Spoon! An Oral History of ‘The Tick’

Birth of the Big Blue Bug

Ben Edlund, creator of The Tick: In 1985, I was about 17, mostly playing role-playing games with my friends in Massachusetts. In the course of playing the Marvel superheroes role-playing game, I noticed it deconstructed superheroes into a rule system. Somehow, I became both enamored of superheroes and very keyed into how absurd they were — they ride on this cloud of willful suspension of disbelief more powerful than most other genres. 

While we would play, I would doodle — I’d drawn my whole life — and a character started to emerge called The Tick. In part, he was The Tick because I grew up in the woods of Massachusetts and we had dogs and cats and there were a lot of ticks. My dad — who was an artist and an unusual cat — would pull these full, olive-sized ticks off the dogs and he’d put them in this jar of gasoline on the windowsill that would fill up over the course of the summer. I was traumatized and needed to get this out somehow, and The Tick was it. 

I also found it funny that fictional cities like Marvel’s New York City and DC’s Gotham were so full of superheroes. That meant, if you were a new superhero trying to break in, all the cool animals were taken — I mean, they made it all the way down to wolverines! So this poor bastard has to be The Tick. Sure, ticks do strike fear into people, but it’s a dumb name — it’s not a good one.

We had a regular group of players at my house, but once in a while other players would roll in. One kid came in, Chris, who was the manager of New England Comics, which was both a publisher and a comic book store. Chris said his bosses were trying to put out a comic and that I should go talk to them. I didn’t have a car, so my brother drove me, and I showed them what I was doing. 

Soon, I started to work with them on various things. At some point, the editor and owner, George Suarez, said, “This Tick guy, we’ll put him in the newsletter. He’s cool.” The Tick became the adjunct mascot for the New England Comics direct distribution catalog. Then, George was like, “Everyone’s publishing a comic book. We’ll do The Tick as a comic and see how that goes.” 

Heading into that first issue is when The Tick became blue, which I credit to the art director of New England Comics, Bob Polio. Originally, I was pretty dogmatic — ticks are brown, so The Tick was going to be brown — but Bob was like, “Superheroes aren’t brown, dude. He should be blue. That’s a superhero color.” I was still like, “I don’t think so!” But we held an in-office vote, and blue won. 

When we published the first issue of The Tick in 1988, it was during the independent black-and-white explosion in comic books. Only a few towns away from me, (Kevin) Eastman and (Peter) Laird were doing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and I was very much in the shadow of, and influenced by, their success. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was one of the biggest black-and-white comics, then they went and did the cartoon, which blew the doors off everything and changed the whole dynamic. And so, in the early 1990s, a whole bunch of properties got pulled out of the black-and-white independent comic explosion.

While that was happening, New England Comics got contacted by Kiscom, which was a toy licensor, kind of an agent that pulled together toy deals. Everyone was trying to do it that way because that’s what had happened with the Ninja Turtles — they connected with a toy company, built a toy line, then retrofitted a cartoon to it as a two-tiered marketing attack designed to create awareness for the toys. That’s what everyone had been doing, so we tried to do that with The Tick. 

In the early 1990s, I was going to film school in New York, and I would ride my bike down to the Toy Fair. I had these weird meetings with all these big toy executives, and I would bring my bike seat into these meetings so it wouldn’t get stolen. I remember pitching toys like a camouflage Tick where you’d dip him in water and he’d go paisley for no reason. The problem was, I was trying to parody toys while making a toy line. It was a mess. For months, we tried to sell it through that channel, but it was just too weird. So, we flipped the formula and tried to sell the cartoon directly, which is when we partnered with Sunbow Media. 

