The Tick is back–and it’s mightier than ever! After a yearlong wait, Prime Video’s half hour superhero comedy just is back in action in Season 2, a season of TV that’s finds the show bigger and bolder than ever before. Peter Serafinowicz and Griffin Newman are suited up and ready for action as the mysterious yet boisterous Tick and his mild-mannered sidekick Arthur, and action they do face.

As opposed to the myth-building of Season 1, which hit viewers in three bite-size chunks released from 2016 to 2018, Season 2 is a 10-part epic filled with more heroes, more villains, and more hugs. To get metaphorical, now that all the toys are out of the chest, the brains behind the Tick are ready to bang and smash them together.

Decider had the pleasure of chatting with the head brain of The Tick, a brain belonging to creator and executive producer Ben Edlund. The Tick’s been Edlund’s big blue baby since the character’s first comic appearance way back in 1986. Since then, Tick and Arthur have bounded from one series to another, from animation to live-action. In Season 2 of Prime Video’s gritty-yet-silly take, we get to see this Serafinowicz and Newman like we’ve never seen them before: partners-in-crime-fighting. In our talk, we learned all about this duo’s development, the influence of the Marvel and superhero comics on the show, and learned which classic Tick character Edlund most wants to bring to life.

Decider: What was on your wishlist going into Tick Season 2, and did you get to do what you wanted to do?

Ben Edlund: I would say that we got to do a tremendous amount of what we set out to do. I think originally we had a much larger, much less realistic wishlist and that got cut into shape by reality. What’s exciting to me about what we’ve achieved in the second season is that everything’s up and running. The city is open for business, there’s more heroes, more villains–it’s ready to go. So that was what we wanted to get going. We wanted Arthur to be up and ready, but I also wanted to experiment with not a single villain that organizes the whole season, but a set of storylines that we could get into a revolving relationship with, so it would be more comedically dense and less driven by one singular idea. All of that was very exciting. It’s more of a smorgasbord.

The biggest change in Season 2 from almost minute one is, as you said, Arthur being “up and ready.” The show has that really fun Tick and Arthur dynamic that was in the ’90s cartoon and previous live-action series. Now that you have Tick and Arthur side-by-side, how did you go about differentiating their dynamic from those other two shows?

In a way, it was really comforting to come back to the similarities. Tonally, it’s actually more at home. This new version is designed to be a saga, oddly. I don’t know why, but that’s how it’s coming out. The first season was the set up to introduce our main characters, where we really wired in with them and we really cared. It was kind of like the chapter before the Tick and Arthur myth that’s already known. It’s this prologue that didn’t exist before and has this pulse and this different feel. Getting it up and running, it’s inevitably different, because now we’re in Season 2 and it has so much more emotion, so much more of a sense of coherence.

One of the things that is, in the DNA of this is, different is that Tick is a more coherent guru. He really does have this relationship with destiny that is a full-on philosophy. It’s some kind of belief system that he operates under and he’s pulling Arthur into. The whole thing is sort of deeper and more intentional and even more overthinking for a dumb guy and his hapless friend.

The other difference you feel between Season 1 and Season 2 is that if the first season felt like The Tick’s take on the Marvel Netflix shows–

That’s what it was, to some degree.

Season 2 feels like you’ve leveled up and now you’re doing The Tick’s take on the Marvel movies, with all the very S.H.I.E.L.D.-like AEGIS and the Nick Fury-esque Ty Rathbone.

Yes. Netflix and the Marvel shows were very much about a gritty, very low to the ground, individualistic; [they were] dark and gritty and Batman-y. For example, that was why [The Dark Knight cinematographer] Wally Pfister was ideal [to direct] the pilot, to fit the look. We really were in a place that was, not just Netflix, but also the colder, darker world of DC that doesn’t let itself have fun. That’s reality, that’s as close to reality as you can get in superhero land. That’s where Arthur lived. He lived in a crappy little neighborhood and was trying to figure out what milk to buy. That’s where he started. The Tick shows up and brings color into his universe and the Tick does not come from the Marvel, Daredevil universe at all. He comes from somewhere else. He begins to pull Arthur out of himself, up into the world.

Even in the first season, it goes from dark to light, from night to day. Then, when AEGIS arrives, it’s almost like we’re going back in time. We go from the gritty nowness to the things we were investigating in the last season, and we’re sort of tumbling back to the Silver Age fun. That’s really where actually all the universes live. They have these self-reflexive expressions that are darker or more realistic or gritty or this or that. These universes that we take in that are DC or Marvel or any of those ideas, are packed to the gills with history and heroes and the population is huge. Almost no live-action [show touches on that], except for Legends of Tomorrow and perhaps Doom Patrol. Those are starting to get into the world of, “We’re just gonna take it all!” That’s the full-court expression of superhero mythology as it really is.

That’s exactly what it feels like to read a superhero comic book. It means reading a character created in the ’60s interacting with one created in the ’90s or one from the ’40s that was revamped in the ’80.

Yes! I wanted us to have that. I didn’t want it to be like that right away. We could’ve been Futurama; we could’ve been going 100 miles an hour from the beginning. Then you wouldn’t have that level of interest in the care and destiny of the main characters because it would be everything and the kitchen sink, all the time. But this all is supposed to be a story, because I wanted to make it really hard to do. It needs to have an actual arced out story of at least five seasons of, “We really care, these people are going somewhere, the Everest family has a destiny, the Tick has a secret.”

