By Helen Creighton
Power corrupts. Superpowers corrupt absolutely. That’s the message of the 2006 comic series ‘The Boys’ – a 72-issue story arc about superheroes gone bad and the people who fight them, and now a TV series for people who don’t like superheroes, or are at least bored with the current, ever-spawning, squeaky-clean superhero movie franchises.
Except maybe Deadpool. If you like Deadpool, you’ll probably love The Boys.
The Boys in the original comic are a CIA-sponsored black ops team consisting of a rage-filled, vengeful and manipulative ex-Royal Marine named Billy Butcher; his curiously-named second in command Mother’s Milk, an ex-US military single father of an errant teenage girl and a diminutive, mute and traumatised Asian female assassin-for-hire simply referred to as The Female. The Female, who is prone to horrific uncontrolled outbursts of deadly violence, is taken under the caring wing of ludicrously Gallic and still possibly fake Frenchman (‘Frenchie’) who may or may not have once served in the French Foreign Legion. A clueless, small town Scottish everyman and conspiracy theorist, Hugh Campbell, (nicknamed ‘Wee Hughie’), recruited by Butcher after his fiance is killed in front of him due to the careless actions of a popular superpowered individual named ‘A-Train’, completes the team. Their purpose is to punish and corral the worst behaviour of notoriously degenerate teams of superheroes, all thinly disguised analogues of various Marvel and DC heroes. All ‘supes’ are essentially the latest corporate product and property of a sinister US weapons company named Voight-American, which also has a propaganda arm churning out – you’ve guessed it – endless superhero comics.
The Boys takes the deconstruction of the superhero genre started in the 1980s by Alan Moore’s classic ‘Watchmen’ to its natural end point. The satire is filthy and brutal. Nothing is exempt from mockery. The comic offers barrels of bawdy humour, irreverent dialogue, vastly over-the-top characters, many and varied Anglo Saxon swear words, excessive bloody violence and constant sexual depravity. It plants a mocking kiss right on the forehead of the comics industry itself and raises a jolly middle finger to the corporate world and its machinations. Originally published by the DC Comics adult imprint Wildstorm, it was hastily cancelled and then picked up by Dynamite after the DC head honchos actually bothered to read the first few issues and realised the off-message, anti-superhero and far too brutally adult nature of the beast. The comic even features a personification of the comics industry as a whole in the form of a incredibly sleazy, cynical old man simply named The Legend, who lives in the basement of a comic book shop, knows all the dirt on everyone and hates ‘supes’ quite as much as Billy Butcher.
I’m a longtime fan of creator Garth Ennis’s writing, and The Boys to me is among his best work so I was very curious about how the adaptation to screen would be handled. Would they retain the brutally irreverent nature of the original work? Could they handle the sick humour? In an age of Twitter mobs, ‘cancel culture’ and casual accusations of ‘misogyny’ regardless of intent or narrative context, how would they handle a major part of the story, in which sweet, idealistic Christian ingenue supe Starlight, aka Annie January, is coerced into a humiliating and abusive sexual initiation by the male members of The Seven, Voight’s premier supe team, led by the obvious Captain America/Superman analogue, The Homelander? Would they dare feature the over-endowed Russian superhero Love Sausage or would that be a bridge too far? Would Disney get their knickers in a twist over the soiling-by-association of their various intellectual properties? Would they chicken out and tone everything down? Or would they go there? Let’s find out!
One binge watch later, my overall impression of the series is that it is a highly enjoyable and quickly darkening story that takes the plot points of the comics as a jumping off point. There’s less outright bawdiness, fewer gratuitous sexual moments and a lot more delving into the various characters’ backstories and their humanity, or lack of it. My one real disappointment is that Hughie is not the Simon Pegg-lookalike young Scotsman of the original whose often naive, fish out of water view of the USA provides some comic moments, but is instead portrayed as a native of New York city. This is slightly made up for by the fact that Pegg actually appears as Hughie’s father. Jack Quaid however does a fine job as the meek, unassuming Hughie, an innocent abroad anyway in the world of supes and the only member of the team who starts the story with no blood on his hands. Apart from that of his fiance, of course, in an impressively gory scene which actually matches the visceral horror of Darrick Robertson’s original art.
