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“Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings; it is a totally coherent system bound to context and behavior.” — Kenneth L. Pike

The web has accents. So should our design systems.

Design Systems as Living Languages

Design systems aren’t component libraries—they’re living languages. Tokens are phonemes, components are words, patterns are phrases, layouts are sentences. The conversations we build with users become the stories our products tell.

But here’s what we’ve forgotten: the more fluently a language is spoken, the more accents it can support without losing meaning. English in Scotland differs from English in Sydney, yet both are unmistakably English. The language adapts to context while preserving core meaning. This couldn’t be more obvious to me, a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, who learned English with an American accent, and lives in Sydney.

Our design systems must work the same way. Rigid adherence to visual rules creates brittle systems that break under contextual pressure. Fluent systems bend without breaking.

Consistency becomes a prison

The promise of design systems was simple: consistent components would accelerate development and unify experiences. But as systems matured and products grew more complex, that promise has become a prison. Teams file “exception” requests by the hundreds. Products launch with workarounds instead of system components. Designers spend more time defending consistency than solving user problems.

Our design systems must learn to speak dialects.

A design dialect is a systematic adaptation of a design system that maintains core principles while developing new patterns for specific contexts. Unlike one-off customizations or brand themes, dialects preserve the system’s essential grammar while expanding its vocabulary to serve different users, environments, or constraints.

When Perfect Consistency Fails

At Booking.com, I learned this lesson the hard way. We A/B-tested everything—color, copy, button shapes, even logo colors. As a professional with a graphic design education and experience building brand style guides, I found this shocking. While everyone fell in love with Airbnb’s pristine design system, Booking grew into a giant without ever considering visual consistency.  

The chaos taught me something profound: consistency isn’t ROI; solved problems are.

At Shopify. Polaris () was our crown jewel—a mature design language perfect for merchants on laptops. As a product team, we were expected to adopt Polaris as-is. Then my fulfillment team hit an “Oh, Ship!” moment, as we faced the challenge of building an app for warehouse pickers using our interface on shared, battered Android scanners in dim aisles, wearing thick gloves, scanning dozens of items per minute, many with limited levels of English understanding.

Task completion with standard Polaris: 0%.

Every component that worked beautifully for merchants failed completely for pickers. White backgrounds created glare. 44px tap targets were invisible to gloved fingers. Sentence-case labels took too long to parse. Multi-step flows confused non-native speakers.

We faced a choice: abandon Polaris entirely, or teach it to speak warehouse.

The Birth of a Dialect

We chose evolution over revolution. Working within Polaris’s core principles—clarity, efficiency, consistency—we developed what we now call a design dialect:

Constraint	Fluent Move	Rationale
Glare & low light	Dark surfaces + light text	Reduce glare on low-DPI screens
Gloves & haste	90px tap targets (~2cm)	Accommodate thick gloves
Multilingual	Single-task screens, plain language	Reduce cognitive load

Result: Task completion jumped from 0% to 100%. Onboarding time dropped from three weeks to one shift.

This wasn’t customization or theming—this was a dialect: a systematic adaptation that maintained Polaris’s core grammar while developing new vocabulary for a specific context. Polaris hadn’t failed; it had learned to speak warehouse.

The Flexibility Framework

At Atlassian, working on the Jira platform—itself a system within the larger Atlassian system—I pushed for formalizing this insight. With dozens of products sharing a design language across different codebases, we needed systematic flexibility so we built directly into our ways of working. The old model—exception requests and special approvals—was failing at scale.

We developed the Flexibility Framework to help designers define how flexible they wanted their components to be:

Tier	Action	Ownership
Consistent	Adopt unchanged	Platform locks design + code
Opinionated	Adapt within bounds	Platform provides smart defaults, products customize
Flexible	Extend freely	Platform defines behavior, products own presentation

During a navigation redesign, we tiered every element. Logo and global search stayed Consistent. Breadcrumbs and contextual actions became Flexible. Product teams could immediately see where innovation was welcome and where consistency mattered.

The Decision Ladder

Flexibility needs boundaries. We created a simple ladder for evaluating when rules should bend:

Good: Ship with existing system components. Fast, consistent, proven.

Better: Stretch a component slightly. Document the change. Contribute improvements back to the system for all to use.

Best: Prototype the ideal experience first. If user testing validates the benefit, update the system to support it.

The key question: “Which option lets users succeed fastest?”

Rules are tools, not relics.

Unity Beats Uniformity

Gmail, Drive, and Maps are unmistakably Google—yet each speaks with its own accent. They achieve unity through shared principles, not cloned components. One extra week of debate over button color costs roughly $30K in engineer time.

Unity is a brand outcome; fluency is a user outcome. When the two clash, side with the user.

Governance Without Gates

How do you maintain coherence while enabling dialects? Treat your system like a living vocabulary:

Document every deviation – e.g., dialects/warehouse.md with before/after screenshots and rationale.

Promote shared patterns – when three teams adopt a dialect independently, review it for core inclusion.

Deprecate with context – retire old idioms via flags and migration notes, never a big-bang purge.

A living dictionary scales better than a frozen rulebook.

Start Small: Your First Dialect

Ready to introduce dialects? Start with one broken experience:

This week: Find one user flow where perfect consistency blocks task completion. Could be mobile users struggling with desktop-sized components, or accessibility needs your standard patterns don’t address.

Document the context: What makes standard patterns fail here? Environmental constraints? User capabilities? Task urgency?

Design one systematic change: Focus on behavior over aesthetics. If gloves are the problem, bigger targets aren’t “”breaking the system””—they’re serving the user. Earn the variations and make them intentional.

Test and measure: Does the change improve task completion? Time to productivity? User satisfaction?

Show the savings: If that dialect frees even half a sprint, fluency has paid for itself.

Beyond the Component Library

We’re not managing design systems anymore—we’re cultivating design languages. Languages that grow with their speakers. Languages that develop accents without losing meaning. Languages that serve human needs over aesthetic ideals.

The warehouse workers who went from 0% to 100% task completion didn’t care that our buttons broke the style guide. They cared that the buttons finally worked.

Your users feel the same way. Give your system permission to speak their language.

Today’s web is not always an amiable place. Sites greet you with a popover that demands assent to their cookie policy, and leave you with Taboola ads promising “One Weird Trick!” to cure your ailments. Social media sites are tuned for engagement, and few things are more engaging than a fight. Today it seems that people want to quarrel; I have seen flame wars among birders.  

These tensions are often at odds with a site’s goals. If we are providing support and advice to customers, we don’t want those customers to wrangle with each other. If we offer news about the latest research, we want readers to feel at ease; if we promote upcoming marches, we want our core supporters to feel comfortable and we want curious newcomers to feel welcome. 

In a study for a conference on the History of the Web, I looked to the origins of Computer Science in Vienna (1928-1934)  for a case study of the importance of amiability in a research community and the disastrous consequences of its loss. That story has interesting implications for web environments that promote amiable interaction among disparate, difficult (and sometimes disagreeable) people.

The Vienna Circle

Though people had been thinking about calculating engines and thinking machines from antiquity, Computing really got going in Depression-era Vienna.  The people who worked out the theory had no interest in building machines; they wanted to puzzle out the limits of reason in the absence of divine authority. If we could not rely on God or Aristotle to tell us how to think, could we instead build arguments that were self-contained and demonstrably correct? Can we be sure that mathematics is consistent? Are there things that are true but that cannot be expressed in language? 

The core ideas were worked out in the weekly meetings (Thursdays at 6) of a group remembered as the Vienna Circle. They got together in the office of Professor Moritz Schlick at the University of Vienna to discuss problems in philosophy, math, and language. The intersection of physics and philosophy had long been a specialty of this Vienna department, and this work had placed them among the world leaders.  Schlick’s colleague Hans Hahn was a central participant, and by 1928 Hahn brought along his graduate students Karl Menger and Kurt Gödel. Other frequent participants included philosopher Rudolf Carnap, psychologist Karl Popper, economist Ludwig von Mises (brought by his brother Frederick, a physicist),  graphic designer Otto Neurath (inventor of infographics), and architect Josef Frank (brought by his physicist brother, Phillip).  Out-of-town visitors often joined, including the young Johnny von Neumann, Alfred Tarski, and the irascible Ludwig Wittgenstein. 

When Schlick’s office grew too dim, participants adjourned to a nearby café for additional discussion with an even larger circle of participants.  This convivial circle was far from unique.  An intersecting circle–Neurath, von Mises, Oskar Morgenstern–established the Austrian School of free-market economics. There were theatrical circles (Peter Lorre, Hedy Lamarr, Max Reinhardt), and literary circles. The café was where things happened.

The interdisciplinarity of the group posed real challenges of temperament and understanding. Personalities were often a challenge. Gödel was convinced people were trying to poison him. Architect Josef Frank depended on contracts for public housing, which Mises opposed as wasteful. Wittgenstein’s temper had lost him his job as a secondary school teacher, and for some of these years he maintained a detailed list of whom he was willing to meet. Neurath was eager to detect muddled thinking and would interrupt a speaker with a shouted “Metaphysics!” The continuing amity of these meetings was facilitated by the personality of their leader, Moritz Schlick, who would be remembered as notably adept in keeping disagreements from becoming quarrels.

