Rhode>> Never fear; I am in no danger of abandoning this stuff because of some criticism, because you are quite right; I get a lot of fun out of it. I only wish I could do it full time!

I don’t actually care for superhero parody because I feel that the mainstream superhero genre does a pretty good job of parodying itself. What it doesn’t do very well is loosen up and just let the joy flow, which is what I like so much about Rocket Rabbit and the Tick.

Thinking about it that way, those reviews are even less fair. There aren’t nearly enough Tick-like comics in the world.

It would be nice to just dismiss the bad reviews but the fact is that when I get a GOOD one it makes my day, so I have to at least consider the BAD reviews… and especially when they come from some pretty eminent and thoughtful reviewers, which sadly has been the case with me. (I am not sure if any of them do it for a living though; I think that it tends to be a side job for most of them).

But thanks, again, for the encouragement!

My impression is that, for these reviewers anyway, some genres can support an enormous number of stories that juggle similar elements, but the Silly-Hero story has to start and stop with THE TICK. As someone who is doing silly hero stories, I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out why that is so…

…While also considering how to steer my books away from being labeled as re-hash. I spend much of my spare time on them so I would like to think that I could make them as interesting as I possibly can (otherwise what’s the point?)

But being interesting or original is the tricky part; by definition a story in any “genre” has been done before, to some extent. Their similarities in subject, style or structure are precisely why all those stories are grouped together into what is termed a genre. It would be fair to say that the “Superhero” genre has seen a LOT more mileage than any other genre that you could name in the world of comics. An almost infinite variety of variations on that simple idea. And yet none of the reviewers I quoted preface their reviews of superhero books by pointing out that they’ve been done before.

By the way, when I started doing my comics I wasn’t setting out to parody any particular comic book genre, I just came up with some characters that made me smile, and tried to figure out who they were and what they would do. A robot that looked like a rabbit had to do something… but what?… maybe a crime-fighter? That is how it started. My sensibilities are in the silly line, so ROCKET RABBIT came out as a silly hero book… but I wasn’t trying to “send up” any book I had previously read or even to consciously make a “HERO PARODY” genre-piece… (In fact, if I had anything in mind at all when doing this book it was GET SMART or the EMMA PEEL AVENGERS, not comics).

That said though, when introduced to THE TICK by my pal Rhode, I learned how much whacky-hero territory that book had already hilariously covered, many years before I even sat down to try.

Like those guys, I’ve read a lot of superhero parody before too. The concept of funny superheroes may not be entirely original, but the uniqueness of the concept isn’t what makes a story good or bad. It’s how well you tell the story. So, even though I’d read superhero parody before, what made me love Nerve Bomb was that I giggled my ass off as I was reading it. It was executed ridiculously well (with the emphasis on “ridiculous”).

I think that those critics didn’t connect with the silliness (and that’s fair, I guess), but they tried to explain their disconnect by attacking the concept, and I don’t think that’s fair at all.