the Tick and Arthur riding on a bus to Canada and the Tick recalling how they got there, which was the Tick was trying to stop a robbery by some ninjas and finds out that it's all a trap – that the ninjas and their arch-nemesis, the Murder Clowns, have teamed up to battle against the Tick. And what happens in the course of the battle is that a crate falls on the Tick's head. Now that would kill you or me, but being this is the Tick and he's nigh invulnerable, when the crate lands on his head he starts speaking French, and then really goes after both Murder Clown and ninja alike with a vengeance, easily winning the battle.
It's important to note that in this book Cullen Bunn is doing some callbacks to Ben Edlunds first work on the Tick. Edlund drew the Tick comic as a bit of a joke, kind of playing around with superheroes and got published in the New England Comics newsletter, and the idea was so popular that they decided that there needed to be a Tick comic book. As part of the newsletter Edlund drew up a list of facts about the Tick, describing his background, his weight, etc. and just really was just being absolutely silly and almost nonsensical about it. And the folks who wrote the newsletter didn't bother to proofread it, thus having some very odd misspellings passed on for posterity whenever the piece is reprinted. Among the Tick's abilities Edlund listed: can floss all his teeth, speaks fluent French, concert pianist, knows all the Presidents in order. And so the idea of the Tick starting to speak French by Bunn is a callback to Edlund's original work.
After Tick thrashes both Murder Clown and ninja alike, he begins to wander and dream about his origin.