5 O'Clock Shuffle - August 22

This week on the 5 O'Clock Shuffle I look at the major Spider-Man, Flash, and Arrow casting news, Amazon's new Tick TV show, what won at the box office, the major TV coming your way, and of course the comic book forecast 

Cover Story - Top 12 Tick Covers

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While The Tick may not be on everyone’s mind this week he’s certainly on my mind.  His new live action show premiered Friday on Amazon mostly to widespread apathy but it’s reignited my curiosity for the character.  Like him or not, the wild blue yonder is one of the most successful indie superheroes there is, emerging out of the bubbling stew of creativity that was 1980s underground comics to be a major media force in the 1990s. 

In his over 20 year career the Tick has been adapted to live action, animation, video games, and a whole avalanche of comics, to the point that I’d say he deserves to be counted alongside the likes of Hellboy, Spawn, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as one of the truly iconic superheroes not to come from DC or Marvel.  Given all that, and the fact I’ve now got an excuse to re-examine some of his stuff, let’s dive into the shallow end and get the cover story on the top 12 covers featuring The Tick. 

Static Thoughts - The Tick (2001)

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Edited by Robert Beach

As the superhero genre continues to extend its icy tendrils into all forms of media, streaming superhero content seems to be the next big frontier for the genre. After such major hits as Daredevil and Jessica Jones, we’re now starting to see more obscure heroes get their shot at the big time such as last year’s Powers and 2016’s The Tick reboot on Amazon. As evidenced by the name of this article, The Tick reboot is what brought me here today, though I don’t have any plans to review it yet. I’ll give my thoughts eventually. For now, it’s just a pilot, and I’d like to wait till we see a full series before making a definitive call. 

No, I’m here today to look backward rather than forward, back to the strange days of 2001. Those were the days before Nolan’s Batman, before the Marvel cinematic universe, even before Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. Back then, Batman and Robin had just recently killed the superhero genre while Blade and X-Men had only recently revived while the boom of indie comics led to dozens of off-beat hero adaptations. 

This was the era of Spawn, Savage Dragon, the Maxx, Wild C.A.T.s, Witchblade, Freakazoid, and more. This was also the time superheroes came to live-action TV like never before with shows like Mutant X and Smallville. In the midst of these two major trends, an obscure Boston indie superhero found his way into a live-action adaptation that, while brief, I’d argue as one of the best installments of the genre. His name? The Tick. 

Will Powerless include the Global Guardians?

Edited by Robert Beach 

One of the bizarre paradoxes of superhero adaptations seems to be that the fewer major properties a studio owns, the better their work turns out.  For instance, DC/WB has owned the rights to all of their characters from the word go, and they’ve yet to churn out a good non-Batman movie this century. Conversely, Marvel, who lacked access to either of their major franchises, turned a handful of B-list heroes into the biggest multimedia franchise on the planet right now. 

The same seems to be true in the world of television where the fractured rights landscape of DC has rendered excellent hits like Supergirl, Flash, and Legends of Tomorrow while Marvel has the disappointing Agents of SHIELD and Agent Carter. Now DC/WB is back at the act with weird and fractured comics rights with the new NBC comedy series Powerless, the first set photos of which have just premiered.

From all accounts, Powerless is set to be an office comedy set in a world full of superheroes, magic, and aliens. I’m not entirely sure how that will work if the idea is that the office workers have super powers in the vein of Cracked.com’s Anti-Heroes, or they’re just replacing generic Office-style shenanigans with time travel, super villain schemes, and alien invasions. I’m tempted to think it’s the latter of the two, treating the boom and bombast of standard superhero adventure with the banal attitude of classic mundanity has always been an easy path to hilarity.  

Stuff like The Tick, Formerly Known As The Justice League, and the collected works of Brian Michael Bendis have all mined this lucrative vein of nerd comedy to great success in the past. In either event, the world of Powerless will still require superheroes if it wants to sell its general idea of being in a superhero universe and that’s where things get weird.

Unlike Marvel, who own all of their TV rights, DC’s television adaptation rights are incredibly fractured. That’s why Arrow and Flash are on CW while Supergirl is on CBS, Gotham is on Fox, and Constantine was on NBC. This means even if NBC wanted its superhero universe to feature big-name heroes like Superman and Wonder Woman, they couldn’t get the rights.