Nina Hahn, former senior vice president of Sunbow Media: Sunbow was the production company for an advertising company called Griffin-Bacal Advertising. They were the advertising agency for Hasbro, so, by default, Sunbow became the production company for all the Hasbro toys that were made into TV shows, like G.I. Joe and My Little Pony. Sunbow had zero notoriety in the original content space, or things that were boutique, bespoke or based on things other than toys. Sunbow brought me on to build up that division, and one of the projects I found was The Tick. I’m a big comic book person, which is how I found it, and I called Ben and that’s where the relationship began.

At that point, other than the comic, Ben had no writing experience and no television experience, so I knew we had to pair him with a writer, but I didn’t want him with any old writer. I knew Richard Liebmann-Smith from his writing for The New Yorker, and he had a wicked sense of humor. It was this giant leap that I lost a lot of sleep over, but it worked.

Richard Liebmann-Smith, co-creator of The Tick animated series: I had zero animation experience and very little TV experience. I’d mostly written stuff for The New Yorker and Playboy — all funny stuff. I guess Nina liked it, and she made this bizarre move of putting me together with Ben. I remember her calling me up and saying, “This guy Ben is a genius! You might want to meet him!” 

Edlund: It was an incredibly fortuitous coupling. It helped me in every way in which I was deficient. I think that’s why The Tick ended up as grown-up as it did — there’s a wisdom in it because it was the union of a 25-year-old mind and a 55-year-old mind. 

Hahn: Then it became the three of us creating the zeitgeist for the series, with Ben and Richard writing and me editing. 

Edlund: Once we got it ready, Nina convinced her friend Karen Barnes at Fox Kids that The Tick was something they should look at again, as they’d already passed on it previously before Sunbow got involved. 

Margaret Loesch, former president and CEO of Fox Kids: Karen Barnes brought The Tick to my attention. Karen had met Ben Edlund, and she said he was a very quirky guy, but very talented. She brought The Tick to me, and I thought it was very special. I met Ben and he was an unusual guy, but he was exactly what I’d hoped for. He had a vision, and he had a character that was a riot while also being very sweet. Ben was also a joy to work with. He had strong opinions, but I appreciated that. 

Edlund: I was very specific. It’s still an issue for me — I’m very specific with the humor and the way The Tick works, and I’m very skeptical that someone else is going to come along and understand how that operates. I had this very special bandwidth for The Tick, and I knew it would fail outside of that. I was a pretty arrogant little piece of crap at that time.

Loesch: The Tick was very cult-ish in tone, but this was the early days of Fox Kids and we were still trying to create who we were. I knew we wanted to be different, and I wanted to age-up the appeal of the network so that it wouldn’t just appeal to kids between the ages of six and nine. I wanted to appeal to older kids without being inappropriate for younger kids. I wanted to take a page out of what the Fox network was doing, which is why I greenlit The Tick. 

The Tick Gets Animated

Edlund: The only thing I had guaranteed in the contract was that I would be a consultant, which meant I’d be dismissable at any point. But as the cartoon was being developed, I always stayed in the conversation and I never freaked out. I never said, “You’re destroying it!” I just said, “It could also be this.” And as the team’s output wasn’t coming together after a few months, I was elevated alongside Richard to be the developer on the show.

Liebmann-Smith: It’s always been my feeling that Ben is The Tick, and it should be his call. There’s lots of stuff that others added, but he was always in control of it and I felt he should have the final say. 

Edlund: There were some adjustments that had to be made from the comics to the cartoon. For example, if I could have, I would have started The Tick in a mental institution like I did in the comics, but that was a “no.” 

Maybe the most important change was a complete inversion of something that I thought was one of the core jokes about The Tick: That he couldn’t find anybody good to fight. I thought that supervillains were dumb and that nobody is going to be one. In the comic, The Tick doesn’t encounter a supervillain until issue six, and that supervillain is a fake supervillain you can hire to fight so that you look cool as a superhero. 

But you can’t do that in a cartoon because you need two action figures to clash for real, so the polarity was reversed. We had to embrace those basic tenets: that there really is good versus evil and that there is a real problem and we have to fix it. I was uncomfortable with all of that initially, but I eventually came around. Truth is, story convention is ancient and it’s magic. It’s got mythical power, and if you fully reject it, you reject your access point to a real, moving narrative. It was a long road for me to learn that.

