The Jabberwock

Everyone can be a superhero, but not anyone can be one. The 20th century introduced the idea of far from human super powered individuals that surpassed what’s possible by any average human. Superheroes used their powers to stop injustices and protect the innocent.  Ideas of a superhero are used generally with many different types of superheroes branching off. DC and Marvel already have plenty of examples of what their definitions and types of superheroes are. By the turn of the 21st century, Marvel and DC struggled with new ideas of how to redefine a superhero. Edginess and maturity plagued the early years of the new century with more lighthearted themes becoming less prevalent. Image Comics in 2007 would present their new idea for the superhero genre.

The Boys from Image Comics is a gritty satire of superheroes written by Garth Ennis. Garth Ennis is  a known critic of the superhero genre; often despising the superheroes in the superhero genre. Ennis’s main idea of a superhero is a character like the Punisher, a character that Ennis has written comics about on occasion when he used to work for Marvel Comics. The Boys comics paint the superhero as more of celebrities that are starved for attention rather than real superheroes. The universe of The Boys is quite miserable for the average person as the superheroes here are rarely ever trained and could care less about innocent lives. All the superheroes are under the management of Vought International.  Hughie Campbell is the main character of the story and he is our pov character. One day with his girlfriend Robin, she was suddenly killed by A-Train, the fastest man alive. A-Train is a member in the most prominent superhero group known as The Seven.

Hughie is utterly devastated by the loss, but can’t do anything towards A-Train due to how it was simply deemed as civilization’s casualties. A-Train gets away and couldn’t care less about ending an innocent girl’s life. Hughie spirals for a bit, but eventually meets a man named Billy Butcher. Butcher manipulates Hughie to join The Boys, a group that specializes in taking out superheroes. From this introduction of The Boys, the tone Ennis tries to paint is depressing and grimy and this was the common theme throughout the Boys comics. In my opinion, Ennis is too obsessed with this edginess over writing a cohesive story. 

After reading all the Boys comics for myself, I believe The Boys comics can be best summed up as Ennis’s fanfiction. Hughie and his new group of friends dress in black go around and beat the ever loving crap of superheros. The comic very clearly paints how all superheroes are not just lowlife celebrities, but every superhero is a degenerate and or a sexual deviant. 

All superheroes here are direct parodies of superheroes from Marvel and DC. Homelander, leader of The Seven, is the most clear example of the parody with his parody being Superman but evil. No nuance is added to these evil inversions of known beloved characters. The comic struggles with how to characterize each superhero The Boys face off against, other than being evil generic parodies of the superhero they are ripping off. The most egregious example is Black Noir, a parody of Batman, eating babies to show how evil this Batman parody is. What genuine point does showing all these graphic images and gore for the story other than shock value and to be gritty for the sake of being edgy? 

Ennis feels like he is very personal with his hatred of superheroes. His thinking is more so let’s be disgusting and gross for the sake of showing the grittiness of our universe while murdering costume people I despise. Violence and sexual acts are very common in the comic and are fully in the reader’s face which would turn off first time viewers of this comic. This focus of edginess in my opinion made Ennis blinded by his work, which leads into issues in the storytelling of The Boys.

Another issue with The Boys comics are also certain aspects that utterly breaks the world building of the universe. One aspect that I questioned is how Compound V is used in the story. Compound V is a drug in The Boys universe and is the main source of why superheroes exist in this universe.  Most superheroes are made in labs injected with this Compound V. Butcher injects all The Boys with Compound V as well in order to fight back against the superheroes. Compound V is the main reason why The Boys are unstoppable and they have no problem ripping apart superheroes. This brings the question of what point is there to superheroes if everyone can get superpowers from this drug. Butcher says early in the comic there are roughly 200,000 people injected with Compound V; 200,000 superbeings on the planet.

I can further question why haven’t these 200,000 people come together and take over the world, but that comes later in the comic.  There are no consequences with the use of Compound V and The Boys themselves don’t feel that much different from the superheroes themselves. The Boys are just more trained and actually stand a fight against these superheroes. I get that most of these superheroes are rarely ever trained because of their powers making them sloppy when it comes to saving people, but an ounce of tension would be appreciated when you are trying to make a comic focus on taking down superheroes. 

The ending of The Boys doesn’t even include the group beating up superheroes.  The whole build of the comic of people fighting back against superheroes is thrown out the window with the military industrial complex rather coming in and killing all the crazy superheros who just realized we can take over the world whenever they wanted. The military just had special weapons to kill superheroes on standby this entire time and let all these crazy superheroes kill the president. Not only are the superheroes incompetent, but the government as well are incompetent in stopping these comic costume crazy people sooner who could have done way more damage if there were no anti-superhero weapons. 

