Netflix’s adaptation of The Boys, a 2006 to 2012 comic books series by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, has been widely praised and well received since its inception. The concept is a refreshing and brutalist take on the overplayed hero-flick genre, dominated by stale Marvel and DC iterations which take few risks and almost always avoid gore and confrontation.
Gore is, instead, the name of the game in Netflix’s hit series, with graphic violence as well as confronting depictions of rape and depraved sexual acts. On the whole, however, the television adaptation does an excellent job of balancing both shocking the audience and continuing an intriguing plot and developing nuanced characters, aided by a particularly brillaint performance from Antony Starr as The Homelander. In the way that the series reinvents some areas of the superhero genre for the larger market, The Boys has parallels to equally graphic series such as Invincible, or even to inovative movies like the Spider-Verse franchise.
All of this new media has led me, years after The Boys premiered on Amazon, to read the original series by Ennis and Robertson. Growing up loving comic books, particularly The Phantom, meant an easy gateway to manga and graphic novels in my late teens, an interest I have never abandoned. In fact, I hunted down the Invincible comics series after realizing the wait would be significant even for a second season of Amazon’s animated television series. Although upon rewatching I found Invincible (the TV series) to be at times slow or disappointing, I devoured the comics, impressed by the artwork, plotlines, characters and pacing. Coming to The Boys, I was expecting a somewhat commensurate experience, having heard that the comics were even a tad more confronting than the Amazon adaptation. That comment, I suppose, is an understatement.
From the outset The Boys shows exactly what it is; with Robertson’s darkened, at times murky and always bold art style, the comics immediately immerse themselves in the sordid and the debaucherous. Beyond the above examples, graphic violence has always been a gripping tool in visual media, from Game of Thrones to John Wick. Game of Thrones is a good example of the difficulty in embracing the gruesome, such as the death of Vyserys to a crown of molten gold, without descending to the gratuitous, like the torture of Theon Greyjoy. The Boys makes it immediately apparent that these comics will have no such troubles.
Instead, it is made abundantly clear from the outset that, whenever possible, the gratuitous will be embraced. Murder, rape, bestiality and assault in all forms barely covers the range of graphic depictions in The Boys, which lends to the overwhelming sense of heaviness that reading it brings. In part, the series embraces these scenes to demonstrate the horrific cruelty of the super-powered beings in its pages, uncaring and unfeeling towards ordinary people and the norms we have developed. I am certain that the intent is to shock the reader into disgust at the actions of those without empathy or morality, but there is also, one feels, a perverse joy taken in the detailed depiction of these debasing acts. As always seems to occur in comics and manga, women bear the overwhelming brunt of the sexual and physical violence, although The Boys has no qualms in meting out vicious deaths upon men and women in equal measure.
I like to think I come into new experiences with an open mind and, having love Amazon’s depiction of The Boys despite it’s raunchiness, I was expecting to equally enjoy Ennis and Robertson’s original. However, where Amazon’s series humanizes and sanitizes certain characters, makes others more complex and interesting, introduces some as comic relief and omits the more graphic of acts, the original is a bleak and brutal view of humans at their worst. Rabid, horny, foul, nasty critters whose only desires are to rape and pillage, to sin without regret; this is the essence of the "supes" in the comics, and in this portrayal they lose the ability to act as an anti-hero or a villain for whom you have any compassion whatsoever.
Here is where I feel the original differs from Amazon’s portrayal; where the television show is really about The Homelander’s descent into madness and the political fascism which he stokes in a post-Trump style public, the original is more of a criticism of capitalism and its profits-over-people approach to collateral and consumers. Where a multitude of the characters in Amazon’s series feel fleshed out and compelling, the comic’s characters are more one-dimensional with clearer separation between the good and the bad, serving mostly as a means to deliver the series’ stinging rebuke of capitalism and all it stands for. As such, when Butcher attempts to enact his "final solution" for the super-powered problem, there is a lack of investment in those attempting to stop him from the side of the reader. Apart really from Starlight and Hughie, essentially none of the "supes" show themselves to have redeemable qualities whatsoever.
The writing and artistry of The Boys, in its original form, is superb. Levels of debauchery aside, Robertson illustrates in an evocative and classic style, and the plot is engaging enough to keep one reading through the waves and waves and waves and waves and waves of blood. Overall, however, unlike the great works of media I’ve consumed throughout my life, finishing The Boys gave me an overwhelming sense of relief. The gratuitousness of the violence, the relentlessness of the depictions of rape and cruelty, and the unending reinforcement of man’s depravity was, it turns out, not great for my soul. While I would recommend The Boys to those with a deep love of classic, hardcore, grimy, Punisher-esque comic tropes, for the majority of people I can only say that you are better off saving yourself the depression and going for a walk instead.
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