Also, in the cartoon, the dynamic between Arthur and The Tick became fully realized. In the comic book, it’s sort of a bunch of snapshots of possible relationships, but with the cartoon, it came to be that The Tick and Arthur are best friends. That’s really the core of it: The show is The Tick and Arthur, and they’re best friends. 

Liebmann-Smith: My interest in the series was mostly in the relationship between The Tick and Arthur. The episodes that have them in some kind of conflict are my favorite ones. It was interesting and funny to see what it would be like to be at the mercy of this giant blue asshole. Still today, I have an animation cel on my wall from The Tick of The Tick and Arthur doing the dishes. To me, that’s what the show is about.

Randolph Heard, writer/producer on The Tick: The relationship between The Tick and Arthur was a love relationship. I didn’t realize it at the time — and there was some funny roommate kind of conflict, since the Tick’s headquarters was just in Arthur’s apartment — but they really had a loving relationship.

Edlund: During our run, we were named as one of the most gay-friendly shows on television. I think because there was this tone of acceptance for everyone.

Liebmann-Smith: Eventually, Ben and I got the pilot episode right with, “The Tick vs. The Idea Men,” and from that point on, Ben and I had a lot of control over it. We became the story editors. No matter who’s the credited writer on an episode, especially in that first season, Ben and I had a big hand in it. 

Edlund: We were more or less allowed to be ourselves on TV. It was a tremendously liberating creative endeavor that could have been the exact opposite.

The Voice of Justice

Sue Blu, voice director: When I got the job as The Tick’s voice director, I was told, “Ben wants to play The Tick,” but the producers still told me to go ahead and audition a bunch of people for the lead role. My very first choice was Townsend Coleman. I knew him really well from Ninja Turtles — where I was the voice director, and he was Michelangelo — and even before that, we had acted together on something called Jem: Truly Outrageous. He was also the voice of NBC, so he had the kind of bravado The Tick needed. So I brought him in to audition, and he was phenomenal. 

But as I said, Ben wanted to play The Tick. However, I don’t think he realized what the acting encompassed. He created The Tick and he had it in his head, but it just wasn’t coming out. I tried to bring out The Tick in him, but when I sent it to the powers-that-be, I’d heard back that Ben had relinquished the role. They then asked me who I thought should do it. I told them, “I want you to listen to Townsend Coleman again.” They listened, and they loved him. That’s how Towny got the job.

Edlund: Townsend got it for a few reasons. One is, he’s a very, very good actor. He’s a very precise guy with his voice and how many shades he can put into it. He had to have the pipes and the certain timbre necessary for the character, but he also got the little boy element in The Tick, as well as the innocence and the sense of joy and the vulnerability. Everyone else was just doing Gary Owens — that radio announcer guy — that’s what it was based on, but there’s another component to it. Like Adam West, who brought this weird symphony to Batman, that’s what Townsend brought to The Tick. 

Townsend Coleman, voice of The Tick: When I first auditioned for The Tick and I read the sides and looked at his picture, I knew exactly what he sounded like. When I did my audition, I was doing an amalgamation of Gary Owens, Ted Baxter and a guy named Phil Austin from the comedy troupe The Firesign Theater. He did this character Nick Danger, and some of that is in there, too. When I read the lines of this 400-pound blue superhero, they just made sense to me. I didn’t have to think about it, and I didn’t feel like I had to conjure up some character for him. It just seemed obvious to me.

Blu: For Arthur, I brought several actors in, and I thought Micky Dolenz could capture the character. I also thought it was cool to have one of the Monkees do this — I thought it would be good for the show. He was terrific, and he and Towny worked really well together. 

I also brought in Cam Clarke for Die Fledermaus, Kay Lenz for American Maid and about 50 guys for all the other roles in the show.