In the Café

The Viennese café of this era was long remembered as a particularly good place to argue with your friends, to read, and to write. Built to serve an imperial capital, the cafés found themselves with too much space and too few customers now that the Empire was gone. There was no need to turn tables: a café could only survive by coaxing customers to linger. Perhaps they would order another coffee, or one of their friends might drop by. One could play chess, or billiards, or read newspapers from abroad. Coffee was invariably served with a glass of purified spring water, still a novelty in an era in which most water was still unsafe to drink. That water glass would be refilled indefinitely. 

In the basement of one café, the poet Jura Soyfer staged “The End Of The World,” a musical comedy in which Professor Peep has discovered a comet heading for earth.

Prof. Peep: The comet is going to destroy everybody!

Hitler:  Destroying everybody is my business.

Of course, coffee can be prepared in many ways, and the Viennese café developed a broad vocabulary to represent precisely how one preferred to drink it: melange, Einspänner, Brauner, Schwarzer, Kapuziner. This extensive customization, with correspondingly esoteric conventions of service, established the café as a comfortable and personal third space, a neutral ground in which anyone who could afford a coffee would be welcome. Viennese of this era were fastidious in their use of personal titles, of which an abundance were in common use. Café waiters greeted regular customers with titles too, but were careful to address their patrons with titles a notch or two greater than they deserved. A graduate student would be Doktor, an unpaid postdoc Professor.  This assurance mattered all the more because so many members of the Circle (and so many other Viennese) came from elsewhere: Carnap from Wuppertal, Gödel from Brno, von Neumann from Budapest. No one was going to make fun of your clothes, mannerisms, or accent. Your friends wouldn’t be bothered by the pram in the hall. Everyone shared a Germanic Austrian literary and philosophical culture, not least those whose ancestors had been Eastern European Jews who knew that culture well, having read all about it in books.

The amiability of the café circle was enhanced by its openness. Because the circle sometimes extended to architects and actors, people could feel less constrained to admit shortfalls in their understanding. It was soon discovered that marble tabletops made a useful surface for pencil sketches, serving all as an improvised and accessible blackboard.

Comedies like “The End Of The World” and fictional newspaper sketches or feuilletons of writers like Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig served as a second defense against disagreeable or churlish behavior. The knowledge that, if one got carried away, a parody of one’s remarks might shortly appear in Neue Freie Presse surely helped Professor Schlick keep matters in hand.

The End Of Red Vienna

Though Austria’s government drifted to the right after the War, Vienna’s city council had been Socialist, dedicated to public housing based on user-centered design, and embracing  ambitious programs of public outreach and adult education. In 1934 the Socialists lost a local election, and this era soon came to its end as the new administration focused on the imagined threat of the International Jewish Conspiracy. Most members of the Circle fled within months: von Neumann to Princeton, Neurath to Holland and Oxford, Popper to New Zealand, Carnap to Chicago. Prof. Schlick was murdered on the steps of the University by a student outraged by his former association with Jews.  Jura Soyfer, who wrote “The End Of The World,” died in Buchenwald.

In 1939, von Neumann finally convinced Gödel to accept a job in Princeton. Gödel was required to pay large fines to emigrate. The officer in charge of these fees would look back on this as the best posting of his career; his name was Eichmann.

Design for Amiability

An impressive literature recounts those discussions and the environment that facilitated the development of computing. How can we design for amiability?  This is not just a matter of choosing rounded typefaces and a cheerful pastel palette. I believe we may identify eight distinct issues that exert design forces in usefully amiable directions.

Seriousness: The Vienna Circle was wrestling with a notoriously difficult book—Wittgenstein’s Tractus Logico-Philosophicus—and a catalog of outstanding open questions in mathematics. They were concerned with consequential problems, not merely scoring points for debating. Constant reminders that the questions you are considering matter—not only that they are consequential or that those opposing you are scoundrels—help promote amity.

Empiricism: The characteristic approach of the Vienna Circle demanded that knowledge be grounded either in direct observation or in rigorous reasoning. Disagreement, when it arose, could be settled by observation or by proof. If neither seemed ready to hand, the matter could not be settled. On these terms, one can seldom if ever demolish an opposing argument, and trolling is pointless.

Abstraction: Disputes grow worse when losing the argument entails lost face or lost jobs. The Vienna Circle’s focus on theory—the limits of mathematics, the capability of language—promoted amity. Without seriousness, abstraction could have been merely academic, but the limits of reason and the consistency of mathematics were clearly serious.

Formality: The punctilious demeanor of waiters and the elaborated rituals of coffee service helped to establish orderly attitudes amongst the argumentative participants. This stands in contrast to the contemptuous sneer that now dominates social media.  

Schlamperei: Members of the Vienna Circle maintained a global correspondence, and they knew their work was at the frontier of research. Still, this was Vienna, at the margins of Europe: old-fashioned, frumpy, and dingy. Many participants came from even more obscure backwaters. Most or all harbored the suspicion that they were really schleppers, and a tinge of the ridiculous helped to moderate tempers. The director of “The End Of The World” had to pass the hat for money to purchase a moon for the set, and thought it was funny enough to write up for publication.

Openness: All sorts of people were involved in discussion, anyone might join in. Each week would bring different participants. Fluid borders reduce tension, and provide opportunities to broaden the range of discussion and the terms of engagement. Low entrance friction was characteristic of the café: anyone could come, and if you came twice you were virtually a regular. Permeable boundaries and café culture made it easier for moderating influences to draw in raconteurs and storytellers to defuse awkward moments, and Vienna’s cafés had no shortage of humorists. Openness counteracts the suspicion that promoters of amiability are exerting censorship.

Parody: The environs of the Circle—the university office and the café—were unmistakably public. There were writers about, some of them renowned humorists. The prospect that one’s bad taste or bad behavior might be ridiculed in print kept discussion within bounds. The sanction of public humiliation, however, was itself made mild by the veneer of fiction; even if you got a little carried away and a character based on you made a splash in some newspaper fiction, it wasn’t the end of the world.

Engagement: The subject matter was important to the participants, but it was esoteric: it did not matter very much to their mothers or their siblings. A small stumble or a minor humiliation could be shrugged off in ways that major media confrontations cannot.

I believe it is notable that this environment was designed to promote amiability through several different voices.  The café waiter flattered each newcomer and served everyone, and also kept out local pickpockets and drunks who would be mere disruptions. Schlick and other regulars kept discussion moving and on track. The fiction writers and raconteurs—perhaps the most peripheral of the participants—kept people in a good mood and reminded them that bad behavior could make anyone ridiculous.  Crucially, each of these voices were human: you could reason with them. Algorithmic or AI moderators, however clever, are seldom perceived as reasonable. The café circles had no central authority or Moderator against whom everyone’s resentments might be focused. Even after the disaster of 1934, what people remembered were those cheerful arguments.

I want to discuss accessibility because it is the most important thing for making websites. Other A List Apart articles give you innovation and insight. This article will give you homework. These are just my personal views, but they’re pretty good.

I want to start off with a couple of statements, and you will agree:

1. Designers are good people. I have never heard a designer say, “I don’t care if somebody can’t read this text”, “Not my fault if somebody can’t use this device”, or “Who cares if this is confusing?”
2. Some designs exclude people. You have seen people unable to read the text on a website or app that somebody designed. You’ve seen people unable to use a physical device that somebody has designed. You’ve seen people utterly bamboozled while trying to use a service that somebody designed.

So what?

The first question is, “Is this life-or-death stuff?” The answer is, “Yes.” In my favorite essay, This Is All There Is, Aral Balkan makes the point that pretty much everything that we design can affect life events and death events. Aral gives the example of how even a straightforward bus timetable app can affect life and death events, if we design it badly:

• somebody might miss a life event, such as their daughter’s fifth birthday party; or
• somebody might miss a death event, such as the chance to say goodbye to a dying grandmother.

The next—and frustrating—question is, “Why do some designs still exclude people?” After all, we know that:

• not everybody can see perfectly;
• not everybody can hear perfectly;
• not everybody thinks the same way; and
• not everybody moves the same way.

I think the answer is that there’s too much to recall. Consider, if you will, the wide variety of topics that A List Apart articles cover. Designers are expected to remember all of that guidance, plus all of the accessibility guidance, plus so much more. It is too much.

Recognizing accessibility issues while designing

I’d like to point toward one possible solution, starting from Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design. These are from the mid-1990s, and—although there’s a good chance that you, gentle reader, are a lot younger than that—please bear with me. 

Seeing as the problem is that there’s too much to recall, I want to look at heuristic № 6, “Recognition rather than Recall.” Jakob Nielsen said that for users, information required to use the design should be visible or easily retrievable when needed. I suggest we tweak that to make life easier for designers. Let’s say that the information required to produce the design should be visible or easily retrievable when needed. In other words, let’s make it easier to recognise accessibility issues while we’re designing.

How are we going to do that? I really like the book A Web for Everyone—Designing Accessible User Experiences by Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery. I really like this book not only because it includes a quote from me—actually two quotes, but I don’t like to boast—but because it includes personas that are perfect for helping us to recognise accessibility issues. That’s the good news. The even better news is that these personas are available now for free on the companion website to the book What Every Engineer Should Know About Digital Accessibility, again by Sarah Horton, with David Sloan this time.