You’re pulling off that arc, too, especially when it comes to how The Tick dissects identity. It was a theme in Season 1 and it continues in Season 2 through Dot and Ms. Lint, and even Dangerboat. Can you talk about exploring deep themes of identity in this half-hour comedy superhero show?

The first season was pretty myopic. It’s about interior, about what people carry around as their self-images and how they operate. They’re interacting outwardly now. The whole theme of the season is “Okay, you want to be a hero, what does that mean?” It’s complicated, because it’s a combination of altruism and celebrity. Those are completely at odds. The idea of, okay, well now your self-image is turned outward, it’s actually becoming an active and communicated symbol. That’s what Superian is doing at the apex of those ideas, but even at the bottom, Arthur is just trying to go to work and be himself and finds out that nope, you took your name and turned it into a symbol and now that ain’t you anymore. You don’t get to be just you. So they all fall prey, even the Tick falls prey. What do we transmit truthfully about ourselves and what do we withhold because we have to in this world?

That makes sense with Superian, whose Season 2 journey is very focused on social media and cable news. It’s a very interesting choice to get him roped up in all that.

There’s nothing very interesting that can be done to him physically. He’s just so amazing, he’s just amazing. So, really the things that are interesting about him to me are “What is that like?” He’s just a winner. He’s never not been a winner. He just keeps winning and winning. He’s got this almost depraved relationship to approval. He’s not really had to do work on himself. So, in this new time that he’s realizing the mirror is looking a little cracked, it really spins him out.

Season 2 introduces John Hodgman as AEGIS agent/doctor Hobbes, which really feels like the role he was born to play. Was anyone else even considered?

Anyone could’ve played Hobbes, in a certain nature, but it was written for John Hodgman. I’ve liked him for a really, really long time, just him being him. He has a very distinct signal that was in mind while we were developing this guy. The character’s name was originally Dr. Hodges because we were thinking we weren’t going to get him. Actually, changing it to Hobbes works far better for me. But he is amazing. He does so much great stuff. He’s a wonderful person to work with. He was very collaborative and had a lot of ideas and was just really fruitful. But yeah, he was definitely already in mind.

I went up to him at one point, early on, when he was getting fitted and we were just working out things. I thought that I had cracked the code of what I wanted in some way that was distinct and I was like “John, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this on The Muppet Show–” and he was like “Bunsen Honeydew, I get it.” To me, it worked like a charm. There’s something about the wonderful, kind manner of Bunsen Honeydew and his internal sense that science trumps everything else, so Beaker can get set on fire if that helps science.

The other big addition in Season 2 is Lobstercules. Where do we even begin?

We’re very happy with everything that took place with Lobstercules. It came out great. I was driving along when we were first working out the season, we had a lot of the basic ideas down. For me, there’s sort of a trope that I don’t even know the name of, really. It centers around my experience of animated Spider-Man villains which were often various scientists, or subjects of experimentation, that ended up being monsters in pants. The pants stayed, but the top half was a monster. Oh no, it’s a lizard creature! Oh no, it’s an alligator! Oh no, it’s a sandman! Whatever it was, the pants stayed on. So that was sort of the feeling that I wanted here.

Then, I was driving and something hit me that was like “Prawn Hercules!” “Prawn” has sort of been co-opted for awhile by District 9, in my opinion. I grew up around prawns and crayfish and stuff like that– and lobsters. It’s very New England. It was just staring me right in the face: Hercules and lobster, so Lobstercules.

Season 2 introduces so many new characters, which is a Tick tradition at this point. Really only Tick and Arthur carry through from the comics through all the TV iterations, and now the Prime Video series is adding all these new characters. Do you ever feel the urge to go and bring back American Maid or Die Fledermaus?

At this point, I think it’ll be really fun and interesting to draw more and more from things like the comic book, and we have the opportunity to take what we would like from Sony, the previous live-action [series]. There’s still some legal issues with pulling things specifically made for the cartoon.

But there’s a big kind of buildup in the background for Season 3 in the form of a villain that I created for the comic book, which is exciting. That’ll be something that’s fun to play with in Season 3. But we still see it as a holy grail, like how do you get Chairface Chippendale on the show? How can we do it? It’s definitely possible. It’s less about achieving the special effects than it is about arranging the reality of it so it lives comfortably in this new world.

We all need to see this happen. What updates can you give us about Season 3? What are your hopes for Season 3, if it happens?

Like from Season 1 to Season 2, that feeling of “Wow, we’re up and moving now!” I would like there to be a similar feeling. I just got off saying that Futurama was not we wanted to be but in Season 3, having built ourselves up these caring bonds between the characters and coherence for all these critters, then Season 3 will be more comedically dense. There will be more stuff going on because the city will start to do that gerbil on a hot plate dance. Lots and lots more stuff. In that, as much as we can, it would be really fun to create nods to the old versions, bring other creatures forward. You ain’t seen nothing yet, is kind of the actual promise. I believe it.

I want to see Chairface Chippendale in live-action!

With a five o’clock shadow.

Stream The Tick Season 2 on Prime Video