Who are The Boys?

Just about sums it up.
(Garth Ennis / Darick Robertson)

The Boys is one of my favorite comics from the last five or so years, written by Garth Ennis and with art primarily by Darick Robertson. Ennis, when describing what he wanted from The Boys, said, “I want to out-Preacher Preacher.” If you’re familiar with Ennis’s work, this quote shouldn’t be a surprise at all. If you’re not, be prepared for a crash course in Terrible People Doing Terrible Things.

Taking place in modern times with an altered history starting with World War II, The Boys is, on the surface, a gritty and gross satire of big-name superhero comics. Once you start reading and getting into the plot, however, it’s easy to tell that Ennis is throwing around some pretty hard hitting themes. It’s more than only what superheroes and villains could be if they were the opposite of their idealized selves from the usual comics. He also delves into American political satire, Corporate America’s corruption and strong moral themes about absolute power corrupting absolutely and what makes good people stay good and bad people go worse. Early in, there’s talk about this setting’s version of 9-11, and Ennis does a fantastic job capturing the trauma it caused not just to individuals but in a collective consciousness sense.

“The Name of the Game”

The Boys are a hush-hush spec-ops team put together by the CIA to keep a covert eye on “supe” (superheroes and villains) activity and to quietly put down any of them that get out of control. Supes in this world are hedonistic and generally awful; all have gotten their powers from an unstable drug (‘Compound V’) created out of WWII by Nazi scientists. These people are people who’ve been given heaps of power, heaps of money and a ton of public attention; many of them react like they’re Charlie Sheen with laser beam eyes. Mostly controlled by the corrupt corporation Vought-American, supes are money-makers, breeding a huge comic book industry and multi-media empire. VA, though, has their eye on bigger, better things – like supes supplementing the American military.

Thrown into the mix are The Boys themselves.

Butcher –
The leader of The Boys, Billy Butcher is an affable, charming Cockney murderer. Once just second in command while The Boys was more about the covert and less about the violent policing of supes, the current incarnation of the team is entirely his responsibility. He keeps a wonderful bulldog named Terror, who answers to such commands as “Terror – fuck it, mate.”

Wee Hughie –
Simon Pegg. No, really! He’s modeled after Pegg, who did the forward for the first TPB. Hughie’s a mostly normal young man, recruited into The Boys after becoming the tragic victim to the aftermath of superhero activities. The comic is largely seen through Hughie’s eyes as he quickly discovers just how over his head he is.

Mother’s Milk –
Huge, scary and just about the only really sane man in The Boys. He’s had a pretty shitty family life even by this setting’s standards. Let’s not talk about his name.

The Female –
A young mute girl, The Female seems to be completely addicted to violence. She’s the heavy hitter of The Boys, willing to literally tear faces off upon request. Extremely close with Frenchie, he’s the one she most listens to, especially when it’s time for chocolates and not violence, something she has a problem with.

The Frenchman-
Once participated in french-bread jousting. A giant simmering stew of every French stereotype, the Frenchman is hilarious, absolutely mad and despite his soft spot for the rest of the team, completely terrifying in a fight.

There’s a huge supporting cast of very memorable characters, like the butt-monkey assistant to the CIA Director, who is living the trope so hard that he’s called ‘Monkey,’ or Vasilii Vorishikin, a Russian ex-supe who claims he’s drinking vodka when it’s probably brake cleaner and constantly mourns the loss of the Communist state.

The superheroes are mostly satiric pastiches of well known heroes or villains. The most powerful of the supes are The Seven, who are basically The Justice League backed by big business. They’re led by Homelander; he is Superman if Superman had a God-complex and an appetite for eating babies.

“La Plume De Ma Tante Est Sur La Table”

Ennis is, as he tends to be even in his best work, is heavy-handed with some of his themes If you have a problem with gore, sex, vulgarity of all kinds or pitch-black humor, you should probably avoid The Boys. It’s a brutal story with brutal people; Ennis, as usual, doesn’t shy away from ‘mature’ elements as storytelling props – violence is shockingly common, crude language of all types are handily thrown around and there’s so many boobs you might think you’re reading Heavy Metal: The Terrible People Edition.

In this story, supes are celebrities if all celebrities were as terrible as we want them to be; watching superheroes is as train-wreck fascinating as watching reality TV. The actual ‘heroes,’ The Boys, are often just as violently bad as their targets, and redemption is a thing that gets, essentially, shat on.

When you look beyond the violence for impact’s sake, when you look past the gross humor and the incredible amount of fucked-up activities in the comic (and there are so many), The Boys is an amazing story, especially for anyone who’s read superhero comics since they were a kid. What Ennis is doing here, his usual bombastic and extreme way is creating a world in which our heroes aren’t what we want to be, but what we very well are (if you are a pessimist who doesn’t just see the glass as half empty but instead broken, jagged and dealing out tetanus).

“The Bloody Doors Off”

The Boys is thought-provoking if you don’t just take it at face value. You can certainly read it at face value as well, laughing at the bodily fluid jokes, marveling at the unhallowed amount of violence, ogling the boobies. But that’s all just dressing on top of book that in its heart, I see as an angry letter about the prostitution of comic books.

Incoming reading many things into a comic book:

Ennis talks about how the big business that creates and runs the supes is only concerned about profit and not with the calamitous impact that supes have on the lives of everyday bystanders like Hughie. They don’t care about how their superheroes affect the people, they don’t care about the supes’ personalities, ideals, sins and crimes. They care about the bottom line, what makes big bucks. They don’t care that Superman comics aren’t selling well because kids these days are devouring Spawn.

Meanwhile one of the ‘good guys’ is The Legend, an ex-editor from the big corporation’s superhero comic publishing division. The Legend is a blast from the past, an editor who goes on long-winded soliloquies, rants and abuses well-inked text boxes. The Legend shows us an almost tender side to all this superhero hate; a fond nod to the past when things were bad, but not unleashed to the levels they are now. The Legend is two young Jewish guys in New York City, ten years before World War II, designing a man who was so good, so powerful, so super, that a collective consciousness wanted him to be an ideal of us.

“Over the Hill with the Swords of A Thousand Men”

If you already hate Garth Ennis and his distinctive storytelling style, skip The Boys because it is a glorious encapsulation of everything he does. But otherwise?

I think you should read The Boys. I really think you should read The Boys. Are you like me – did you, once upon a time, devour superhero comic books, only to slowly get more and more turned off, to get frustrated as the Big Two publishers made dumber and dumber mistakes? If you finally threw your comics down in frustration when a female character’s reboot was now solely cock-hungry and vapid or when thirty years of storytelling was tossed out the window because divorce makes a character ‘too old’ or any of the other shitty occurrences over the last decade of comics, The Boys will be something you can appreciate. You’ll cheer for them every time they bring a baseball bat down on some shallow, plastic schmuck in spandex’s generically-masked head.