The standout performances are from Antony Starr as the Homelander and Karl Urban as his nemesis, Billy Butcher. Urban, who I think often doesn’t get quite the credit he deserves as a actor – he always seems to disappear into a role – is note-perfect, a charismatic man who will give you a bizarre pep talk laden with comical Spice Girls metaphors, but who really harbours a deep-seated rage, and a deadly purpose. There’s a scene in which he brutally murders a physically harmless yet traitorous supe that is chilling in its brute physicality and fury. Just as chilling is Antony Starr’s turn as Homelander. He nails the physical presence and the wholesome, all-American charm of a classic superhero; a charm that instantly evaporates to reveal a petulant, angry and deeply damaged individual when the cameras are off. An individual who is beginning to wonder quite why someone with his powers should be taking orders from lesser mortals. An individual with some rather weird psychosexual issues that are … ah, managed by the Voight vice-president Madelyn Stillwell, as played by the ever-excellent Elizabeth Shue. Nice to see her pop up in something of this quality. Both Homelander and Billy Butcher are ticking timebombs who mirror each other in their violence, anger and their ability to put on a mask that puts others at ease. Their confrontation in the last episode turns certain events in the comics on their heads and I’m very curious to see where they will eventually go with it.
As for the whole Starlight rape issue, well, it’s done rather differently, as one should probably expect in the current era. It’s less gratuitous and involves only the aquatic supe oddity The Deep, rather than the Homelander, A-Train and the rest as in the original comic. Perhaps the whole casting couch analogy hits far too close to home in current Hollywood, as well it should. The grand reveal in the comics of the dirty secret of Starlight’s ascension to The Seven that sends Hughie into a tailspin of judgement and shows Butcher for the manipulative sod he is – and allows Ennis to probe the topic of sexual double standards – doesn’t occur. It’s rather handled as a simple female empowerment arc as Annie/Starlight eventually goes off-script in public to shame The Deep aka Kevin, a strange character played as a mixture of arrogance and complete insecurity by Chace Crawford. Kevin seems oblivious to basic standards of decency when it comes to women, but has an actually quite touching empathy with sea creatures, making him a somewhat more interesting character than just a stupid, one-dimensional rapist type. Interesting take. Tables are eventually turned and indignity upon indignity is piled upon The Deep until he begins to break down. Then there’s that scene with the poor dolphin. Blackly comical, and totally Ennis-ian, but damn.
There’s little to say about Mother’s Milk as played by Laz Alonso except that he IS the MM of the comics. Perfect. Moral, respectable and committed to his family, exactly how I imagined him, down to the way he speaks. Alonso makes the perfect foil to Tomer Kapon’s Eurotrashy Frenchie, whose character is quite wildly different from Ennis’ original work, as he should probably be – what works on the page doesn’t always translate to screen, and Frenchie’s utterly ludicrous speech, although hilarious in the comic doesn’t seem to fit this version of The Boys at all. Instead we are given a vastly toned-down interpretation with a believable backstory. What remains from the comics is his instant empathy with Karen Fukuhara’s The Female. Her backstory has also been vastly expanded from the original comic. She, like Laz Alonso, is pretty much exactly the same visual presence onscreen as in the comics, a ball of tension and murderous misery who starts to soften under Frenchie’s care, but still remains utterly deadly when pointed at the enemy.
Another female character whose role and backstory has been expanded is The Seven’s Wonder Woman analogue, Queen Maeve, played by Dominique McElligott. There does seem to be a focus on giving women more to do than in the comics, down to the gender-swapping of Stillwell which actually works really well, given the fact they actually had a reason other than ‘it’s the current year and by gum, we need more women in stuff’ to justify it via the vital plot point of her relationship with Homelander. Anyway Maeve here is a long way from the totally dissolute, aloof and permanently trashed supe of the original and I do wonder if successive series will hasten her descent into that state before long. As it is, she’s almost too likeable, too lovely even, compared to the jaded ageing blonde with ‘cracks around the edges’ (Butcher) seen in the comics. Her sheer horror at Homelander’s behaviour on that plane (an event that’s actually even way more horrifying in the books, somehow, as a much more pointed 9/11 analogy) seems destined to be the thing that will tip her over the edge.
So, yes, I can say that The Boys lives up to expectations, despite some obvious changes. Sadly no Russian arc featuring Commie hero Love Sausage yet though. One can only hope for season two. Maybe we’ll even get an appearance from Terror, Butcher’s dog (geddit) next season? More importantly I really have to wonder where that final plot-twist is going. Hopefully not into tedious marital soap opera, but judging by the quality of this first season, there doesn’t seem to be much chance of that.