Meet your users

I’m going to introduce you to these personas now:

• Vishnu, an engineer and global citizen with low vision says, “I want to be on the same level as everyone else”, “If I can adjust my screen, I can read comfortably”, and, “Translating in my head is easier with simpler sentences.”
• Trevor, a high school student with autism, says, “I like consistent, familiar places on the web”, “When I can learn the pattern, I can find my way”, and, “Reading is hard for me”.
• Steven, a deaf graphic artist and American Sign Language speaker, says, “My only disability is that everyone doesn’t sign”, and, “Without captions, it’s meaningless to me”.
• Maria, a bilingual community health worker, says, “I love this. It’s all here … when I can find it”, “When a site is confusing, I just leave”—fair enough, Maria!—and, “When I hear and see it, health information makes more sense”.
• Lea, an editor living with fatigue and pain, says, “No one gets that this really is a disability”, “Don’t make me work so hard”—please do not bombard this lady with drop-down lists—and, “Links at the top of the page make navigation easier for me”.
• Jacob, a blind paralegal and a bit of a geek, says, “The right technology lets me do anything”, and “This makes it possible to do my job”.
• Emily, who has cerebral palsy and is living independently, says, “I want to do everything for myself”, “Simpler screens are easier screens”—hell yeah, Emily!—and, “Tell me what I need in advance”.
• Carol, a grandmother with macular degeneration which affects her sight, says, “My grandkids are dragging me into the world of technology”, “I don’t understand what the screen is saying”, and, “Why can’t the text be just a little bit larger?”

I want to throw one more persona at you now, because, well, A List Apart readers are overachievers. One of my favorite authors, Cennydd Bowles—who literally wrote the book on Future Ethics—says to create Personas Non Grata. In other words, every time we design something, we have to think about what a bad guy could do with that thing, and whom that might affect.

To actually use these personas while designing, I like what Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher in Design for Real Life call the Designated Dissenter: for each project that you work on, one of your teams should be responsible for asking, “Will this work for Vishnu?”, “How’s Trevor going to get on with this?”, and so on. 

Then, once you’ve used the personas to recognise the accessibility issues, you can look up the guidelines for whichever platforms you’re designing for: 

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2
• Accessibility designing — Material Design 3
• Accessibility — Windows apps
• Accessibility | Apple Developer Documentation
• Check your interface for accessibility (Ubuntu)

Your mission, should you choose to accept it

I told you in the introduction of this article that I would give you homework. You thought I was joking. So, here’s your homework: I want you to grab the personas from the Know About Accessibility website, and use them throughout every design project to help you recognise accessibility issues while you work—and reclaim design for everyone.

NOTE: This article is based on “Recognise,” my five-minute presentation from Interaction Design Association (IxDA) Dublin’s Defuse (Design for Use) event in 2025.

For all the glamour, fame, and cultural milestones Hollywood is known for, there is also a darker legacy shaped by tragedy, scandal, and unresolved controversy. These are incidents that exposed dangerous working conditions, criminal cases, public cover-up accusations, or events that permanently changed how the industry operated.

The loss itself was devastating for most of these cases, although the surrounding questions, legal fallout, or ethical failures kept the stories alive for decades. They left lasting marks on Hollywood’s reputation, exposing the darker side behind one of entertainment’s most powerful industries.

The post 15 Tragedies Staining Hollywood’s History appeared first on Den of Geek.

In the premiere episode of the best superhero series on Prime Video, a spaceship falls on a father, crushing him in front of his young son. Out of the ship stumbles the members of the Earth’s greatest superhero team, their eyes bleeding because of weaponized syphilis. Before the heroes can recover, the supervillain arrives to shoot them in the head—well, only two get shot; the youngest simply has his hands crushed. The heroes murdered, the villain mocks the little boy before flying off, leaving him forever traumatized.

Fans of The Boys might be scratching their heads after reading that description. Something so nasty, so filled with ineffective superheroes must come from Prime Video‘s beloved (until recently) adaptation of the comics by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. Or maybe it’s from the animated series Invincible, which amps up the violence in Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker, and Ryan Ottley’s celebration of all things comics.

But in fact, it comes from the best superhero series ever produced by Amazon: The Tick. Canceled after two seasons and overshadowed by The Boys and Invincible, The Tick had a weird, resilient optimism (despite the scene described above) that’s needed even more today.

Heroes of the City

The death of the Flag Five at the hands of the Terror was just one of many ways that the Prime Video series differed from most depictions of the Tick. Created in 1986 by Ben Edlund for a newsletter distributed by his local comic book shop New England Comics, the Tick has spawned several comic book series, both in color and black and white, a beloved animated series that ran from 1994 to 1996, a short-lived Fox sitcom in 2001, and, finally, the Amazon series that ran for 20 episodes between 2016 and 2019.

The appeal of the Tick is simple. He’s a giant blue guy with nigh-invulnerability and super-strength who is fully committed to the idea of being a superhero. The Tick has no name, no motivation outside of justice, and no enemies besides evil. And ninjas, but they’re more of an annoyance than enemies. He’s joined by his doughy friend Arthur, a timid accountant in a moth suit that makes him look like a bunny. The Tick defends the City, a metropolis populated by heroes and villains.

Fundamentally, The Tick is about how superheroes are silly. Wonderful and cool and compelling, yes. But most of all, silly. The Tick can sometimes go to dark places, with a whole backstory that reveals the Tick’s past as a lunatic in an insane asylum. And the series loves its occasional satire of DC and Marvel, pairing him with Captain Wonder a.k.a. reporter Clark Oppenheimer or with the Running Guy, who is faster than 10 fast men. But the original comics were more interested in laughing with the weirdness of superheroes than laughing at them, so the Tick and Arthur spent time with less-specific oddballs like Paul the Samurai, Chainsaw Vigilante, and the Man-Eating Cow.

The animated series and sitcom retained the same manic energy, even if it added more direct superhero parodies Die Fledermaus and American Maid (renamed Batmanuel and Captain Liberty for the live-action series). Every incarnation of the Tick has been over-the-top, absurd, and utterly optimistic… except for the 2016 series, at least at first.

Big Blue Destiny

On the surface, 2016’s The Tick has everything you’d expect from an adaption of the comics. There’s Peter Serafinowicz as the titular guileless and energetic big blue hero. Griffin Newman plays Arthur as a nervous accountant in a grey moth suit that makes him look like a bunny. They live in an unnamed city, under threat by the villainous Terror (Jackie Earle Haley), and cross paths with other heroes like Overkill (Scott Speiser) and the Superman-styled Superian (Brendan Hines). Arthur’s sister Dot (Valorie Curry, perhaps best known today as Firecracker on The Boys) even appears.

But it takes only a few minutes for the series to establish itself as something very different from what came before, something realistic. We meet Arthur as a depressed young man trying to cover up his mental illness, a steadfast belief that the Terror, who killed his father and members of the Avengers-esque Flag Five 15 years ago, still lives, despite the promise that he’s been long since defeated by Superian. When Arthur gives in to his worst instincts and follows the villain Miss Lint (Yara Martinez) and a group of thugs to a warehouse, he’s intercepted by the Tick, an endless figure of excitement and glee in an otherwise dark world.

In the pilot and the first few episodes, The Tick toys with the idea that Tick is just the manifestation of Arthur’s intrusive thoughts. Yes, Arthur lives in a world with Superian and the Terror, but he’s just a broken man, and the Tick is his psychosis.

Unlikely as the premise is for The Tick, it made sense in 2016. The pilot was directed by Wally Pfister, Christopher Nolan‘s cinematographer, who shot all three entries in the Dark Knight trilogy. The first episodes feel like they’re trying to take the Tick in a similar direction, offering a more believable way to tell a story about a giant blue superhero who says things like, “Crime, nastiness and evil rear their fowl odorous heads in every corner of the globe, and that’s saying something because globes don’t even have corners!”

Pretty quickly, the show did away with that conceit and allowed the Tick to live in the world. However, it never abandoned the mental health aspect. In fact, it expanded to show how not just Arthur, but everyone—Dot, Overkill, even Superian—had some failure haunting them, some sadness they couldn’t shake. Thus the heroism of the Tick is less about his powers and more about his indefatigable commitment to doing good. He’s completely unbothered by disappointment or confusion. For example, when Arthur’s stepdad (Francois Chau) greets the hero by exclaiming, “Look at you,” Tick gleefully doesn’t stop to suss out the meaning. He just responds “Impossible!” and carries on.

The Tick’s embrace of all his weirdness became less a coping mechanism for living in an awful world, and more of a model for making the awful world better.

Going Sane in a Crazy World

Despite its gritty premiere, the final episode of The Tick features a host of superhero tropes. Supervillain the Duke (John Hodgman) has infiltrated the S.H.I.E.L.D. pastiche A.E.G.I.S., undermined the new Flag Five, and sent agents to kill Arthur’s family, all while Superian has an existential crisis on the Moon. Instead of leaping into action, however, Arthur and Dot get overwhelmed by past failures and mistakes, the same feelings of inadequacy that stall Overkill and Miss Lint’s turns toward heroism.

As always, Tick responds to the crisis with a monologue, full of hyperbole and mixed metaphors. But this time, there’s something truly inspirational in his garbled words. “The truth about the truth is that it’s a choice,” he declares. “Choose love or choose fear. Everything else is up to destiny.”

It’s a silly statement, to be sure, and the show recognizes the self-help cliches in Tick’s speech, just as it does the purple prose he usually spouts. But in that moment of self-doubt and despair, anything positive seems silly. Moreover, the fact that Tick says it with such sincerity, without even the hint of apologizing for who he is, becomes inspirational. As he’s done from the first episode, Tick invites Arthur to be who he is: not a broken man who copes with his trauma by dressing up like a moth/bunny, but a human who has both experienced hurt and makes weird, wonderful choices.

