Though Peter Serafinowicz has confidently assumed the role of the titular superhero in Amazon’s The Tick, the team behind the show revealed at New York Comic-Con Thursday that a previous inhabitant of the blue suit, Patrick Warburton, will appear in some capacity. “He’s going to do something special, can’t say exactly when it will be, but it will happen,” executive producer Barry Josephson said when an audience member if any of the cast members from the 2001 show would be involved. (Warburton already maintains loyalty to The Tick enterprise, by serving as a producer on the new series.) Though Josephson was tight-lipped on what Warbuton might do on camera, creator Ben Edlund added: “There will be some comment on The Tick, because he was The Tick.”
Earlier during the panel, Edlund also vaguely teased what’s in store for The Tick and his sidekick Arthur (Griffin Newman), the latter of whom is actually the focal point of this iteration of the story. He said that the first season will prominently feature Jackie Earle Haley’s villain The Terror, and previewed some other threats headed their way: “They’re going to meet a very very violent vigilante character who won’t have a skull on his chest, but he will be quite hardline in his reasoning,” Edlund explained, nodding to Marvel’s Punisher. ”We’ll meet a government organization that has sort of fused between some kind of superhero registration and tracking organization and a homeland security nightmare. That’s going to emerge as one of the forces that they have to contend with.” He added: “I’m hoping to shrink The Tick’s hands to the size of a molecule.”
The series will also incorporate characters from the The Tick’s past, but tailored to this current world. “Each time we do that it’s going to be an interesting new expression of those things that have come before, because it’s an unprecedented attempt, at least on our part, to make a superhero comedic universe you can actually invest in and care about,” Edlund said. “So it starts there, and as we build our universe we’ll be able to get increasingly more absurd and more fun. It just always has to have a through line of heart and continuity.”
Amazon ordered The Tick to series in September, and the first season is due sometime in 2017.