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There are certain plot points that pop up again and again when superheroes leap into a new iteration: the Waynes die, Krypton explodes, that kind of stuff. It’s appropriate that with the Tick, the bombastic superhero satire created by writer/artist Ben Edlund, the piece of lore that jumps from relaunch to relaunch isn’t a tale of morality defining trauma. Instead, it’s a joke.
If you’ve followed the big blue arachnid from one adaptation to the next over the last few decades, then you’ve seen the same joke repeated in every single pilot of every single Tick TV show. It doesn’t matter if it’s a live-action series or a cartoon, if it’s The Tick, then this joke is there.
Before making the jump to the small screen, this gag first appeared in the pages of 1989’s The Tick #6. Edlund’s soon-to-be-repeated gag goes like this: Arthur, after teaming up with the Tick, lets the mighty crimefighter into his rundown bachelor pad. The Tick, assuming that all the boring furniture is really a cover for a superhero lair, starts flipping over furniture and wrecking coat hooks in a search for the secret trigger. In the comic, he rips a coat hook off the wall, goes for a lamp (Arthur saves it), and then asks what the couch turns into. Arthur shouts, “It turns into a bed!” The Tick flips it over anyway.
When the Tick jumped into the world of animation in 1994, the joke followed. In “The Tick vs. the Idea Men,” written by Edlund and Richard Liebmann-Smith, the same thing happens almost word for word as in the original comic. The Tick rips a coat hook off the wall, goes for a lamp, and then tries to flip over Arthur’s couch. And just like in the comic, the Tick scolds Arthur for not having his lair filled with lair-y things.
When The Tick returned as a live-action sitcom in 2001, the joke was repeated again in another pilot written by Edlund (which you can watch for free right now on Crackle). In this iteration, the Tick (Patrick Warburton) follows Arthur home to his apartment and knocks the door down to let himself in. The Tick again says “It looks just like an apartment!” and then begins to wreak havoc.
He starts to hunt for the trigger, ripping a light off of the wall and then flipping over Arthur’s sofa. One more time, the Tick asks what it turns into, and Arthur says, “It turns into a bed!”
We’re not done yet! The new Tick, which is now available to stream on Amazon Prime, of course uses the sequence one more time. In an episode written by Edlund, Arthur (Griffin Newman) wakes up to find the Tick (Peter Serafinowicz) in bed with him, and then the hero starts strolling through Arthur’s “HQ.” He finds a coat hook and asks Arthur if it’s his “secret trigger.”
He rips it off the wall. Arthur runs behind him, begging him to not touch anything. This version doesn’t have the couch gag, as Arthur’s sparse apartment doesn’t have a couch in it. Instead, the Tick obsesses over Arthur’s “crime lab” (a bunch of newspapers taped to the wall) and throws a candle stick and a floor lamp around while looking for the secret lair switch.
There’s a reason why Edlund has repeated this joke three times since first writing it back in 1989: it works. Not only is it hilarious (watching the Tick use his super strength to casually destroy property is always a delight), but it sums up Arthur and the Tick’s world views in just a few lines. In that way, this one scene is absolutely as pivotal to the Tick as the Waynes being murdered or Krypton blowing up. And in this piece of superhero lore, the only thing that gets hurt is a coat hook.