The finale of The Tick plays even better now, in the shadow of the finale of The Boys. The Boys underscored its central point about the inherently empty and pathetic pursuit of power (whether in the real or fictional White House), but it couldn’t make the switch from outrageous edgy humor to genuine human emotion, no matter how much Homelander offered to degrade himself.

By the end of its run, The Tick also turned its superhero tropes into something relevant, by reminding the viewers that there’s no such thing as normal, no such thing as a broken person, just a bunch of freaks who will make the world a better place when they they let Destiny get all up in their puppets.

The Tick is streaming in its entirety on Prime Video.

The post The Triumph of The Tick, Amazon’s Forgotten Superhero Series appeared first on Den of Geek.

When a show runs for several seasons, we can consider quite a few of them a success. After all, no show gets renewed out of pity; it needs to be making money to justify the spot. And yet, throughout television’s history, there are shows that aren’t even remembered today but were hugely popular before.

If a show gets cancelled after one season, it is expected that it won’t penetrate the general culture discourse. But after five seasons? Eight, in some cases? That’s nearly a decade of content people consume and don’t even remember. These are the shows that are strangely forgotten today.

The post 15 Popular Shows We’ve Never Heard Anyone Mention appeared first on Den of Geek.

In the premiere episode of the best superhero series on Prime Video, a spaceship falls on a father, crushing him in front of his young son. Out of the ship stumbles the members of the Earth’s greatest superhero team, their eyes bleeding because of weaponized syphilis. Before the heroes can recover, the supervillain arrives to shoot them in the head—well, only two get shot; the youngest simply has his hands crushed. The heroes murdered, the villain mocks the little boy before flying off, leaving him forever traumatized.

Fans of The Boys might be scratching their heads after reading that description. Something so nasty, so filled with ineffective superheroes must come from Prime Video‘s beloved (until recently) adaptation of the comics by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. Or maybe it’s from the animated series Invincible, which amps up the violence in Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker, and Ryan Ottley’s celebration of all things comics.

But in fact, it comes from the best superhero series ever produced by Amazon: The Tick. Canceled after two seasons and overshadowed by The Boys and Invincible, The Tick had a weird, resilient optimism (despite the scene described above) that’s needed even more today.

Heroes of the City

The death of the Flag Five at the hands of the Terror was just one of many ways that the Prime Video series differed from most depictions of the Tick. Created in 1986 by Ben Edlund for a newsletter distributed by his local comic book shop New England Comics, the Tick has spawned several comic book series, both in color and black and white, a beloved animated series that ran from 1994 to 1996, a short-lived Fox sitcom in 2001, and, finally, the Amazon series that ran for 20 episodes between 2016 and 2019.

The appeal of the Tick is simple. He’s a giant blue guy with nigh-invulnerability and super-strength who is fully committed to the idea of being a superhero. The Tick has no name, no motivation outside of justice, and no enemies besides evil. And ninjas, but they’re more of an annoyance than enemies. He’s joined by his doughy friend Arthur, a timid accountant in a moth suit that makes him look like a bunny. The Tick defends the City, a metropolis populated by heroes and villains.

Fundamentally, The Tick is about how superheroes are silly. Wonderful and cool and compelling, yes. But most of all, silly. The Tick can sometimes go to dark places, with a whole backstory that reveals the Tick’s past as a lunatic in an insane asylum. And the series loves its occasional satire of DC and Marvel, pairing him with Captain Wonder a.k.a. reporter Clark Oppenheimer or with the Running Guy, who is faster than 10 fast men. But the original comics were more interested in laughing with the weirdness of superheroes than laughing at them, so the Tick and Arthur spent time with less-specific oddballs like Paul the Samurai, Chainsaw Vigilante, and the Man-Eating Cow.

The animated series and sitcom retained the same manic energy, even if it added more direct superhero parodies Die Fledermaus and American Maid (renamed Batmanuel and Captain Liberty for the live-action series). Every incarnation of the Tick has been over-the-top, absurd, and utterly optimistic… except for the 2016 series, at least at first.

Big Blue Destiny

On the surface, 2016’s The Tick has everything you’d expect from an adaption of the comics. There’s Peter Serafinowicz as the titular guileless and energetic big blue hero. Griffin Newman plays Arthur as a nervous accountant in a grey moth suit that makes him look like a bunny. They live in an unnamed city, under threat by the villainous Terror (Jackie Earle Haley), and cross paths with other heroes like Overkill (Scott Speiser) and the Superman-styled Superian (Brendan Hines). Arthur’s sister Dot (Valorie Curry, perhaps best known today as Firecracker on The Boys) even appears.

But it takes only a few minutes for the series to establish itself as something very different from what came before, something realistic. We meet Arthur as a depressed young man trying to cover up his mental illness, a steadfast belief that the Terror, who killed his father and members of the Avengers-esque Flag Five 15 years ago, still lives, despite the promise that he’s been long since defeated by Superian. When Arthur gives in to his worst instincts and follows the villain Miss Lint (Yara Martinez) and a group of thugs to a warehouse, he’s intercepted by the Tick, an endless figure of excitement and glee in an otherwise dark world.

In the pilot and the first few episodes, The Tick toys with the idea that Tick is just the manifestation of Arthur’s intrusive thoughts. Yes, Arthur lives in a world with Superian and the Terror, but he’s just a broken man, and the Tick is his psychosis.

Unlikely as the premise is for The Tick, it made sense in 2016. The pilot was directed by Wally Pfister, Christopher Nolan‘s cinematographer, who shot all three entries in the Dark Knight trilogy. The first episodes feel like they’re trying to take the Tick in a similar direction, offering a more believable way to tell a story about a giant blue superhero who says things like, “Crime, nastiness and evil rear their fowl odorous heads in every corner of the globe, and that’s saying something because globes don’t even have corners!”

Pretty quickly, the show did away with that conceit and allowed the Tick to live in the world. However, it never abandoned the mental health aspect. In fact, it expanded to show how not just Arthur, but everyone—Dot, Overkill, even Superian—had some failure haunting them, some sadness they couldn’t shake. Thus the heroism of the Tick is less about his powers and more about his indefatigable commitment to doing good. He’s completely unbothered by disappointment or confusion. For example, when Arthur’s stepdad (Francois Chau) greets the hero by exclaiming, “Look at you,” Tick gleefully doesn’t stop to suss out the meaning. He just responds “Impossible!” and carries on.

The Tick’s embrace of all his weirdness became less a coping mechanism for living in an awful world, and more of a model for making the awful world better.

Going Sane in a Crazy World

Despite its gritty premiere, the final episode of The Tick features a host of superhero tropes. Supervillain the Duke (John Hodgman) has infiltrated the S.H.I.E.L.D. pastiche A.E.G.I.S., undermined the new Flag Five, and sent agents to kill Arthur’s family, all while Superian has an existential crisis on the Moon. Instead of leaping into action, however, Arthur and Dot get overwhelmed by past failures and mistakes, the same feelings of inadequacy that stall Overkill and Miss Lint’s turns toward heroism.

As always, Tick responds to the crisis with a monologue, full of hyperbole and mixed metaphors. But this time, there’s something truly inspirational in his garbled words. “The truth about the truth is that it’s a choice,” he declares. “Choose love or choose fear. Everything else is up to destiny.”

It’s a silly statement, to be sure, and the show recognizes the self-help cliches in Tick’s speech, just as it does the purple prose he usually spouts. But in that moment of self-doubt and despair, anything positive seems silly. Moreover, the fact that Tick says it with such sincerity, without even the hint of apologizing for who he is, becomes inspirational. As he’s done from the first episode, Tick invites Arthur to be who he is: not a broken man who copes with his trauma by dressing up like a moth/bunny, but a human who has both experienced hurt and makes weird, wonderful choices.

The finale of The Tick plays even better now, in the shadow of the finale of The Boys. The Boys underscored its central point about the inherently empty and pathetic pursuit of power (whether in the real or fictional White House), but it couldn’t make the switch from outrageous edgy humor to genuine human emotion, no matter how much Homelander offered to degrade himself.

By the end of its run, The Tick also turned its superhero tropes into something relevant, by reminding the viewers that there’s no such thing as normal, no such thing as a broken person, just a bunch of freaks who will make the world a better place when they they let Destiny get all up in their puppets.

The Tick is streaming in its entirety on Prime Video.

The post The Triumph of The Tick, Amazon’s Forgotten Superhero Series appeared first on Den of Geek.

Dungeons & Dragons is the undisputed king when it comes to TTRPGs, there’s no denying that. There is also nothing wrong with it either, since it can be a lot of fun to play. The 5.5 version of the rules have made the game both approachable and tactical, with each combat encounter and dungeon crawl telling its own story.

After many years of playing the game, however, a change is needed. You could be looking for a new system for your next campaign, or just for a couple of one-shots to shake things up. No matter your reasoning, if you want something new, these are the TTRPGs that you have to try at least once.

The post 10 D&D-Style Games for Modern Geeks to Enjoy appeared first on Den of Geek.

In the premiere episode of the best superhero series on Prime Video, a spaceship falls on a father, crushing him in front of his young son. Out of the ship stumbles the members of the Earth’s greatest superhero team, their eyes bleeding because of weaponized syphilis. Before the heroes can recover, the supervillain arrives to shoot them in the head—well, only two get shot; the youngest simply has his hands crushed. The heroes murdered, the villain mocks the little boy before flying off, leaving him forever traumatized.

