Never Meet Your Heroes

The Boys by Garth Ennis and co-created, designed, and illustrated by Darick Robertson.
Comic Book Review by Kerey McKenna.

So many superheroes these days. In comic books and theaters, on broadcast TV and now the streaming services. There are standalone heroes and hero team-ups and movies where heroes team up with other versions of themselves from parallel universes. Seemingly even some notable bombs can’t stop some superhero franchises from chugging along. You could wipe half of them from existence but they’d come roaring back the next year, in even greater numbers. Does every other movie or TV show have to be an adaptation of some sci-fi pulp fiction rag starring some model-perfect celebrity who packed on the muscle (or donned a padded suit) to get in on the craze some of you may ask? Who will save us from this legion of costumed clowns?

That’s where “The Boys” come in.

The Boys comic book series, running from 2006 to 2012, is a brutal deconstruction of comic book superheroes. With Amazon Prime’s new streaming adaptation coming this week I wanted to briefly revisit the original comics.

They are set in a world where Corporate America mass produces a glut of irresponsible and dangerous real life super-powered people in a profane combination of celebrity culture and defense spending. Very few of the “Superheroes” in the story (most of whom are clear parodies of DC and Marvel Characters) have any redeeming qualities. They are a result of the mega corporation, Vault American (think OCP from the RoboCop trilogy) either attempting to create human weapons, or covering up when they cause industrial accidents that result in some poor schmuck getting doused in chemicals and coming out the other end with superpowers. Whether grown in a vat or coming into contact with hazardous chemicals, Vaught slaps garish costumes on them, creates back stories, and makes them rich with a share of the merchandising and comic book rights. Comics are bowdlerized or outright fictionalized accounts of their “adventures.” Vaught American has the marketing down to a science, with a legion of super IP for all tastes: Teams of young “Social Justice Warrior” heroes checking off every demographic box for progressives. Jingoistic “God, Family, Country” heroes for Middle America. Vaught American doesn’t really care about either value set, just about casting the widest net possible in pursuit of profit. Many of the supers themselves are assigned their heroic identities and accompanying politics much in the way that pro wrestlers are—the costume and persona are assigned by management and it is the performers’ responsibility never to break character in public.

Meanwhile, as there is little need for actual day-to-day superheroics (battles in this world are rare but tend to be brutal, vicious, short and likely to result in collateral damage), many of the “heroes” partake in the usual vices of celebrity: sex, drugs, and all manner of irresponsibility with the assurance that their corporate masters will grease the palms to keep them out of the papers and jail. As if any jail could hold them…

Not happy about super-powered menaces with an excellent PR department running around, the US government activates “The Boys,” a small goon squad of individuals given superpowers to keep the garishly dressed supers and their corporate masters in check through blackmail, intimidation, and brutal application of lethal force:

Billy Butcher: Leader of the The Boys, this rough and tumble British bruiser has brains to match his considerable brawn. Always accompanied by his bulldog Terror, Butcher has a veneer of gallows and profane humor covering a very personal vendetta against the world’s most powerful super, The Homelander, a blond ubermensch in a star-spangled costume. Clearly a riff on Superman.

Mother’s Milk: Billy’s lancer. His mother worked in a Vaught industrial facility and exposure to chemicals passed along extra superpower imbuing nutrients when she nursed him.

The Frenchman: What’s his nationality? He’s French. Why do you think he has this outrageous accent?!

The Female (of the Species): a stoic (mostly silent) teenage waif who is ready for any excuse to fold men into pretzels and punt them into the stratosphere.

Wee Hughie: The newest member of the team and the primary audience POV character to learn about this world. Hailing from bonny Scotland, he is recruited to the team and granted superpowers after his girlfriend is brutally killed as collateral damage by a reckless super. Brought into the fold by Billy, he is our viewpoint to the ridiculous, profane, and deadly excesses of the supers and the many sins of Vaught America.

The Boys fits in with other works that violently deconstruct a superhero genre that has become inexorably entwined with the comics medium, such as 1980’s classics Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, or millennial fair like Kick-Ass and Super. This was a series that launched two years before the MCU takeover of the international box office and wrapped up the same year as Avengers delivered on the promise of a shared cinematic universe. What would it feel like to revisit this harsh take down of superheroes as they’ve started taking over the culture?

After a quick reread I’d say my feelings are still very mixed but curious about what Amazon is going to do with the material.

First, the book revels in over the top graphic depictions of sex and violence (as do many works by co-creator Garth Ennis). Beyond the gut-churning imagery itself, what I find most disconcerting is that the series veers wildly between extreme imagery in service of realism and pathos on one page, and then in the next page pulls a 180 with the violence and sex a punchline for dark humor. The only through line connecting the extremes is a consistent drum beat of cynicism: about politics, about the genre, and about the human (and superhuman) experience.

The anger and cynicism that drips off the page (with all the blood and gore) makes the most sense if you take into account that Garth Ennis is ambivalent or even outright hostile to the superhero genre that dominates comic books. In laying out a narrative in which honest blue-collar goons can take down celebrity ubermenschen, it seems like Ennis often isn’t writing to make a grand statement about the nature of corruption of power, but rather an exercise in catharsis to violently banish the costumed clones that take up so much of his work schedule when he’d rather be writing about spies, soldiers and gunmen.

I felt the series was strongest in its earliest installments in which the two most naive members of the cast, Wee Hughie the rookie member of The Boys, and Star Light, a heroine who has just graduated to “The Seven” (A dark parody of the Justice League, led by the Homelander) still have all their preconceptions about superheroes—and themselves. As the story unfolds, they see these preconceptions cruelly undermined at every turn as they come to realize just how dark and twisted the world really is.

A lot of what the pair discover isn’t so much the dark secrets of the fictional world, but indictments of the superhero genre and comic book industry itself. Rereading this years later (very much after the superhero takeover of the mainstream) many of the most important critiques still ring true (treatment of female creators and female characters in the industry, shallow virtue/value signaling by mega corporations, and how much corporate lobbying protects big business from actual market forces). Other parts of the story (9/11, The Avengers being relatively unknown by the public when compared to The Justice League, its Stan Lee Parody) feel very much like products of their time and have not aged well at all.

As I said I’m interested in what Amazon is going to do with this so in my next installment I will binge the new show and report back whether the transition to TV and some new creators in the mix have smoothed out the rough edges.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.