The Boys Replaced A Much Better Superhero Satire

While The Boys has its own comedic spin, it relies heavily on the evil Superman trope, with much of the show’s draw coming from Anthony Starr’s chilling performance as Homelander. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with the trope, it’s been overexposed both before and after it first aired in 2019. James Gunn’s Brightburn uses the trope as horror, Invincible and The Eternals both lean on it for their villain, and it’s been done for decades in comics with characters like Bizaro and Hyperion.

On the other hand, Tick can be viewed as a subversion of Superman, but rather than removing his heroism, they make him naive and dumb, making him a much more unique take on the character.

While there is a more direct morally imperfect Superman parallel in The Tick with the character Superian, he’s not actually evil, just selfish and narcissistic. More importantly, he’s a side character the show doesn’t rely on.

Both Tick and Superian are more interesting ways to humanize mythic characters like Superman, showing the cracks in that mythos in a way that’s much more nuanced than making him an irredeemable villain. 

While both shows parody the superhero genre, The Boys tends to have characters who are direct parodies, whereas most characters in the Amazon version of The Tick parodies broad archetypes. The Deep is a parallel for Aqua Man, for instance, while Overkill from The Tick is a parody of the grim and gritty vigilante in general. This often results in The Boys feeling like a parody of the MCU and DCEU while The Tick is poking fun at the ideas and tropes of the genre as a whole. 

By taking a less direct parodic approach, The Tick has a much more varied cast of characters. While every superhero in The Boys gets their powers from the same source, The Tick gets to play with characters from various backgrounds, allowing the show to poke at things like alien heroes and powerless heroes, which The Boys can’t comment on. The ultimate example of this is Danger Boat, the lovesick sentient battleship, which is a concept that feels right at home in the superhero genre, but that The Boys could never do. 

But the biggest reason The Tick is a better satire of the superhero genre is that it presents an actual superhero world, whereas in the world of The Boys, most of the superheroic activity is fake, and there aren’t any supervillains.

The existence of superheroes, flawed as they might be, in The Tick is justified by the existence of legitimate supervillains, which makes for an interesting examination of how flawed characters within flawed systems can still work toward the greater good. By removing that element and making the heroes themselves the threat, The Boys flattens its morality making the existence of The Seven clearly wrong. 

None of this is to say that The Boys doesn’t deserve its success or isn’t a great piece of satire, it just isn’t as unique or interesting as The Tick. The fact that The Boys originally aired in 2019, the same year The Tick was canceled, creates the feeling that Amazon was replacing one with the other. For Tick fans, seeing such a surprisingly nuanced but heartfelt parody of superheroes replaced with a more surface-level parody that leans on an overused trope was heartbreaking.