Fans of The Boys might be scratching their heads after reading that description. Something so nasty, so filled with ineffective superheroes must come from Prime Video‘s beloved (until recently) adaptation of the comics by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. Or maybe it’s from the animated series Invincible, which amps up the violence in Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker, and Ryan Ottley’s celebration of all things comics.

But in fact, it comes from the best superhero series ever produced by Amazon: The Tick. Canceled after two seasons and overshadowed by The Boys and Invincible, The Tick had a weird, resilient optimism (despite the scene described above) that’s needed even more today.

Heroes of the City

The death of the Flag Five at the hands of the Terror was just one of many ways that the Prime Video series differed from most depictions of the Tick. Created in 1986 by Ben Edlund for a newsletter distributed by his local comic book shop New England Comics, the Tick has spawned several comic book series, both in color and black and white, a beloved animated series that ran from 1994 to 1996, a short-lived Fox sitcom in 2001, and, finally, the Amazon series that ran for 20 episodes between 2016 and 2019.

The appeal of the Tick is simple. He’s a giant blue guy with nigh-invulnerability and super-strength who is fully committed to the idea of being a superhero. The Tick has no name, no motivation outside of justice, and no enemies besides evil. And ninjas, but they’re more of an annoyance than enemies. He’s joined by his doughy friend Arthur, a timid accountant in a moth suit that makes him look like a bunny. The Tick defends the City, a metropolis populated by heroes and villains.

Fundamentally, The Tick is about how superheroes are silly. Wonderful and cool and compelling, yes. But most of all, silly. The Tick can sometimes go to dark places, with a whole backstory that reveals the Tick’s past as a lunatic in an insane asylum. And the series loves its occasional satire of DC and Marvel, pairing him with Captain Wonder a.k.a. reporter Clark Oppenheimer or with the Running Guy, who is faster than 10 fast men. But the original comics were more interested in laughing with the weirdness of superheroes than laughing at them, so the Tick and Arthur spent time with less-specific oddballs like Paul the Samurai, Chainsaw Vigilante, and the Man-Eating Cow.

The animated series and sitcom retained the same manic energy, even if it added more direct superhero parodies Die Fledermaus and American Maid (renamed Batmanuel and Captain Liberty for the live-action series). Every incarnation of the Tick has been over-the-top, absurd, and utterly optimistic… except for the 2016 series, at least at first.

Big Blue Destiny

On the surface, 2016’s The Tick has everything you’d expect from an adaption of the comics. There’s Peter Serafinowicz as the titular guileless and energetic big blue hero. Griffin Newman plays Arthur as a nervous accountant in a grey moth suit that makes him look like a bunny. They live in an unnamed city, under threat by the villainous Terror (Jackie Earle Haley), and cross paths with other heroes like Overkill (Scott Speiser) and the Superman-styled Superian (Brendan Hines). Arthur’s sister Dot (Valorie Curry, perhaps best known today as Firecracker on The Boys) even appears.

But it takes only a few minutes for the series to establish itself as something very different from what came before, something realistic. We meet Arthur as a depressed young man trying to cover up his mental illness, a steadfast belief that the Terror, who killed his father and members of the Avengers-esque Flag Five 15 years ago, still lives, despite the promise that he’s been long since defeated by Superian. When Arthur gives in to his worst instincts and follows the villain Miss Lint (Yara Martinez) and a group of thugs to a warehouse, he’s intercepted by the Tick, an endless figure of excitement and glee in an otherwise dark world.

In the pilot and the first few episodes, The Tick toys with the idea that Tick is just the manifestation of Arthur’s intrusive thoughts. Yes, Arthur lives in a world with Superian and the Terror, but he’s just a broken man, and the Tick is his psychosis.

Unlikely as the premise is for The Tick, it made sense in 2016. The pilot was directed by Wally Pfister, Christopher Nolan‘s cinematographer, who shot all three entries in the Dark Knight trilogy. The first episodes feel like they’re trying to take the Tick in a similar direction, offering a more believable way to tell a story about a giant blue superhero who says things like, “Crime, nastiness and evil rear their fowl odorous heads in every corner of the globe, and that’s saying something because globes don’t even have corners!”

Pretty quickly, the show did away with that conceit and allowed the Tick to live in the world. However, it never abandoned the mental health aspect. In fact, it expanded to show how not just Arthur, but everyone—Dot, Overkill, even Superian—had some failure haunting them, some sadness they couldn’t shake. Thus the heroism of the Tick is less about his powers and more about his indefatigable commitment to doing good. He’s completely unbothered by disappointment or confusion. For example, when Arthur’s stepdad (Francois Chau) greets the hero by exclaiming, “Look at you,” Tick gleefully doesn’t stop to suss out the meaning. He just responds “Impossible!” and carries on.

The Tick’s embrace of all his weirdness became less a coping mechanism for living in an awful world, and more of a model for making the awful world better.

Going Sane in a Crazy World

Despite its gritty premiere, the final episode of The Tick features a host of superhero tropes. Supervillain the Duke (John Hodgman) has infiltrated the S.H.I.E.L.D. pastiche A.E.G.I.S., undermined the new Flag Five, and sent agents to kill Arthur’s family, all while Superian has an existential crisis on the Moon. Instead of leaping into action, however, Arthur and Dot get overwhelmed by past failures and mistakes, the same feelings of inadequacy that stall Overkill and Miss Lint’s turns toward heroism.

As always, Tick responds to the crisis with a monologue, full of hyperbole and mixed metaphors. But this time, there’s something truly inspirational in his garbled words. “The truth about the truth is that it’s a choice,” he declares. “Choose love or choose fear. Everything else is up to destiny.”

It’s a silly statement, to be sure, and the show recognizes the self-help cliches in Tick’s speech, just as it does the purple prose he usually spouts. But in that moment of self-doubt and despair, anything positive seems silly. Moreover, the fact that Tick says it with such sincerity, without even the hint of apologizing for who he is, becomes inspirational. As he’s done from the first episode, Tick invites Arthur to be who he is: not a broken man who copes with his trauma by dressing up like a moth/bunny, but a human who has both experienced hurt and makes weird, wonderful choices.

The finale of The Tick plays even better now, in the shadow of the finale of The Boys. The Boys underscored its central point about the inherently empty and pathetic pursuit of power (whether in the real or fictional White House), but it couldn’t make the switch from outrageous edgy humor to genuine human emotion, no matter how much Homelander offered to degrade himself.

By the end of its run, The Tick also turned its superhero tropes into something relevant, by reminding the viewers that there’s no such thing as normal, no such thing as a broken person, just a bunch of freaks who will make the world a better place when they they let Destiny get all up in their puppets.

The Tick is streaming in its entirety on Prime Video.

The post The Triumph of The Tick, Amazon’s Forgotten Superhero Series appeared first on Den of Geek.

We love shows that push limits, particularly on how to tell stories, not to mention what’s ok to tell. Adult content should, after all, be mature rather than forbidden. We ask creators to give us originality, but how do we behave once that creativity arrives at our TV screens?

Embarrassment is usually the first reaction, particularly when we weren’t expecting it. These following shows aren’t necessarily bad by any means, but they make regular households uncomfortable. Be sure to check if you’re alone before tuning into them, unless you’re prepared to answer exactly what you’re watching.

The post 15 Shows That Feel Embarrassing to Watch With Other People in the Room appeared first on Den of Geek.

In the premiere episode of the best superhero series on Prime Video, a spaceship falls on a father, crushing him in front of his young son. Out of the ship stumbles the members of the Earth’s greatest superhero team, their eyes bleeding because of weaponized syphilis. Before the heroes can recover, the supervillain arrives to shoot them in the head—well, only two get shot; the youngest simply has his hands crushed. The heroes murdered, the villain mocks the little boy before flying off, leaving him forever traumatized.

Fans of The Boys might be scratching their heads after reading that description. Something so nasty, so filled with ineffective superheroes must come from Prime Video‘s beloved (until recently) adaptation of the comics by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. Or maybe it’s from the animated series Invincible, which amps up the violence in Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker, and Ryan Ottley’s celebration of all things comics.

But in fact, it comes from the best superhero series ever produced by Amazon: The Tick. Canceled after two seasons and overshadowed by The Boys and Invincible, The Tick had a weird, resilient optimism (despite the scene described above) that’s needed even more today.

Heroes of the City

The death of the Flag Five at the hands of the Terror was just one of many ways that the Prime Video series differed from most depictions of the Tick. Created in 1986 by Ben Edlund for a newsletter distributed by his local comic book shop New England Comics, the Tick has spawned several comic book series, both in color and black and white, a beloved animated series that ran from 1994 to 1996, a short-lived Fox sitcom in 2001, and, finally, the Amazon series that ran for 20 episodes between 2016 and 2019.

The appeal of the Tick is simple. He’s a giant blue guy with nigh-invulnerability and super-strength who is fully committed to the idea of being a superhero. The Tick has no name, no motivation outside of justice, and no enemies besides evil. And ninjas, but they’re more of an annoyance than enemies. He’s joined by his doughy friend Arthur, a timid accountant in a moth suit that makes him look like a bunny. The Tick defends the City, a metropolis populated by heroes and villains.

