[LASER WHOOSH]
That was diabolical!
Garth Ennis and Derek Robertson's The Boys
might appear as though they've taken the world
by storm thanks to their highly successful Amazon Prime TV
series, animated spin off, and incoming landslide
of in-universe TV and film projects,
but they've been around for quite some time.
Beginning in late 2006 and running until 2012,
they've had quite a life on the printed comic book page.
But it wasn't until Eric Kripke and the other writers
involved in The Boys TV series made some simple tweaks
to the narrative setup that the property truly captured
the imagination of the public.
Don't want to be late to your first official meeting.
I had a whole welcome speech planned.
The titular team of superhero-hunting comic book
characters--
Hughie, Butcher, Frenchie, Mother's Milk, and The Female,
collectively known as The Boys, ran for 72 issues with three
spin off miniseries to boot.
The book follows five broken and emotionally traumatized
supercape killers as they attempt
to navigate an increasingly dour future populated
by superpowered beings.
Yeah, that's right.
They're normal humans who perennially
battle corporately controlled and owned superheroes.
Movie tickets, merchandising, theme parks, video games,
a multibillion global industry.
In the world of the comics, all superheroes or owned and run
by a mega corporation called Vought American.
Their primary assets are a group of characters
called The Seven who are obvious doppelgangers of the DC Comics
Justice League.
This is writer Garth Ennis's way of making
a meta-textual statement around his views
on superhero comics and superhero culture.
Typically speaking, for me, this stuff
usually falls flat on its face.
Garth Ennis is a great writer in some genres,
but his distaste for superheroes rubs me
the wrong way more often than not,
which brings us to the first major difference
between the comics and the show.
See people love that cozy feeling that soups give them.
The Boys TV show is a bleak look at the world today
through the lens of the superheroes,
but it's not resentful of the fact
that it's a superhero TV show, whereas, the original comics
are made out of spite, ostensibly.
The simple truth is that Garth Ennis is more concerned
about being Garth Ennis and therefore, he
uses The Boys comic to create a cynical
and mean spirited narrative about the inherent problems
with superhero stories.
Instead of being a canvas that can
be used to tell any manner of stories,
Ennis has few superheroes as a fascist metaphor and nothing
else.
Together, we will make sure that this never happens
to our great nation ever again!
This is distinctly different from the TV show which
is far more concerned with actually interrogating ideas
of power and superherodom through the tropes
of the superhero genre.
Despite my complaining that The Boys is
a cynical take on superheroes, they really
developed quite a following.
After Dynamite picked them up, they found some really solid
sales numbers.
It is without a doubt a good time
to be in the superhero business.
There were rumors of the book being optioned almost as
soon as it was released, though there
are many contradicting reports about the truth
of these claims.
Eventually, it was optioned to be a movie.
Rumors of Simon Pegg actually playing Hughie bubbled up.
Skip to the end.
But that never happened.
Subsequently, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg,
the producers behind the Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon book,
Preacher, being adapted, set it up
as a series with the Supernatural creator Eric
Kripke and acted as showrunners and primary creative forces
behind the TV adaptation.
The main difference between the comics and the show
is a simple and yet very important one.
In the show, The Boys are just people.
No powers, no extraordinary abilities other
than their wits and ingenuity.
In the comics, they all take Compound V
in order to gain powers and temporarily
be able to hold their own with the corporately
controlled superheroes.
In terms of a metaphor, this doesn't work nearly as well.
By keeping The Boys as normal humans,
it draws the emotional line in the sand.
It shows the frailty of the human condition.
It shows the will and internal strength of the characters,
even if they're foul-mouthed superhero assassins.
[BLEEP] diabolical.
That one change right there makes
them all so much more complex.
In the comics, Butcher even injects Hughie
with the drug against his will and takes him out
on a raid against a team of teen superheroes.
Woefully underprepared and reeling from ostensibly being
hit with superpowered PCP against his will,
Hughie accidentally kills a teen superhero
by punching through his chest.
The key distinction for The Boys TV show
is that they're always the underdogs.