Kay Lenz, voice of American Maid: American Maid was very adept at using her stiletto heels — flinging them and hitting a bull’s-eye. That was her superpower. I really enjoyed that character, because while the other heroes were stumbling, accidental heroes, she was far more intentional. 

Dop Dwee Dot Dot Dot Dwee Dow

Doug Katsaros, writer of The Tick theme song/series composer: I’d worked with Sunbow on Bucky O’Hare and the Toad Wars!, and when The Tick came up, I was given a chance to compete for writing the theme. I came up with this big band swing thing. I thought, because The Tick was such a big character, it would be great to have a bunch of trombones — like a world record of trombones — doing the theme song. 

When it came time to pitch my theme, I had a little demo, and I was on the phone with Ben and some executives at Fox. I told them, “I’m gonna try to get 40 trombones. It’s gonna be great, and I’m gonna have them all go, ‘Dop dwee dot dot dot dwee dow!’” Then Ben says, “You know Doug, it sounds funny when you sing it.” Then the Fox guys said, “Yeah, it’s funny when you sing it. Can you sing it?” I said, “I can sing it,” and they said, “Good. The theme is yours.”

The Tick vs. Season One

Edlund: Originally, Season One was going to be a six-episode miniseries. Richard and I wrote the six episodes, then the show went into production and I went out to L.A.. But when we started getting back the storyboards, that’s when I really freaked out. The storyboards were terrible. They were being done in a very traditional, very perfunctory way. It wasn’t boarded for humor. It wasn’t careful or meticulous. If we sent those boards to Korea, they weren’t going to communicate the humor the show needed. 

We were following previous pole stars like Ralph Bakshi’s Mighty Mouse and Ren and Stimpy — things that had been put through the pipeline, but were still undeniably cool because they worked on two levels where they got adult cred for kid shit. That’s what The Tick had to be. And so, after seeing those boards, I went to Karen Barnes and Margaret Loesch and said, “You need to stop production. You need to delay it and allow me to do all the storyboards. This will not translate the humor. It will fail.” 

Now, asking a network to delay a show is like asking them to reconsider if they want to make it at all, but surprisingly, Karen and Margaret were just like, “Okay.” They put it into dry dock for at least four months, which was a very smart, but a very unusual choice.

I moved to the Oakwoods in the Valley, and I would schedule my sleep — I was just drawing all the time. I did all of the boards for the first three episodes, and then I did some of them for at least the next two. Those boards were crazy. They were so detailed, and I was consciously drawing them so that, if they needed to, they could blow the board up as a layout. They set the tone for the boards going forward. It wasn’t that I needed to do every board ever, we just needed a template for how The Tick was going to be done properly.

Hank Tucker, supervising director/producer on The Tick: Ben had a mastery of the language, he had a beautiful drawing style and he also had the humor. It was a revelation for me. I’d been at Disney TV for years, and Ben did something totally different. Generally, as a rule, flat shots are used for funny, but Ben was the first person I saw who could do dynamic shots funny. 

Edlund: At some point during production of the first season, they liked what was coming back, and they decided to give us 13 episodes instead of six.

Christopher McCulloch, aka Jackson Publick, writer/producer on The Tick: During the first season, when they got the order for more episodes, Ben called me to write an episode. I already knew Ben and was working on The Tick comic after he’d left. I was in college with an electric typewriter, and I wrote “The Tick vs. The Mole-Men.” Never having written a script before, I think it was like 65 pages long. I went to Ben’s apartment and pulled a double all-nighter, X-ACTO-knifing pieces out, typing up new pieces, then taping them to the script and faxing them to Los Angeles in time for the recording. 

My whole fucking career — Venture Bros., everything — that’s where it started. I didn’t know I was going to get into animation until then.