Fundamentally, The Tick is about how superheroes are silly. Wonderful and cool and compelling, yes. But most of all, silly. The Tick can sometimes go to dark places, with a whole backstory that reveals the Tick’s past as a lunatic in an insane asylum. And the series loves its occasional satire of DC and Marvel, pairing him with Captain Wonder a.k.a. reporter Clark Oppenheimer or with the Running Guy, who is faster than 10 fast men. But the original comics were more interested in laughing with the weirdness of superheroes than laughing at them, so the Tick and Arthur spent time with less-specific oddballs like Paul the Samurai, Chainsaw Vigilante, and the Man-Eating Cow.

The animated series and sitcom retained the same manic energy, even if it added more direct superhero parodies Die Fledermaus and American Maid (renamed Batmanuel and Captain Liberty for the live-action series). Every incarnation of the Tick has been over-the-top, absurd, and utterly optimistic… except for the 2016 series, at least at first.

Big Blue Destiny

On the surface, 2016’s The Tick has everything you’d expect from an adaption of the comics. There’s Peter Serafinowicz as the titular guileless and energetic big blue hero. Griffin Newman plays Arthur as a nervous accountant in a grey moth suit that makes him look like a bunny. They live in an unnamed city, under threat by the villainous Terror (Jackie Earle Haley), and cross paths with other heroes like Overkill (Scott Speiser) and the Superman-styled Superian (Brendan Hines). Arthur’s sister Dot (Valorie Curry, perhaps best known today as Firecracker on The Boys) even appears.

But it takes only a few minutes for the series to establish itself as something very different from what came before, something realistic. We meet Arthur as a depressed young man trying to cover up his mental illness, a steadfast belief that the Terror, who killed his father and members of the Avengers-esque Flag Five 15 years ago, still lives, despite the promise that he’s been long since defeated by Superian. When Arthur gives in to his worst instincts and follows the villain Miss Lint (Yara Martinez) and a group of thugs to a warehouse, he’s intercepted by the Tick, an endless figure of excitement and glee in an otherwise dark world.

In the pilot and the first few episodes, The Tick toys with the idea that Tick is just the manifestation of Arthur’s intrusive thoughts. Yes, Arthur lives in a world with Superian and the Terror, but he’s just a broken man, and the Tick is his psychosis.

Unlikely as the premise is for The Tick, it made sense in 2016. The pilot was directed by Wally Pfister, Christopher Nolan‘s cinematographer, who shot all three entries in the Dark Knight trilogy. The first episodes feel like they’re trying to take the Tick in a similar direction, offering a more believable way to tell a story about a giant blue superhero who says things like, “Crime, nastiness and evil rear their fowl odorous heads in every corner of the globe, and that’s saying something because globes don’t even have corners!”

Pretty quickly, the show did away with that conceit and allowed the Tick to live in the world. However, it never abandoned the mental health aspect. In fact, it expanded to show how not just Arthur, but everyone—Dot, Overkill, even Superian—had some failure haunting them, some sadness they couldn’t shake. Thus the heroism of the Tick is less about his powers and more about his indefatigable commitment to doing good. He’s completely unbothered by disappointment or confusion. For example, when Arthur’s stepdad (Francois Chau) greets the hero by exclaiming, “Look at you,” Tick gleefully doesn’t stop to suss out the meaning. He just responds “Impossible!” and carries on.

The Tick’s embrace of all his weirdness became less a coping mechanism for living in an awful world, and more of a model for making the awful world better.

Going Sane in a Crazy World

Despite its gritty premiere, the final episode of The Tick features a host of superhero tropes. Supervillain the Duke (John Hodgman) has infiltrated the S.H.I.E.L.D. pastiche A.E.G.I.S., undermined the new Flag Five, and sent agents to kill Arthur’s family, all while Superian has an existential crisis on the Moon. Instead of leaping into action, however, Arthur and Dot get overwhelmed by past failures and mistakes, the same feelings of inadequacy that stall Overkill and Miss Lint’s turns toward heroism.

As always, Tick responds to the crisis with a monologue, full of hyperbole and mixed metaphors. But this time, there’s something truly inspirational in his garbled words. “The truth about the truth is that it’s a choice,” he declares. “Choose love or choose fear. Everything else is up to destiny.”

It’s a silly statement, to be sure, and the show recognizes the self-help cliches in Tick’s speech, just as it does the purple prose he usually spouts. But in that moment of self-doubt and despair, anything positive seems silly. Moreover, the fact that Tick says it with such sincerity, without even the hint of apologizing for who he is, becomes inspirational. As he’s done from the first episode, Tick invites Arthur to be who he is: not a broken man who copes with his trauma by dressing up like a moth/bunny, but a human who has both experienced hurt and makes weird, wonderful choices.

The finale of The Tick plays even better now, in the shadow of the finale of The Boys. The Boys underscored its central point about the inherently empty and pathetic pursuit of power (whether in the real or fictional White House), but it couldn’t make the switch from outrageous edgy humor to genuine human emotion, no matter how much Homelander offered to degrade himself.

By the end of its run, The Tick also turned its superhero tropes into something relevant, by reminding the viewers that there’s no such thing as normal, no such thing as a broken person, just a bunch of freaks who will make the world a better place when they they let Destiny get all up in their puppets.

The Tick is streaming in its entirety on Prime Video.

The post The Triumph of The Tick, Amazon’s Forgotten Superhero Series appeared first on Den of Geek.

The dreaded board game night doesn’t need to stay that way, since there are multiple games that, contrary to popular belief, aren’t an absolute bore. Teg and Chess are all well and good, but there are many newer games you can get your hands on, with both complex and simple rules to follow.

Not every game here is for everyone, although at least one of these games will become your next favorite thing. If you need some time away from your screens, these are just a few board games you and your friends can enjoy.

The post 15 Board Games That Won’t Be a Bored Game appeared first on Den of Geek.

In the premiere episode of the best superhero series on Prime Video, a spaceship falls on a father, crushing him in front of his young son. Out of the ship stumbles the members of the Earth’s greatest superhero team, their eyes bleeding because of weaponized syphilis. Before the heroes can recover, the supervillain arrives to shoot them in the head—well, only two get shot; the youngest simply has his hands crushed. The heroes murdered, the villain mocks the little boy before flying off, leaving him forever traumatized.

Fans of The Boys might be scratching their heads after reading that description. Something so nasty, so filled with ineffective superheroes must come from Prime Video‘s beloved (until recently) adaptation of the comics by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. Or maybe it’s from the animated series Invincible, which amps up the violence in Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker, and Ryan Ottley’s celebration of all things comics.

But in fact, it comes from the best superhero series ever produced by Amazon: The Tick. Canceled after two seasons and overshadowed by The Boys and Invincible, The Tick had a weird, resilient optimism (despite the scene described above) that’s needed even more today.

Heroes of the City

The death of the Flag Five at the hands of the Terror was just one of many ways that the Prime Video series differed from most depictions of the Tick. Created in 1986 by Ben Edlund for a newsletter distributed by his local comic book shop New England Comics, the Tick has spawned several comic book series, both in color and black and white, a beloved animated series that ran from 1994 to 1996, a short-lived Fox sitcom in 2001, and, finally, the Amazon series that ran for 20 episodes between 2016 and 2019.

The appeal of the Tick is simple. He’s a giant blue guy with nigh-invulnerability and super-strength who is fully committed to the idea of being a superhero. The Tick has no name, no motivation outside of justice, and no enemies besides evil. And ninjas, but they’re more of an annoyance than enemies. He’s joined by his doughy friend Arthur, a timid accountant in a moth suit that makes him look like a bunny. The Tick defends the City, a metropolis populated by heroes and villains.

Fundamentally, The Tick is about how superheroes are silly. Wonderful and cool and compelling, yes. But most of all, silly. The Tick can sometimes go to dark places, with a whole backstory that reveals the Tick’s past as a lunatic in an insane asylum. And the series loves its occasional satire of DC and Marvel, pairing him with Captain Wonder a.k.a. reporter Clark Oppenheimer or with the Running Guy, who is faster than 10 fast men. But the original comics were more interested in laughing with the weirdness of superheroes than laughing at them, so the Tick and Arthur spent time with less-specific oddballs like Paul the Samurai, Chainsaw Vigilante, and the Man-Eating Cow.

The animated series and sitcom retained the same manic energy, even if it added more direct superhero parodies Die Fledermaus and American Maid (renamed Batmanuel and Captain Liberty for the live-action series). Every incarnation of the Tick has been over-the-top, absurd, and utterly optimistic… except for the 2016 series, at least at first.

Big Blue Destiny

On the surface, 2016’s The Tick has everything you’d expect from an adaption of the comics. There’s Peter Serafinowicz as the titular guileless and energetic big blue hero. Griffin Newman plays Arthur as a nervous accountant in a grey moth suit that makes him look like a bunny. They live in an unnamed city, under threat by the villainous Terror (Jackie Earle Haley), and cross paths with other heroes like Overkill (Scott Speiser) and the Superman-styled Superian (Brendan Hines). Arthur’s sister Dot (Valorie Curry, perhaps best known today as Firecracker on The Boys) even appears.

But it takes only a few minutes for the series to establish itself as something very different from what came before, something realistic. We meet Arthur as a depressed young man trying to cover up his mental illness, a steadfast belief that the Terror, who killed his father and members of the Avengers-esque Flag Five 15 years ago, still lives, despite the promise that he’s been long since defeated by Superian. When Arthur gives in to his worst instincts and follows the villain Miss Lint (Yara Martinez) and a group of thugs to a warehouse, he’s intercepted by the Tick, an endless figure of excitement and glee in an otherwise dark world.

