The Boys, Volume 1: The Name of the Game

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The Boys is a hefty series written by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. Ennis, of Preacher fame, “blows the bloody doors off” of the Superhero genre. The Boys is not your tidy and inoffensive Superman type story. Instead, this is a bloody, gory, disgusting, and brutal take on superheroes as a genre set in a modern world. It would have to be harsh if you think about the corruption of absolute power. A superhero is probably not a sane person, and given a skewed lens of the world filtered through a life without limits, I can see them acting...badly. Although not all people are bad, as we see in the story, enough of them are that you will need a group like The Boys to attempt to keep them in check. The Boys are so harsh that it is almost repulsive, but in typical Ennis style, the reader can not turn away.

“Remember the seven Ps.
Seven what?
Proper preparation and planning... Prevent piss-poor performance.”

The superheroes in this story are called The Seven, which is a nod to the Justice League, and are your basic despotic, raping, and pillaging psycho and sociopaths. They kill for the fun of it, lord over humans, live to the excess, and are generally horrible but powerful human beings. In turn, the book explores governments' and by extension societies' responses to the superheroes with a band of misfit black ops soldiers of varying degrees of sociopathic and homicidal tendencies sent in to fight them. They, too, are incredibly screwed up but in exciting and equally terrifying ways. Their sole purpose is to keep the “supes” in check. In the center of all, this is a sweet and goofy love story. No, really, I am serious. Ennis makes it work, and it is awesome.

The overarching plot follows The Boys through a series of screwed up interactions with superheroes. The Boys “manage, police, and sometimes liquidate Vought-American's superhumans,” so that is what they do. They attempt to keep the supes in check, things go awry, there is much sex and death, people die in awful ways, and there is always another superhero to stop. Neither side can claim the moral high ground. Wee Hughie is the main character that the narrative focuses on. At one time, Hughie was just a regular bloke, his story is wrought with sadness. Hughie was in a relationship with the love of his life. His girlfriend stepped off the curb in a wonderful romantic comedy moment and was summarily destroyed in an explosion of gore and viscera. All while holding Wee Hughie's hands. No one could be quite right in the head after that.

“There'd be no point trynna blackmail a bloke everyone already knows is a cunt, would there?”

Through the series, we learn the backstory about why The Boys are the way they are, and why each of them has a reason to hate supes. Each of them has a good cause and a solid backstory. By the end of the series, we have a much richer picture of The Boys and some closure to the story. It would be exhausting if the writing and art weren't so good.

Additionally, Ennis modeled the character “Wee” Hughie as a mirror image of the actor Simon Pegg. It is a great fan nod. Some find it distracting to read about “Wee” Hughie walking into an orgy, but my sophomoric sense of humor found it utterly hilarious. The 13-year-old in me is doing double fist pumps and giggling.

“You know you can be a real bitch sometimes.”

The art is a very “Marvel comic” style, purposely drawn to convey the superhero motif. The supes and their world are drawn and colored to emphasize the superhero world's grandness and gaudiness. Versus The Boys, who are dark and melancholic.

Typical of Garth Ennis's style, the writing is large, precise, and excessive. If you are familiar with Preacher, you will be familiar with his style. The Boys is a challenging series. It is full of sex and violence to the extremes. If this bothers you, maybe look for something from a different author. But for me, this severity and excessiveness are part of its charm. Superheroes are maniacs at their core. This book acts on the extremes of superheroes with extreme characters in retaliation. Who else could keep superheroes in check than people with nothing to lose except their own moral code?

This one was a real mixed bag for me, which has become sort of typical of Ennis' work for me. When he's writing about the relationship between power, authority, and personal responsibility, Ennis can be one of the best writers of superheroes in the business. Unfortunately, a lot of his personal writing tics - his dislike of superheroes, his ‘hard-man' posturing, his penchant for pureile humour - prevent his writing from reaching its potential.

Repulsive.


Deconstruction of the superhero genre by making them snobbish or even vile is not a new concept, something that is being done ad infinitum in this current age of superhero media. But Garth Ennis takes this concepts and tries way too hard to be a new voice in the age of superhero deconstruction at its own detriment. I understand what Ennis was trying to do by making the superheroes as disgusting as possible but he practices no restraint in showing at least a little bit of humanity in it. Most of the content in the book could have been written by a middle schooler and I would have believed you as nearly every single page has reference or full display of sex, drugs, and violence without nuance. It is indulgent in the guise of being a deconstruction of the superhero genre and barely qualifies as an attempt. Regardless of the in-universe justification, everyone is an awful human being who gets off on being as awful as they can, and the story revels in the disgusting edginess and has the gall to be smug about it.


Ennis has been vocal about his distaste for superheroes and that is fine, and naturally it would bring into fruition a series that deconstructs the essence of superheroes. But it is not an excuse to have every single character be awful, where the only sympathetic people are the manipulated victims of superheroes, and spout these awful things. I get that content in a story is not the author endorsing their views, but the line blurs when even the sympathetic people scoff at homosexuality and play it as bad as sexual assault and pedophilia. Or when sexual assault is played as a joke. Maybe if there was a shed of humanity like a foil character that was actually a decent person that wasn't walked all over for it, this story would at least have some credibility. But as for now, this story doesn't mean to explore what it would be like if top superheroes were evil; it exists to be as offensive as it can be.

There is more to this story than being a self-indulgent bitter and edgy echo chamber, but it becomes hard to see that when every single line of dialogue mires itself in such moral filth. It is possible to have a genre deconstruction without resorting to avoiding any attempt at pathos. I get it what he's trying to do - but the end result is repulsive.

Anyways, I've heard the TV show changes up a lot from the books so I'll be gladly watching that.