Liebmann-Smith: The way Ben and I worked was unusual. At the time, I was working a full-time editor job for a magazine, and my wife and daughter and I were living in this very nice place on Park Avenue. Ben would come up in the evenings and on weekends, and we would work in my office. He was 23 years old, his mother had just died, he had very long hair and he looked like a bum. In many ways, he basically lived with us a lot of the time — it was very intense. 

Tucker: When The Tick debuted, Fox really protected it. They put us on right after X-Men. They really took care of us, and because of that, we got fairly good numbers. 

Coleman: One of my favorite lines from the first season came when Jimmy Cummings played Barry, who was another superhero named “The Tick.” The Tick is in this superhero lounge, and Barry bursts in and says, “Who’s the jerk who calls himself The Tick?” The Tick stands up and says, “I am that jerk! Who wants to know?” 

Jim Cummings, voice of Barry, Mr. Mental, Joseph Stalin, Multiple Santa, etc.: The Tick had a weird sensibility that I really enjoyed. Barry was a fun character. I also loved playing Mr. Mental, and in the Christmas episode, I got to play Multiple Santa, where they doubled, tripled and quadrupled my audio.

Jess Harnell, voice of Sewer Urchin, etc.: There was this one episode where the other superheroes are looking all over for The Tick as the Sewer Urchin looks in the sewer because that’s where he hangs out. At one point, the other superheroes ask the Sewer Urchin if there’s any sign of The Tick down there. The line as written was, “No, but I found this pie.” But when we did the session and I was doing my Rain Man thing, I said, “No, but I definitely found this beautiful pie.” I didn’t know if they’d keep the ad-lib, but not only did they keep it, a few months after it aired, I was walking around Westwood and I saw this guy with a picture of the Sewer Urchin on his shirt. It said, “I definitely found this beautiful pie.”

Edlund: The Tick’s battle cry, “Spoon!” made its cartoon debut in “The Tick vs. Arthur’s Bank Account.” That came from the comic book, and it was another companion piece of absurdist deduction. If the tick is where you go if you have no more cool animals, “Spoon!” was basically about how dumb it is to have a battle cry. There’s something wrong with your life if you have a battle cry. You’re solving your problems the wrong way.

Two Much Tick

Edlund: For Season Two, Micky Dolenz had to go on tour with The Monkees, so Rob Paulsen stepped in. He was amazing as Arthur. Rob adopted what Micky did, but then he had a lot of episodes to make Arthur his own.

Rob Paulsen, voice of Arthur (Seasons Two and Three), Brainchild, The Terror, etc.: I’m a Monkees freak, so it was a thrill to get to work with Micky during the first season. Then, before Season Two, the producers came to me and asked me to pick up for Micky. I said “yes,” but I did ask, with a handshake, that if Micky comes back, I still get to be Arthur, because I knew I was going to get invested in that role. Fortunately, they stuck to it, and I got to do the second and third seasons.

I really wasn’t that different from Micky. If there is a difference, I’d say Micky was a little bit more nebbish-y, while I was maybe a little more over-the-top and chronically anxious. Both of us had that exasperation with The Tick like, “What a big fucking dope this guy is, but he’s my dope and I love him.”

Edlund: Season Two has the episode “The Little Wooden Boy and the Belly of Love,” where Arthur starts dating and The Tick is really threatened by it, so he carves this little wooden boy out of a block of wood. It makes you wonder, what is Arthur to him? It was also really nuts. That is an insane person. It’s funny because, The Tick is our guy, we love him, but he’s nuts. 

Coleman: Another great line: “Little wooden boy, you wouldn’t leave me, would you?”

Tucker: The episodes that really say “The Tick” for me are “The Little Wooden Boy and the Belly of Love,” “Armless But Not Harmless” and “Heroes,” which was a parody of Cops about superheroes.