In the pilot and the first few episodes, The Tick toys with the idea that Tick is just the manifestation of Arthur’s intrusive thoughts. Yes, Arthur lives in a world with Superian and the Terror, but he’s just a broken man, and the Tick is his psychosis.

Unlikely as the premise is for The Tick, it made sense in 2016. The pilot was directed by Wally Pfister, Christopher Nolan‘s cinematographer, who shot all three entries in the Dark Knight trilogy. The first episodes feel like they’re trying to take the Tick in a similar direction, offering a more believable way to tell a story about a giant blue superhero who says things like, “Crime, nastiness and evil rear their fowl odorous heads in every corner of the globe, and that’s saying something because globes don’t even have corners!”

Pretty quickly, the show did away with that conceit and allowed the Tick to live in the world. However, it never abandoned the mental health aspect. In fact, it expanded to show how not just Arthur, but everyone—Dot, Overkill, even Superian—had some failure haunting them, some sadness they couldn’t shake. Thus the heroism of the Tick is less about his powers and more about his indefatigable commitment to doing good. He’s completely unbothered by disappointment or confusion. For example, when Arthur’s stepdad (Francois Chau) greets the hero by exclaiming, “Look at you,” Tick gleefully doesn’t stop to suss out the meaning. He just responds “Impossible!” and carries on.

The Tick’s embrace of all his weirdness became less a coping mechanism for living in an awful world, and more of a model for making the awful world better.

Going Sane in a Crazy World

Despite its gritty premiere, the final episode of The Tick features a host of superhero tropes. Supervillain the Duke (John Hodgman) has infiltrated the S.H.I.E.L.D. pastiche A.E.G.I.S., undermined the new Flag Five, and sent agents to kill Arthur’s family, all while Superian has an existential crisis on the Moon. Instead of leaping into action, however, Arthur and Dot get overwhelmed by past failures and mistakes, the same feelings of inadequacy that stall Overkill and Miss Lint’s turns toward heroism.

As always, Tick responds to the crisis with a monologue, full of hyperbole and mixed metaphors. But this time, there’s something truly inspirational in his garbled words. “The truth about the truth is that it’s a choice,” he declares. “Choose love or choose fear. Everything else is up to destiny.”

It’s a silly statement, to be sure, and the show recognizes the self-help cliches in Tick’s speech, just as it does the purple prose he usually spouts. But in that moment of self-doubt and despair, anything positive seems silly. Moreover, the fact that Tick says it with such sincerity, without even the hint of apologizing for who he is, becomes inspirational. As he’s done from the first episode, Tick invites Arthur to be who he is: not a broken man who copes with his trauma by dressing up like a moth/bunny, but a human who has both experienced hurt and makes weird, wonderful choices.

The finale of The Tick plays even better now, in the shadow of the finale of The Boys. The Boys underscored its central point about the inherently empty and pathetic pursuit of power (whether in the real or fictional White House), but it couldn’t make the switch from outrageous edgy humor to genuine human emotion, no matter how much Homelander offered to degrade himself.

By the end of its run, The Tick also turned its superhero tropes into something relevant, by reminding the viewers that there’s no such thing as normal, no such thing as a broken person, just a bunch of freaks who will make the world a better place when they they let Destiny get all up in their puppets.

The Tick is streaming in its entirety on Prime Video.

The post The Triumph of The Tick, Amazon’s Forgotten Superhero Series appeared first on Den of Geek.

This article contains light spoilers for Daredevil: Born Again season 3 based on set photos. Daredevil: Born Again hasn’t just been about the rebirth of Matt Murdock, the blind lawyer who spends his evening defending the streets of Hell’s Kitchen as Daredevil. It’s also been about the rebirth of the Netflix Marvel series that first […]

The post Daredevil: Born Again Can Finally Give Us the Cage and Iron Fist Team-Up We Want appeared first on Den of Geek.

In the premiere episode of the best superhero series on Prime Video, a spaceship falls on a father, crushing him in front of his young son. Out of the ship stumbles the members of the Earth’s greatest superhero team, their eyes bleeding because of weaponized syphilis. Before the heroes can recover, the supervillain arrives to shoot them in the head—well, only two get shot; the youngest simply has his hands crushed. The heroes murdered, the villain mocks the little boy before flying off, leaving him forever traumatized.

Fans of The Boys might be scratching their heads after reading that description. Something so nasty, so filled with ineffective superheroes must come from Prime Video‘s beloved (until recently) adaptation of the comics by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. Or maybe it’s from the animated series Invincible, which amps up the violence in Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker, and Ryan Ottley’s celebration of all things comics.

But in fact, it comes from the best superhero series ever produced by Amazon: The Tick. Canceled after two seasons and overshadowed by The Boys and Invincible, The Tick had a weird, resilient optimism (despite the scene described above) that’s needed even more today.

Heroes of the City

The death of the Flag Five at the hands of the Terror was just one of many ways that the Prime Video series differed from most depictions of the Tick. Created in 1986 by Ben Edlund for a newsletter distributed by his local comic book shop New England Comics, the Tick has spawned several comic book series, both in color and black and white, a beloved animated series that ran from 1994 to 1996, a short-lived Fox sitcom in 2001, and, finally, the Amazon series that ran for 20 episodes between 2016 and 2019.

The appeal of the Tick is simple. He’s a giant blue guy with nigh-invulnerability and super-strength who is fully committed to the idea of being a superhero. The Tick has no name, no motivation outside of justice, and no enemies besides evil. And ninjas, but they’re more of an annoyance than enemies. He’s joined by his doughy friend Arthur, a timid accountant in a moth suit that makes him look like a bunny. The Tick defends the City, a metropolis populated by heroes and villains.

Fundamentally, The Tick is about how superheroes are silly. Wonderful and cool and compelling, yes. But most of all, silly. The Tick can sometimes go to dark places, with a whole backstory that reveals the Tick’s past as a lunatic in an insane asylum. And the series loves its occasional satire of DC and Marvel, pairing him with Captain Wonder a.k.a. reporter Clark Oppenheimer or with the Running Guy, who is faster than 10 fast men. But the original comics were more interested in laughing with the weirdness of superheroes than laughing at them, so the Tick and Arthur spent time with less-specific oddballs like Paul the Samurai, Chainsaw Vigilante, and the Man-Eating Cow.

The animated series and sitcom retained the same manic energy, even if it added more direct superhero parodies Die Fledermaus and American Maid (renamed Batmanuel and Captain Liberty for the live-action series). Every incarnation of the Tick has been over-the-top, absurd, and utterly optimistic… except for the 2016 series, at least at first.

Big Blue Destiny

On the surface, 2016’s The Tick has everything you’d expect from an adaption of the comics. There’s Peter Serafinowicz as the titular guileless and energetic big blue hero. Griffin Newman plays Arthur as a nervous accountant in a grey moth suit that makes him look like a bunny. They live in an unnamed city, under threat by the villainous Terror (Jackie Earle Haley), and cross paths with other heroes like Overkill (Scott Speiser) and the Superman-styled Superian (Brendan Hines). Arthur’s sister Dot (Valorie Curry, perhaps best known today as Firecracker on The Boys) even appears.

But it takes only a few minutes for the series to establish itself as something very different from what came before, something realistic. We meet Arthur as a depressed young man trying to cover up his mental illness, a steadfast belief that the Terror, who killed his father and members of the Avengers-esque Flag Five 15 years ago, still lives, despite the promise that he’s been long since defeated by Superian. When Arthur gives in to his worst instincts and follows the villain Miss Lint (Yara Martinez) and a group of thugs to a warehouse, he’s intercepted by the Tick, an endless figure of excitement and glee in an otherwise dark world.

In the pilot and the first few episodes, The Tick toys with the idea that Tick is just the manifestation of Arthur’s intrusive thoughts. Yes, Arthur lives in a world with Superian and the Terror, but he’s just a broken man, and the Tick is his psychosis.

Unlikely as the premise is for The Tick, it made sense in 2016. The pilot was directed by Wally Pfister, Christopher Nolan‘s cinematographer, who shot all three entries in the Dark Knight trilogy. The first episodes feel like they’re trying to take the Tick in a similar direction, offering a more believable way to tell a story about a giant blue superhero who says things like, “Crime, nastiness and evil rear their fowl odorous heads in every corner of the globe, and that’s saying something because globes don’t even have corners!”

Pretty quickly, the show did away with that conceit and allowed the Tick to live in the world. However, it never abandoned the mental health aspect. In fact, it expanded to show how not just Arthur, but everyone—Dot, Overkill, even Superian—had some failure haunting them, some sadness they couldn’t shake. Thus the heroism of the Tick is less about his powers and more about his indefatigable commitment to doing good. He’s completely unbothered by disappointment or confusion. For example, when Arthur’s stepdad (Francois Chau) greets the hero by exclaiming, “Look at you,” Tick gleefully doesn’t stop to suss out the meaning. He just responds “Impossible!” and carries on.

The Tick’s embrace of all his weirdness became less a coping mechanism for living in an awful world, and more of a model for making the awful world better.

