I saw a few episodes of the Amazon Prime series and it made me want to read the source material. Well, I was disappointed. The book is slower paced, which is to be expected, but it is also more focused on the gross-out humor and leans on gore much more. The characters are more exaggerated in a way that reduces the contrast between the protagonists and the antagonists, and they're all less interesting. The hero characters aren't layered enough to be interesting (with one exception), so there's a lot less satisfaction of the Boys taking them down. Also, the Boys lean on an uninteresting plot device to be able to take on the heroes, and the way the show deals with that element of the story is stronger. ( )

I picked up the first volume of this comic because I heard it was subversive and had loads of violence. My expectations about the sex and violence were met, but I did not find this to be a subversive take on superheroes--in fact it follows a lot of tired action tropes to where I could see my Dad enjoying The Boys. Women are relegated to few roles (mainly sexual), have virtually no important speaking roles, and are often "put in their place". There is a particularly cringy scene were Butcher lectures a teenage woman about her clothing choices and her disrespect for her father: a scene to which I'm sure conservative dads everywhere creamed their cargo shorts. Attitudes about women aside, there were issues with anachronistic words and beliefs that left me confused often as to when this story was supposed to take place. The story feels disjointed and I can tell its probably going to be episodic. I don't read much superhero comic books on the regular so maybe this is normal. It has a long story arc featuring gay characters and The Boys' attitude towards queer people is...troubling. Butcher tolerates and is neutral toward queer characters but uses their queerness as fodder for blackmail and constantly uses slurs when talking about them. So he is essentially that guy who is nice to gays on the surface but talks shit about them behind their back and will call you a snowflake for wanting to talk about queer people in a respectful manner or support gay rights. I'll sum up by saying if you want to read a truly great superhero deconstruction, look up the we serial Worm by Wildbow. ( )

Watching the trailer for the upcoming Amazon series made me decide to finally pick up and read this series, which I’ve heard about here and there over the years. I ended up really liking this volume, although I wasn’t entirely sure what to think at points. It feels like a book from the 80s or 90s, but it was first published in the early 2000s and is set around the same time. Parts of the book are pretty gruesome, and it seems like series isn’t going to shy away from depicting the gore and perversion. I’m not sure how well that will work in a live-action setting, but I’ll give it a chance if I can find time to watch it without my girlfriend. Worth checking out for its combination of misanthropy crossed with inverted tropes. ( )

Supes Gone Wild
Review of the Dynamite Entertainment trade paperback edition (2019) collecting the original floppy comic books Nos. 1 to 14 from October 2006 to January 2008.

I started following the Amazon TV-series "The Boys" as it is filmed in Toronto and it is always fun to do location spotting in movies and shows that were filmed in my home town. Generally I'm not big on anti-hero role-reversal superhero fiction since I grew up with the old school hero comics.

I was curious to try out the original comics on which the TV-series was based and discovered it was even more depraved than the TV-version. So I'm not likely to follow-up with reading the full 72 issues of the original.

Major differences from the TV-series are Hughie was originally drawn looking like Simon Pegg, who played Hughie's father in Season 1, main villains The Seven play only a minor role in Nos. 1 to 14 but it does include Annie (Starlight) being indoctrinated into the group, the Deep wears a diver's helmet, there is a whole different Seven member called John from Jupiter, during most of Nos. 1 to 14, the Boys battle other lower level supes including the Teenage Kix and a Russian based group, the Boys themselves (not just the Female) are injecting the superserum Compound V in order to be able to battle the supes, there isn't any of the Vought Corporation satire humor (which I realize is probably my favorite part of the TV show aside from the Annie/Hughie romance). ( )

MUahahahahahaha

What a grand treat this is! I mean, I fell in love with the Amazon show and I've been a diehard fan of the Preacher (also Garth Ennis), so it's kinda a no-brainer that I would have gone gung-ho over this one as well.

What I DIDN'T expect was just how far, how raunchy, how purely, gloriously satirical Ennis would take it!

A lot of the iconic scenes and character twists are exactly the same in both the tv show and the comic, but in some cases, it's much MORE. Starlight, for example, got cornered by three of the Seven on first meet-and-greet. The Serum is much more widespread than we were lead to believe in the show, as well. And the embarrassing moments? The blackmail attempts? The full-out craziness of the supes, everywhere? These are worse in the comics. And by worse, I mean deliciously horrific and entertaining.

The satire is god-awful brilliant. I was really blown away by Tech-Knight (aka Batman) and his little problem. Getting to know The Legend (aka Stan Lee) was also great. But you know what blew me away the most? The f**k-up with the airplane. It was this alternate history's 9/11, taking out the Brooklyn Bridge. And the cluster-F surrounding big corporations owning the government is pretty much the same... only the big players are different. Supes are BIG BUSINESS, ya know?!

So delicious. And I'm only a third done in the Big Omnibus. I can't wait to see how this war ENDS. :) ( )