I love Man-Eating Cow for the sheer lunacy of her character. She's a cow... that eats bad guys. Who but Ben Edlund and his cohorts could think of something so insane and actually make it work? I mean, this is the guy who suggested to Joss Whedon that the character of Bad Horse in Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog be an ACTUAL horse.

But on to this book:

The biggest question in creating a series around a cow, not an anthropomorphic cow, mind, but a normal, non-speaking cow, is how do you propel a story without the main character speaking or at least thinking?

You create a world in which the other characters pick up the slack, and Man-Eating Cow does that brilliantly. We start with a gangster being devoured by M.E.C, which involves the police, so we get the perspective of the investigating officer. We also get a rodeo clown who's been trailing M.E.C. for a long time. This world, by the way, is full of clowns, poet gangsters, cannibalistic superheroes, and any other zany features the writers can think of, but in the world of the Tick, it all makes perfect sense. The first eight issues of M.E.C. are absolutely fantastic, my only complaint is that the last two issues were part of a company crossover and didn't include the other issues.

Also in this collection we have the three issues of the Chainsaw Vigilante series. C.V. was a character introduced in the Tick as an anti-hero whose only goal was to rid the world of superheroes because they were taking the work away from the police and causing more problems. The series continues this battle and even sees C.V. reach a level of success. Unfortunately, it ends right in the middle of a storyline and leaves a lot of questions unanswered.

Overall a good collection, just wish there had been more of it. ( )