We’ve seen a glimpse of Peter Serafinowicz in the weirdly textured super-suit. We’ve heard from creator Ben Edlund about why he’s coming back to his signature creation. Now, we’re getting a look at Arthur, the main villain and some other heroes in Amazon’s new Tick series. It all looks goofy as heck.
Images released this week give us a our first look at Griffin Newman as meek accountant Arthur, as well as Jackie Earl Haley as The Terror, the big bad in the upcoming Tick show. The new big, blue guy’s new costume looks a lot more foreboding, insectoid and parasitic.
The pictures were accompanied by a statement from Edlund:
This has been a labour of love for Amazon, Sony, and all of us. The only way for this to have value was if we found a wholly new expression of ‘The Tick’ and Arthur’s story in live-action, and I think we’re on to something! Visually and thematically this new ‘Tick’ lives in the textures and rhetoric of today’s superhero saturation tsunami — and for it to be something you want to watch for hours, it needed to find its way to a story with heart and stakes, as well as absurdism. Is it a radically new hybrid of humour and super heroic action with characters you will care desperately about? YES! Yes it is.
That sentiment echoes sentiments Edlund out out in my chat with him during Comic-Con:
The words ‘continuity’ and ‘The Tick’ don’t even go together [Edlund laughs loudly]. I’ve always read them as jokey standalones or meta-textual riffs on superhero genre pillars. That’s great. You can improvise off of that. For you to tell me, “No, there’s an actual theme here…”
Edlund: It’s a radical shift. It does a couple of things. One thing it takes us from being only the joker at the corner and puts us into the same pool [as other superhero adaptations]. And it makes the job of making fun of it more challenging because we’ve got skin in that game.
Right. You’ve got to walk the tightrope.
Edlund: In a sense. Whereas before, in the live action we shirked action because we weren’t obligated to do all of it. With this, our scope and our effects, and what little action we can show, that’s designed to be competitive. It’s funnier. Before, if you remember, the biggest fight we ever had was a camera shot on Arthur, and [people getting thrown across the frame], and it was not a fight. [laughs] That’s not the route. We are trying to wear the skin of the beast.
We’ll see if it works once The Tick premieres in the US on Amazon on August 19.