This helps the audience root for them
and feel more sympathetic for their admittedly Herculean
journey.
Having them constantly need to use their wits also
makes all of the characters in The Boys
deeper and more complex.
It shows them being more inventive because they
have to plan ways of taking the superheroes down
with their brains and natural abilities.
It also makes Hughie more part of the team
because he's actively choosing to help,
as opposed to being constructed against his will
in a drug-addled murder spree.
In the comics, Billy Butcher is a frat boy
who has a sadistic sense of humor and brutal mean streak.
At one point, he sabotages a jet pack of a character
that he could have easily turned over to the police,
ostensibly murdering him for the fun of it.
He also stabs Jack from Jupiter for literally hours.
It's so extreme that Jack passes out and when he wakes up,
Butcher is still stabbing him.
On the printed page, Billy Butcher's motivation
stems from Homelander murdering his wife.
His wife dies by giving birth to Homelander's
superpowered child, and then in a fit of rage,
Butcher murders the infant.
On the screen, his motivation is set up the same.
However, towards the end of the first season of the TV
series, there's a big reveal--
that his back story isn't the whole truth.
In fact, Butcher's wife is alive,
and is the mother to Homelander's son Ryan.
She's been secreted away by Homelander
and kept in a safe house completely removed
from the rest of society.
It's a horrible nightmare scenario for Butcher,
and makes him infinitely more compelling.
Remember what I told you.
Don't be a [BLEEP].
The subplots involving Vought American
are also more complex and intricate than in the books.
James Stillwell is the primary antagonist
of The Boys in the comics.
He's the corporate figurehead that they go up against.
He's the puppet master pulling the strings of The Seven.
Some people have said that he's just a sociopath
and kind of one note.
Most of James Stillwell's storylines
are being repurposed during season two
and given to Giancarlo Esposito's Stan
Edgar, the Vought American CEO.
James Stillwell is changed for the show
into Madelyn Stillwell, a darkly mangled person who
has a complex relationship with Homelander.
Additionally, Homelander is far more complex in the show.
In the comics, he's just a petulant crybaby.
In the show, he wants to be needed and liked
and goes to extraordinary lengths
to prove his worth and value.
He's so unstable that even his team members
are scared of him, which is a great twist on the character.
Overall, the show is constructed with both a sense of humor
and deep well of empathy for the characters-- something
the comics have in rare supply.
The show takes setups, some of which
are one-to-one archetypal jokes, and develops them
into complex and multifaceted characters.
Some of these changes are also for comedic purposes
on the surface, like The Deep having gills.
I have nothing else to say to you.
We won't let you shut us up any more, Kevin.
But they always loop back around and become
major plot points or developmental markers
for the characters.
Full disclosure, as I'm sure you've
been able to tell from this video,
I don't really enjoy The Boys comics.
I don't subscribe to much of Garth Ennis's world view
on superheroes, but that's just me.
I like chunks of his work, just not The Boys.
For me, The Boys comic is just too damn cynical and obviously,
frustrated by the limitations of the corporately controlled
sector of the genre.
It's a book written about superheroes
because that was the only way that Ennis could figure out
how to pay rent.
It's something he's deeply resentful of,
and it comes through on every page.
In an interview with the LA Times,
Ennis is quoted as having said, "Personally,
not having grown up with superheroes,
I find them completely moronic."
Comics take years of your life to create.
Seems like there's got to be something
better to do with your time rather than focus
on negativity.
The TV show adaptation, however, takes this same basic premise,
changes a few key elements, and makes it instantly more
accessible while still maintaining
the core of the idea.
That core idea?
That our heroes can't be trusted, which leads you
to the inevitable question, what does it say about our culture
that we see paragons of truth, justice,
and the Americas way as evil?
It says we are in trouble.
Maeve, think.
We're done here.
And that's all we have for this week.
What do you think?
Are you excited for the Soldier Boy in season three?
Let us know in the comments below, and as always,
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in order to stay up to date with everything happening
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[MUSIC PLAYING]