Now in its fourth season on Amazon Prime out of a planned five, The Boys is one of the unlikelier superhero comics to find mainstream success. The Garth Ennis-led feature for Dynamite Entertainment (the first six issues having initially been published by Wildstorm) radiates with genuine contempt for the entire superhero genre which then, as now, dominates comic books in the English language. But 2006 was a very different time not just for superhero culture, but the culture of American exceptionalism that Ennis constantly attacked. The auspice of the later part of the Iraq War looms large over The Boys, with war coming to mean less incomprehensible horror so much as all-too-comprehensible farce, with self-absorbed "Supes" led by Homelander challenged by self-satisfied CIA agents led by Billy Butcher.
Some basic background on The Boys first, though. The comic takes place in a world that’s more-or-less analogous to the DC comics superhero setting. Major superhero groups like The Seven battle supervillains and remain aloof in an orbital watchtower. But The Seven, led by the Superman/Captain America analog Homelander, care less about actually helping people so much as just enriching themselves. The violence in The Boys is grotesque, sexual, and fairly gratuitous to the point the Amazon Prime version of the show inevitably had to tone it down.
This is the main fact anyone who’s ever read the original comics will tell you. But The Boys as a show tends to hew closer to the arc of the comics than many critics give it credit for. Both introduce the superheroine Starlight as new recruit to The Seven, who is almost immediately sexually assaulted upon arrival. The chief difference between the two scenes is context– in the comic first Homelander, and then A-Train and Black Noir almost ceremoniously demand blowjobs as the price for entry. But in the show, The Deep manipulates Starlight by taking advantage of her ignorance to trick him into thinking he’s more influential than he really is. The comic version is more over the top, to be sure, but it’s not really any more or less realistic than what we see on Amazon Prime. Rather, the discourse in 2019, compared to 2006, favored the pathetic loser interpretation of sexual assaulters like Louis CK. More systemic sexual abuse certainly exists – it just wasn’t the focus of #MeToo, the modern movement premised, for better or worse, on the idea that this time, everything is different.
That is, admittedly, a charitable interpretation. It’s worth remembering that The Boys is is a comic where Tek Knight, a very unsubtle Batman parody, becomes consumed by an uncontrollable desire to stick his penis into holes, eventually finally explained by an undiagnosed brain tumor that no doctor even tried to search for because everyone just assumed he’s been a closeted homosexual this entire time. On the superficial level, Tek Knight’s story is just a license for a grotesque take on very cliched even for 2006 Batman gay jokes.
But the commentary’s more clever than it looks. Tek Knight is so heavily defined by this peccadillo the reader barely even notices that the actual important part of his character is that his superpower is just being rich while every other character humors him. When The Boys themselves finally show up at Tek Knight’s door, the penis in hole obsession is mostly ignored.
This presentation of the character remains when TV show finally reintroduces him in the fourth season, and while the peccadillo is now just Tek Knight’s natural sexual humor, his openness about that humor is just a different kind of gross. A cursory acknowledgement of modern consent practices and safe words mask that Tek Knight is a selfish, sadistic character rather than a tragically pathetic one. In either appearance, The Boys can only regard him with disinterested disgust.
About The Boys, as in the characters. A person watching the TV show might forget, most of the time, that they all work for the CIA. Garth Ennis did not, and the reference to this in the comics is much, much more explicitly negative. At one point The Boys hitch a ride on a plane that’s quite literally filled with hooded, imprisoned figures who might be but probably aren’t terrorists on their way to be horribly tortured. Ennis conflates the Abu Ghraib imagery, torture that was done solely for cruelty, with the CIA torture program under George W. Bush, which supposedly had an intelligence gathering purpose – the implication clearly being that the CIA torture program wasn’t any better. For a crude comic with grotesque sex and violence, this is a noticeably sharper critique than the serious, Oscar-worthy feature film Zero Dark Thirty, which did the exact same conflation but to the opposite effect, implying that any sort of torture could be rationalized under this logic.
Cultural circumstance defines a lot of these radically different interpretations. Pluto from Japanese comic author Naoki Urasawa from roughly the same time period dealt with similar themes in a much broader context. Its fictionalized middle eastern war is only recent history, and the characters directly involved with it alternate rage and trauma. Yet the war was still in the past, far away, and something the story’s humanized superpowered robots could try to move on from.
The Boys isn’t afforded such a luxury, with the superhuman infantilized Supes of its setting trying, and failing, to stop 9/11, directly leading to many of the disastrous events of the comic’s story. The Amazon Prime version moves the 9/11 scene from flashback to present day – damaging the real world parallel to better emphasize the importance of image. Another logical change to the adaptation affecting these impressions is changing Hughie’s character from a Scot to an American. Having four fifths of the CIA employed team of The Boys not even be American in the original comic seems like an odd choice until you remember the extent to which the United States government pushed allies around the world to at least symbolically participate in the War on Terror.
Garth Ennis, at least, no doubt appreciated this irony, as a Northern Irish writer thoroughly ensconced in the American comics industry. Although not just the commercial industry, but even its cultural defenders, seemed unwilling and unable to appreciate Ennis’ military comic, which much more directly, rather than metaphorically, treated the subject of war. That The Boys is Ennis’ best known work is largely thanks to the sheer popularity of superhero branding that The Boys itself obviously despises.
But then, branding wasn’t quite as omnipresent in our culture back then, even if the pages of old Dynamite Comics issues are loaded with advertisements for such forgotten franchising attempts as new Zorro and Green Hornet adventures. Ennis himself didn’t quite understand branding as well as he should have given the theming. A-Train as the name of a speed-enhanced African-American superhero with an inspiring rise from the ghetto story seems brilliant in the show. Yet none of the original creators seemed to realize where the real-life A-Train actually goes, given that the comic book version of the character is white.
While The Boys in comic form isn’t especially clever or subtle, its bitter cynicism is its main core component. In its penultimate season, The Boys as a TV series seems incapable of escaping the more horrific implications of the comic’s bleak attitude as various factions prepare for a climax around a virus that can kill all Supes. Try as they might to find a better way, no one in four seasons worth of The Boys has found anything even remotely redeeming in the idea of superheroes.
The post Bring on <i>The Boys</i>: Success, Supes, satire, cynicism and Garth Ennis appeared first on The Comics Journal.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
No comments:
Post a Comment