The Tick, The Complete Edlund; A Hardcore Review *SPOILERS*

Hilarious from start to end. I must first admit to not knowing much about the Tick other than him being a giant nigh invulnerable goof until Free Comic Book Day this year. I picked up the first issue as a freebie at Charlies Comics here in Tucson, AZ. Reading through it, I started to understand what all the fuss was about. So I inquired to Charlie about there being any trades of The Tick out. He stressed that the best one by far was The Tick: The Complete Edlund which contains the first 13 issues of the Tick, his super rare first appearance and a whole lot of dvd-like extras.
Edlund weaves a tale of Don Quixote-like proportions in "The City," the Tick's chosen stomping grounds. Here our big blue friend runs afoul of Clark Openheimer, a mild mannered reporter who wears.... hypno glasses as a disguise. Doing his best delusional hero thing, The Tick manages to somehow access Clark's Fortress thingee (careful to avoid lawsuits) and weaken him with a piece of green Otter Creekite, which turned out to just be a green eraser.
From there, the Tick meets Oedipus who looks a lot like a rick Greek who was trained by ninjas in Night of a Million Zillion Ninjas, where he has to beat up, literally a whole fucking lot of ninjas. And the Tick then declares that, "I thought they only hung around airports getting sucked up into jet engines." It is during this story that Tick meets Paul the Samurai, who smuggles his Katana blade through security at the airport in a loaf of French bread.
From here the Tick soon meets Aurthur. Actually it was during this storyline involving ninja and Paul and Oedipus. Tick moves in with Aurthur and the begin going out on patrol. The duo realize that there's little for them to do in The City so they strike out on the road to New York City to find their destiny of fighting super villains. It is during this road trip that they run across the Chainsaw Vigilante. Hilarious stuff like this should'a been a cartoon tv show. Oh, wait, IT WAS! In New York Tick meets Barry Hubris, who is also the Tick. The two fight a classic battle, where the Tick barely knows whats going on while getting pummeled. And only wins cause he's nigh invulnerable and Barry Hubris gets fucking tired. Turns out when you beat another hero who sports the same moniker, you get to keep the name and all of his crime fighting stuff. So the Tick inherits Hubris' Tick Cave, kitchen, dining room and one bathroom of his insanely Wayne-like estate.
The art is fantastic with just enough detail and splendor to make is pseudo-grimm and gritty, but to still have a ton of hilarity. Edlund is a master at comedy superheroism. So much so that I have considered changing the direction of my comic Youth in Asia to be more humorous. Still unsure about it. I know it would bring in more readers, but I dunno if it's the way I want to go. But I know it would be a lot of fun. I actually met Ben Edlund at Comic Con this year. Super nice guy. I didn't expect a comic book creator who has such a cult fan following to be so genuine and funny. He drew me a Tick head in my sketchbook and signed my copy of The Complete Edlund. I also gave him a copy of Fuzzyface, which sort of falls into the humor genre, although it's a horror-omedy.
In all, I have to give this story a deserving grade. I wanted to give it a funny hardcore grade, but I am seriously lacking on ideas for that right now. So, with last weekend, or the weekend before that, I watched TNA's HardCORE Justice ppv. The main event was scheduled to be Rob Van Dam against Jerry Lynn. But Lynn hurt his back while training so in stepped, the Suicidal, Homicidal, Genocidal Maniac known the world over, as Sabu. Sabu is a step slower than he used to be and the match was not as face paced as their wars in the past had been. But it still lived up to the memories. Sabu, spring boarding off the top rope into the crowd in pursuit of Van Dam, all the while Bill Alphonso lead the cheers in both directions. Sabu even hit a second rope spring board DDT, and a Super Arabian Face Buster. It was classic in every sense of the word. But in the end it was Sabu missing an Atomic Arabian Skull Crusher, where he went through a table. Van Dam capitalized hitting the Five Star Frog Splash and the match went home. These two men have had "respect" matches, stretcher matches, and World Television Title matches, but there was still gas in their tanks. And that gas was fucking combustible.