My
God! I’ve got pockets!

Let
us now bemoan the fate of lost pop culture, slipping through our collective
fingers, rolled across our national landscape, and dropped into the national
sewer. Rappin’, Rockin’ Barbie is inexplicably entwined with Rubik’s Cube. Pink
Lady and Jeff sinks along with The Associates. Within this swirling mass of
mediocrity, we find the Tick, bubbling to the surface and crawling back into
our national consciousness like some… bubbling… crawling… thing.

Long
before The Invincibles, the comics industry made fun of its own. Plastic Man
and Captain Marvel were originally as much satire as heroic. The Tick appeared during the late-’80s
independent comics boom, created by Ben Edlund. Hollywood was scouring the
comics’ field for the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and discovered Edlund’s
semi-annual series.

Instead,
Edlund and company produced a Saturday morning cartoon that was just a little
too off-kilter (Mickey Dolenz, Bobcat Goldthwait, Laraine Newman, and Jim
Belushi all contributed their voices). It did last for three seasons, but
nobody bought the tchotchkes. Edlund handed off the comic book to friends as he
pursued a career in Hollywood. Later, he launched the live-action Tick series. Unfortunately, other
parties owned the cartoon show and fought the use of any of the original
storylines or characters. The magic was gone like a fallen cake.

Today,
Edlund works in television. The Tick live action series is available on DVD. The original, hilarious comics have
been collected in The Tick Bonanza 1-4. For that and other shiny stuff, check out www.necomics.com.The Tick: Days of Drama, a new,
non-Edlund comic is due this month. The best news is that ABC is showing the
original Tick cartoons all summer long. Chairface Cippendale, American Maid,
Thrakkorzog, and Arthur are available at 11 p.m. weekdays (Toon Disney) and 11
a.m. Sundays (ABC Family). Tune in and hug your destiny!

—
Craig Brownlie

Press
and play

There
in the checkout line was a Dora the
Explorer book that lets you record something and play it back by the means
of two buttons on the cover. I don’t know what the book is about, and neither
probably would any child who owns it. The point is to record yourself and hear
it played back, then launch off on a chain of increasingly dirty or silly
messages until you’ve exhausted yourself and the possibilities, and then the
book is put away, probably forever.

There
was no one behind me in line. I pressed the red button for a moment, and then
the blue for playback. Hearing the din of Wegmans being played back over the
din of Wegmans was less than captivating. So I casually picked it up, placed it
near my mouth, pressed the button, and murmured in a villainous foreign accent,
“I will kill you.” I placed it back on the shelf and pressed the blue
button, pleased to find my message not only clearly audible, but even more
calmly threatening than I had imagined.

Later,
in the car, I realized that no child would ever hear my message. They would do
just what I had done — “What’s this? Record and hear yourself talk? So I
just press this button here?” And then the damage is done. My message is
gone, never having had a chance. And it was even a few more moments before I
realized that there must have already been a message on there when I first hit
record. It never occurred to me that I probably wasn’t the first person to
figure out how to hit the red button. And now that message, probably a
priceless communication from a 7-year old, was gone.

—
Andy Davis

This article appears in Jul 20-26, 2005.