In reading The Tick recently, I was pleased to find that it was as whacked-out and funny as the television show which had been my first exposure to it. Paul the Samurai, a mini-series that follows up the original Tick series, definitely has the whacked-out, but it misses more often than not on the funny. I'm just not as interested in the lead character as I am in the brain-damaged, big-hearted Tick, and he also isn't a character who lends himself easily to humor, so Edlund and company instead go off in a direction that could best be described as Morrison-esque. There are plenty of interesting notions here, and a few laughs, but it never quite came together for me the way The Tick series did.
Paul the Samurai has two stories, one taking two issues and exploring Paul's job in a bizarre factory and the other taking one and being more of a super-hero parody along the lines of what The Tick traditionally did. The latter is the strongest story for me, but it requires setup from the former. Specifically, Paul needs to be disillusioned and to meet the otherworldly and unusual Vernon Coop in order for the story to come together. However, I think the creators would have been better off if more of the series had been along the lines of the third issue and less the first two.
A lot of the potential comedy in Paul the Samurai comes from his stern demeanor and culture clash, but when the story takes place in a bizarre realm that doesn't really represent the culture he's meant to be clashing with, that humor goes out the window. Instead, Edlund and company aim for a comedy of weirdness, introducing non sequiturs and strange behavior motivated by otherworldly forces, and not only are the gags often less funny than similar types of gags in The Tick, the result is a story that mostly feels like Paul doesn't really belong in it. This could just as easily have been a Tick story, and it probably would have been more entertaining with that protagonist besides.
By the time the mini-series got to its third issue, I felt like the creators had gotten their feet underneath them and might be headed in a more entertaining direction. If there's more Paul to be found, I have reason to believe it could be as entertaining as The Tick but in a slightly different vein, based on the third issue.
Which is not to say there isn't any fun to be found throughout. Edlund's gift for bizarre super-hero creations is on display with Aquatic Joe and... heh... "Soaring Red Pecker" in the third issue, and the trippy sequence of near-madness that finds Paul acting out of character in the second issue is a bit of fun as well. In addition, the more sarcastic and smarter character of Paul's grandfather who appears in flashback in the first issue and in ghostly form in the third issue is a lot of fun, and he brightens the story considerably when he's around. Edlund also has some fun with the concept of the secret agent similar to his hilarious lambasting of the ninja stereotype in the pages of The Tick.
While the story may not be a strong here, the artwork by Dave Garcia is as good and sometimes better than the work that Edlund did on The Tick. He's got a clean line and plenty of detail, sometimes light on the background but not one to skimp when it's important, as with the convoluted steam pipes of the extradimensional boiler room. And it's clear that a lot of work went into the emotions of the characters and their reactions... with a funnier script, I think his art would have made the whole thing hysterical.