Edlund: “Heroes” was a combination of myself and Randolph Heard. I love the villain Pigleg, who was a guy with a pig for a leg. My favorite part about him was the idea that Pigleg is trying to drop the whole Pigleg thing. He’s dressed as a lightbulb and he’s calling himself “The Dealy Bulb,” but he still has a pig for a leg. The best line from that episode is when The Tick is climbing up a building and you see the pig from his point of view, and The Tick says, “Roof pig! Most unexpected!”

Coleman: They started throwing this bit my way where The Tick would go off on this wacky rant to close out the episode. I started getting such a kick out of recording those rants that I didn’t want to know what was coming. When I’d get my script, I wouldn’t even read the last page or two. I didn’t want to know what I was going to say until I was in the studio already on the mic. So, when I read those rants out loud, that was the first time my eyeballs were seeing them. I remember feeling giddy because of it. 

Play

The Tick’s Last Patrol

Loesch: Throughout its run, The Tick never did quite as well as we’d hoped it would. It was exactly what I thought it would be, a cult favorite, but it was never a mainstream thing. I loved the show, though, and I wanted to give it a real shot. I figured the best way to do so was to keep it on the air. Along with that, for Season Three, I wanted The Tick to find more of an audience, so we struck a deal with Comedy Central. I thought that would breathe new life into it, which it did, just not as quickly as I needed it to.

Liebmann-Smith: The run that it had on Comedy Central really helped make an impression and give The Tick a legacy. They used to have these Tick-a-thons when they had nothing else to air, and they’d run it for hours.

Edlund: Problems arrived when they started to do analysis on our numbers. It was in the third season when they realized that 54 percent of the audience was adult. It was a bunch of stoned college kids, and while they might buy cereal, they’re not going to buy anything else we’re selling them on Saturday mornings. We didn’t know Season Three would be the end of it, though. We even had four scripts from Season Four that were written.

Heard: The Tick got canceled because Saban bought Fox Kids and decided our show wasn’t making enough, in part because we never really had a huge toy line. 

Hahn: That’s correct, yes — Saban got involved and wanted those more toyetic properties, and The Tick got shoved to the side. 

Edlund: Comedy Central even came in at the end and offered to pay for some of it because it was doing okay for them, but Fox said, “No, we’re done.”

Loesch: When The Tick was canceled, it was purely a financial consideration. If I couldn’t justify it to my own management, I wasn’t going to get greenlight approval. 

Edlund: I was also so exhausted. I hadn’t created a system by which The Tick could be made without me contributing bone marrow to it. The Tick was entirely a labor of love, and I couldn’t let go of each precious thing, which is why it is what it is, but also why it didn’t run for eight seasons. 

The Tick vs. Immortality

Coleman: People ask me all the time, “What’s your favorite cartoon that you’ve done?” and I almost always say The Tick. It’s one of my greatest points of pride for all kinds of reasons. And damn if it hasn’t tickled my funny bone all these years.

Paulsen: The Tick left such an indelible mark on all of us because it wasn’t only super smart, but it was exactly the kind of upbeat, oddball weird humor that we were all really into. 

Harnell: The Tick took the superhero genre and turned it on its head. Nowadays, a lot of things do that, like The Boys, for example, but The Tick was the first. 

Loesch: What I loved about The Tick was, as goofy as it was, The Tick was a lovable character. It was hip and witty and bizarre and offbeat and lovable. 

Edlund: The people who like The Tick and understand it, they hold it dear. Only certain things achieve that. It’s different than being truly well-known. The Tick is obscure, but it’s well-loved. It’s a port in the storm for certain people looking for certain things that they can’t find elsewhere. It was allowed to be, which is kind of a miracle. 

McCulloch: There’s a particular frequency that The Tick hits that’s not always easy to jump into. On its surface, it’s a superhero parody, but it’s so easy for that to be simple and dumb and too referential. There’s something more offbeat and psychological about The Tick. There’s a sweetness to it and an awkward darkness sometimes. The thing we always aspired to was what Ben called “Inspired Weirdness.” 

Coleman: Spoon!