Going Sane in a Crazy World

Despite its gritty premiere, the final episode of The Tick features a host of superhero tropes. Supervillain the Duke (John Hodgman) has infiltrated the S.H.I.E.L.D. pastiche A.E.G.I.S., undermined the new Flag Five, and sent agents to kill Arthur’s family, all while Superian has an existential crisis on the Moon. Instead of leaping into action, however, Arthur and Dot get overwhelmed by past failures and mistakes, the same feelings of inadequacy that stall Overkill and Miss Lint’s turns toward heroism.

As always, Tick responds to the crisis with a monologue, full of hyperbole and mixed metaphors. But this time, there’s something truly inspirational in his garbled words. “The truth about the truth is that it’s a choice,” he declares. “Choose love or choose fear. Everything else is up to destiny.”

It’s a silly statement, to be sure, and the show recognizes the self-help cliches in Tick’s speech, just as it does the purple prose he usually spouts. But in that moment of self-doubt and despair, anything positive seems silly. Moreover, the fact that Tick says it with such sincerity, without even the hint of apologizing for who he is, becomes inspirational. As he’s done from the first episode, Tick invites Arthur to be who he is: not a broken man who copes with his trauma by dressing up like a moth/bunny, but a human who has both experienced hurt and makes weird, wonderful choices.

The finale of The Tick plays even better now, in the shadow of the finale of The Boys. The Boys underscored its central point about the inherently empty and pathetic pursuit of power (whether in the real or fictional White House), but it couldn’t make the switch from outrageous edgy humor to genuine human emotion, no matter how much Homelander offered to degrade himself.

By the end of its run, The Tick also turned its superhero tropes into something relevant, by reminding the viewers that there’s no such thing as normal, no such thing as a broken person, just a bunch of freaks who will make the world a better place when they they let Destiny get all up in their puppets.

The Tick is streaming in its entirety on Prime Video.

The post The Triumph of The Tick, Amazon’s Forgotten Superhero Series appeared first on Den of Geek.

This article contains potential spoilers for X-Men ’97 season 2. The first trailer for X-Men ’97 season 2 was full of treats for fans. But for fans of the Ragin’ Cajun Gambit, the trailer was nothing but sadness. We get to see a little of Rogue mourning her beloved, but nothing indicating that he’ll do […]

The post X-Men ’97 Producers Tease the Return of a Fallen Fan Favorite appeared first on Den of Geek.

In the premiere episode of the best superhero series on Prime Video, a spaceship falls on a father, crushing him in front of his young son. Out of the ship stumbles the members of the Earth’s greatest superhero team, their eyes bleeding because of weaponized syphilis. Before the heroes can recover, the supervillain arrives to shoot them in the head—well, only two get shot; the youngest simply has his hands crushed. The heroes murdered, the villain mocks the little boy before flying off, leaving him forever traumatized.

Fans of The Boys might be scratching their heads after reading that description. Something so nasty, so filled with ineffective superheroes must come from Prime Video‘s beloved (until recently) adaptation of the comics by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. Or maybe it’s from the animated series Invincible, which amps up the violence in Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker, and Ryan Ottley’s celebration of all things comics.

But in fact, it comes from the best superhero series ever produced by Amazon: The Tick. Canceled after two seasons and overshadowed by The Boys and Invincible, The Tick had a weird, resilient optimism (despite the scene described above) that’s needed even more today.

Heroes of the City

The death of the Flag Five at the hands of the Terror was just one of many ways that the Prime Video series differed from most depictions of the Tick. Created in 1986 by Ben Edlund for a newsletter distributed by his local comic book shop New England Comics, the Tick has spawned several comic book series, both in color and black and white, a beloved animated series that ran from 1994 to 1996, a short-lived Fox sitcom in 2001, and, finally, the Amazon series that ran for 20 episodes between 2016 and 2019.

The appeal of the Tick is simple. He’s a giant blue guy with nigh-invulnerability and super-strength who is fully committed to the idea of being a superhero. The Tick has no name, no motivation outside of justice, and no enemies besides evil. And ninjas, but they’re more of an annoyance than enemies. He’s joined by his doughy friend Arthur, a timid accountant in a moth suit that makes him look like a bunny. The Tick defends the City, a metropolis populated by heroes and villains.

Fundamentally, The Tick is about how superheroes are silly. Wonderful and cool and compelling, yes. But most of all, silly. The Tick can sometimes go to dark places, with a whole backstory that reveals the Tick’s past as a lunatic in an insane asylum. And the series loves its occasional satire of DC and Marvel, pairing him with Captain Wonder a.k.a. reporter Clark Oppenheimer or with the Running Guy, who is faster than 10 fast men. But the original comics were more interested in laughing with the weirdness of superheroes than laughing at them, so the Tick and Arthur spent time with less-specific oddballs like Paul the Samurai, Chainsaw Vigilante, and the Man-Eating Cow.

The animated series and sitcom retained the same manic energy, even if it added more direct superhero parodies Die Fledermaus and American Maid (renamed Batmanuel and Captain Liberty for the live-action series). Every incarnation of the Tick has been over-the-top, absurd, and utterly optimistic… except for the 2016 series, at least at first.

Big Blue Destiny

On the surface, 2016’s The Tick has everything you’d expect from an adaption of the comics. There’s Peter Serafinowicz as the titular guileless and energetic big blue hero. Griffin Newman plays Arthur as a nervous accountant in a grey moth suit that makes him look like a bunny. They live in an unnamed city, under threat by the villainous Terror (Jackie Earle Haley), and cross paths with other heroes like Overkill (Scott Speiser) and the Superman-styled Superian (Brendan Hines). Arthur’s sister Dot (Valorie Curry, perhaps best known today as Firecracker on The Boys) even appears.

But it takes only a few minutes for the series to establish itself as something very different from what came before, something realistic. We meet Arthur as a depressed young man trying to cover up his mental illness, a steadfast belief that the Terror, who killed his father and members of the Avengers-esque Flag Five 15 years ago, still lives, despite the promise that he’s been long since defeated by Superian. When Arthur gives in to his worst instincts and follows the villain Miss Lint (Yara Martinez) and a group of thugs to a warehouse, he’s intercepted by the Tick, an endless figure of excitement and glee in an otherwise dark world.

In the pilot and the first few episodes, The Tick toys with the idea that Tick is just the manifestation of Arthur’s intrusive thoughts. Yes, Arthur lives in a world with Superian and the Terror, but he’s just a broken man, and the Tick is his psychosis.

Unlikely as the premise is for The Tick, it made sense in 2016. The pilot was directed by Wally Pfister, Christopher Nolan‘s cinematographer, who shot all three entries in the Dark Knight trilogy. The first episodes feel like they’re trying to take the Tick in a similar direction, offering a more believable way to tell a story about a giant blue superhero who says things like, “Crime, nastiness and evil rear their fowl odorous heads in every corner of the globe, and that’s saying something because globes don’t even have corners!”

Pretty quickly, the show did away with that conceit and allowed the Tick to live in the world. However, it never abandoned the mental health aspect. In fact, it expanded to show how not just Arthur, but everyone—Dot, Overkill, even Superian—had some failure haunting them, some sadness they couldn’t shake. Thus the heroism of the Tick is less about his powers and more about his indefatigable commitment to doing good. He’s completely unbothered by disappointment or confusion. For example, when Arthur’s stepdad (Francois Chau) greets the hero by exclaiming, “Look at you,” Tick gleefully doesn’t stop to suss out the meaning. He just responds “Impossible!” and carries on.

The Tick’s embrace of all his weirdness became less a coping mechanism for living in an awful world, and more of a model for making the awful world better.

Going Sane in a Crazy World

Despite its gritty premiere, the final episode of The Tick features a host of superhero tropes. Supervillain the Duke (John Hodgman) has infiltrated the S.H.I.E.L.D. pastiche A.E.G.I.S., undermined the new Flag Five, and sent agents to kill Arthur’s family, all while Superian has an existential crisis on the Moon. Instead of leaping into action, however, Arthur and Dot get overwhelmed by past failures and mistakes, the same feelings of inadequacy that stall Overkill and Miss Lint’s turns toward heroism.

As always, Tick responds to the crisis with a monologue, full of hyperbole and mixed metaphors. But this time, there’s something truly inspirational in his garbled words. “The truth about the truth is that it’s a choice,” he declares. “Choose love or choose fear. Everything else is up to destiny.”

It’s a silly statement, to be sure, and the show recognizes the self-help cliches in Tick’s speech, just as it does the purple prose he usually spouts. But in that moment of self-doubt and despair, anything positive seems silly. Moreover, the fact that Tick says it with such sincerity, without even the hint of apologizing for who he is, becomes inspirational. As he’s done from the first episode, Tick invites Arthur to be who he is: not a broken man who copes with his trauma by dressing up like a moth/bunny, but a human who has both experienced hurt and makes weird, wonderful choices.

The finale of The Tick plays even better now, in the shadow of the finale of The Boys. The Boys underscored its central point about the inherently empty and pathetic pursuit of power (whether in the real or fictional White House), but it couldn’t make the switch from outrageous edgy humor to genuine human emotion, no matter how much Homelander offered to degrade himself.

By the end of its run, The Tick also turned its superhero tropes into something relevant, by reminding the viewers that there’s no such thing as normal, no such thing as a broken person, just a bunch of freaks who will make the world a better place when they they let Destiny get all up in their puppets.

The Tick is streaming in its entirety on Prime Video.

The post The Triumph of The Tick, Amazon’s Forgotten Superhero Series appeared first on Den of Geek.