Digital Sextant

The Boys

Vols 1-5
by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson

I’ve been away from comics for a while now — after I stopped buying single-issue comics a couple years back, my interests just wandered elsewhere.  But one of my students who reads comics a lot has loaned me a few interesting sets of comics, so I thought I’d comment a bit.

The Boys is Garth Ennis’ take on the Watchmen question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?  In a world where superhero teams are mostly about marketing and only a little about saving people, The Boys do the dirty work for the CIA, quashing corrupt supes and going after the mother of all villains, the Supreme 7.  It’s the usual Garth Ennis fare, with enough grotesquerie thrown in that Wildstorm kicked it to the curb, after which Dynamite comics–which seems to be known for a robust line of boob comics–has been publishing it.  A few thoughts:

• It tackles some of the same issues Warren Ellis’ The Authority did, only from the perspective of governments trying to deal with the absolute powers of the superpowered.  As in all these stories, might ends up making right, with our heroes winning through superior kickassery.
• Ennis has always had a particular fascination with mutilation, grotesque sex, and extreme violence.  These are abundant in The Boys.  He’s said that the comic will “out-Preacher Preacher,” an idea I find pretty disturbing.  While the horror of the superheroes’ debaucheries fits the grimy world of the comic, I feel like it pushes the envelope just because it can, rather than because it serves the narrative.
• Along those lines, I find the story less compelling than Preacher because we don’t have enough information about Butcher and the other members of The Boys.  It’s implied that we’ll get it here soon, but at issue 35 we haven’t gotten it yet.
• Our fish-out-of-water entry into the story-line is Hughie, a doppleganger for Simon Pegg’s everyman from Spaced.  It works pretty well, though I’m still having trouble moving away from seeing it as Simon Pegg.  It’s a weird experience to see a character explicitly modeled on a real-life person.
• I like the secondary story about Starlight, the essentially good and honest person who finds herself down in the mud with the Supreme 7 and will inevitably end up coming face to face with Hughie in some sort of big showdown.

When the series wraps up (it’s about halfway through the eventual run, it appears), I’ll probably read the rest in trade paperback to see what happens.