My final critique for the comics are the assassinations of our core characters. Hughie and Butcher take most of the focus of the story and we see their dynamics. Butcher needs Hughie as the main guy to tell him when his actions are too much in his huge murder quest against superheroes. Hughie is the most decent person and is the pov-character for the readers. You as a reader  would be mostly shocked as well when you are now in a life forced to fight against people constantly in an endless battle. Hughie himself is very reluctant in fighting back against the superheroes and is very sorry for accidentally killing some of the superheroes. He is the only guy later on in fact to challenge the idea that not all superheroes are bad with his relationship with Starlight, a superhero in The Seven. Starlight is the rare case that not all superheroes are crazy lunatics, but can be decent people too that do deserve their powers to do the right thing, to be a real superhero. 

This is thrown out when Hughie finally meets with A-Train again. A-Train, being the main villain of Hughie’s life, still remained in the background right until Butcher captured A-Train

Hughie in a fit of rage kills A-Train once learning how A-Train sexually assaults Starlight and how A-Train shows little remorse with his actions. This moment should represent Hughie’s fall to Butcher’s level of crazy, but the moment in the comic falls flat in execution. Hughie for the most part of the comic is level-headed and doesn’t show the violent rages and tendencies that Butcher has. This moment tries to paint this as a dark moment for Hughie, but I felt nothing when reading this page of the comic. It doesn’t help that A-Train himself has no character himself and barely interacts with Hughie following the inciting incident. Rarely any drama between both is present throughout the comic; the focus is rather more so on Hughie’s relationship with Starlight and their troubles in a relationship. You can say Butcher goading Hughie to be on his level of brutality is the main intention of the scene, but I can also say how little Hughie gets in falling towards the dark side of Butcher. Hughie always brings down The Boys to reality in what they are doing and continues being that character towards the end. His killing of A-Train is offputting for his character and A-Train’s death isn’t very satisfying because his dynamic with Hughie is barely explored. 

Billy Butcher himself is the character that ropes Hughie into this life of fighting superheroes. Butcher is very cynical and has dedicated his entire life to killing superheroes. We learn his main motives for this destructive life in the spinoff Dear Becky. Butcher was always a violent man due to his abusive father and his service in the military. It was until the subway back from a bar fight that changed everything for Butcher when he met Becky. Both immediately fall in love with one another and Becky would be the only person in Butcher’s life to care about him. Butcher’s happy world was forever stopped one night as Becky would die next to Butcher. A super powered baby would crawl out of her and Butcher had to kill the small child.

Butcher deduces that during one of his vacations with Becky, Homelander raped her and is the father of the demon child. The motives of why Butcher is in this destructive life make sense, but Butcher towards the end goes off the rails. At the end of the comic when most of the superheroes were killed by the military, Butcher goes crazy and decides to kill all The Boys to ensure no super power beings can exist in the world. Using bombs to target the Compound V within the Boys’ blood, Butcher kills MM, Frenchie and Kimiko. His final act of killing Hughie doesn’t work as Hughie kills him. 

This complete turn of a lunatic murder could have been predicted as Butcher was shown to be violent. Killing the team that loyally served him however and are shown to be nothing like superheros is a very jarring turn of events. MM and Hughie as well have families; MM would never see her daughter again because of Butcher. Deciding to kill The Boys as well is also very stupid on Butcher’s part as superheroes still exist in this world. Some superheroes didn’t join the revolution at the white house and still remained superheroes. Vought is still standing and The Boys could be needed again if another superhero revolution breaks out. Butcher doesn’t consider this and just wants an excuse to kill more people that have Compound V within them. This downward spiral doesn’t work for Butcher because his actions are quite iditotic for what was established of his character. 

Garth Ennis really hates the idea of superheroes. He wrote an entire story of his edgy original creations murdering superheroes. He was almost too dedicated to killing superheroes in different ways to express his anger over writing a cohesive story. Just because elements of the story are edgy, the story is not automatically good or mature. It makes Ennis look really strange that he thought of these ideas of eating babies and sexual fantasies in The Boys. Writing wise, there was a lot of intrigue within The Boys universe. All the potential and maybe fascinating concepts are buried within this edginess and degeneracies. Trying to be as phallic as possible blinds you as a creative person.