However, DC still has an incredible backlog of characters that have never even come close to a live-action adaptation and work perfectly to fill the ranks of Powerless background players. This lets the writers of the show avoid having to come up with new heroes week to week, welcomes nerd viewership by NBC slapping a big DC Comics logo, and get free publicity from blogs like this one. Hey, everyone likes sausage, but no one wants to know how it gets made, right? 

In any event, the first two heroes to appear on Powerless have been announced and we’ve caught a glimpse of one of them. The heroes are Crimson Fox and Jack O’ Lantern. Both of whom I was already thoroughly familiar with long before this announcement because, as established, weird comics and I go together perfectly. Crimson Fox makes a decent amount of sense for an addition as her powers and design are pretty well suited to a quick and easy adaptation. What’s more, she’s only about D-list as far as things go. Though she’s never made it to a multimedia adaptation, Crimson Fox was a member of the Justice League for a time.... sort of. 

After DC rebooted their universe for the first time in 1986, one of the caveats going forward was a brand new Justice League that would feature a whole host of new, internationally themed characters. Thus was born the Justice League International along popular spin-off comic Justice League Europe. Crimson Fox joined as a member of the JLE during the mid point of its very respectable and thoroughly enjoyable run.  

She was a French superhero who had super pheromones in addition to some enhanced physicality, and a costume that looked absolutely nothing like a fox. Eventually, the multi-Justice League era imploded under the weight of other spin-offs like Justice League Antarctica and Justice League Task Force. After that, Crimson Fox dropped off the map for years and years before reappearing in the Global Guardians.

That brings us to the second hero: Jack O’ Lantern.  Jack O’ Lantern was a founding member of the Global Guardians, a weird substrata of the DC universe in its own right. The Global Guardians popped up in the early ‘80s as a direct response to the various characters added to the Super Friends TV show to increase diversity. The idea of the time was to be a version of the Justice League on a Global scale, emphasizing diversity and international cooperation. As such, they had members from England, Brazil, Germany, Australia, Israel, Japan, Greece, and even Native Americans. 

The team were more or less forgotten after their brief initial run, save for members Green Fire and Ice Maiden; they went on to join the Justice League International. The team was revived during Crimson Fox’s tenure as a kind of international superhero watchdog force as a way to curb American metahuman activity. The new team featured mostly new members as most of the original heroes became part of yet another international superhero force: The Ultramarine Corp.

So what does all this actually mean? Well, maybe nothing, yet maybe that the world of superheroes we’re about to see on Powerless is meant to be one of broader diversity and international action. The vast miasma of heroes from across the Global Guardians and Ultra Marine Corp are more than enough to fill out the background ranks of a superhero universe while also giving the proceedings a unique style and look.  

Additionally, most of the costumes required for the various characters would be pretty easy to put together, and none of them boost super powers that would be too difficult to replicate. I don’t really know why the makers of Powerless would settle on this particular route, but it’s not a terrible idea to say the least. Provided the framing of their universe isn’t about a background tapestry of interesting and diverse heroes used to back-up a collection of dull white office drones, that’d be a pretty terrible misstep. 

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The Paybacks #1 Review

The Paybacks is a great new comedy superhero comic from Darkhorse by Donny Cates, the guy behind Ghostfleet, the best comic of the year, check out my review of issue #1 over on Front Towards Gamer:

http://ftg.operationsupplydrop.org/2015/09/19/the-paybacks-1-review-comics/

Panel Vision - Astro City #24

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: apes on comics sell comics.  This week we take our first look at the strange comic staple that is Astro City.  Astro City is the product of the combined might of comic powerhouses Kurt Busiek, Brent Anderson, and Alex Ross.  The trio came up together in the mid-90s with Astro City as their breakthrough title before Busiek and Ross went on to produce the groundbreaking Marvels mini-series.  Astro-City is a weird comic in that it doesn’t really rely on a solid cast of characters to tell its stories.  Instead the emphasis is on the location, as the name implies, and using it as sort of a loose canon pastiche of superhero tropes.  The book mainly draws from the bronze age for inspiration but is essentially a free for all grab bag of ideas thrown together to tell stories with superheroes in a superhero universe where fighting crime and brawling aren’t necessarily the focus.