life skills

I have begun a project to record every episode of the Tick (La Garrabota) with the spanish language audio. This is an important project to me. I've always felt that the Tick is a Quijote (which makes the Tick a Quijote) and my project concerns the early nineties cartoon presents a narrative absent from the novel, indeed rejected by its author. That is, the fantastical narrative of dQ.
The Quijote is marked as the first modern novel because Cervantes recognized the polyvocality integrated into his narrative voice and enhanced it, disintegrating the character's integrity until finally the don's madness, rather than his adventures, is the subject of some thousand pages.
Cervantes made dQ the subject of history and progeny of his own deeds, not the master or prime mover. Ben Edlund, creator of the Tick presents a world to which the Tick responds, as well, but the evils of this world are real and the response is (largely) appropriate.
Some effort should be made here to sketch, roughly, the many similarities between the two narratives and characters. The narratives of both dQ and the Tick disregard the situation of the character's birth and upbringing. Don Quijote is a man whose birth name is unknown, introduced in late age upon his decision to become a chivalric knight. Similarly the Tick's adventures in 'The City' begin when he is assigned to its protection by a committee of superhero oversight at a Las Vegas convention. In order to prove his might and "nigh invulnerability" to the world of heroes, the Tick subjects himself to a death chest, complete with impaling spikes of steel, many mallets and an explosive device. His faith in the invulnerability of the Just matches dQ's and the Tick's display is as comical as the annointment of Quijote's armor, scraps gathered from around his farmhouse.
There are deeper similarities. The Tick's power, that which qualifies him as a superhero, is apparently a willingness to subject himself to unending pains in dedication to his lady (Justice). It's exactly so with dQ, whose only real skill as a roaming knight is persistance, fueled by the conviction that his struggles will make him more powerful. The bodies who annoint the heroes (an innkeeper jocularly posing as a king and a superhero advisory committee) are of no given authority to offer protection to those upon whom they subject these figures, and carry out the annointment in large part simply to prompt them to leave.
No character in the world of the Tick questions his lifestyle or the monosyllabic moniker....