History ComicBook / TheBoys

** The Female got her powers from [[spoiler:falling into a big canister of synthesized Compound V]]. The name of the person in charge of the project is Dr. Uderzo, after the creator of ''ComicBook/{{Asterix}}''. The team that was sent to retrieve Female are about as successful as the marines in ''Film/{{Aliens}}'' and even quote the movie directly. The few comics that aren't on the receiving end of a TakeThat are the ComicBook/TwoThousandAD ones Frenchie buys for Female.

** The ''Butcher, Baker, Candlestickmaker'' miniseries ends with Butcher urinating on the face of his father's corpse.

* GoodPeopleHaveGoodSex: Let's go through the list, shall we?
** Butcher and Rayner: Openly dislike each other, and have loud and colorfully expressive hate sex.
** Almost any notable super: Completely no-holds-barred [[TheHedonist hedonistic]] promiscuity, usually either with prostitutes, each other, or just about [[AnythingThatMoves anything else with a pulse]], consent not always a given.
*** To a certain degree averted with Tek-Knight, who compulsively has sex with or tries to have sex with men, animals or even inanimate objects, but [[spoiler:his behavior turns out to be caused by a massive brain tumor]].
** Hughie and Annie: Arguably the two nicest characters in the entire comic, and they enjoy a healthy, supportive relationship and their sexual encounters are intimate and mutually pleasurable.

* SerialEscalation: In an interview, Garth Ennis said that ''The Boys'' would "out-''Preacher'' ''ComicBook/{{Preacher}}''."
** Ennis himself said later in an interview: "What the fuck does that even ''mean?"''

* VicePresidentWho: ZigZagged. Vic the Veep is incompetent, borderline mentally retarded and doesn't even hide that he's a Vought Corporation puppet through and through, but that doesn't make him harmless. For example, [[spoiler:as the President ("Dakota Bob") is about to give the order to shoot down the last of the 9/11 airliners before they hit, Vic knocks him out with a fire extinguisher (everyone else had been staring at the screens), as Vought/American wanted their supers to save the day as a PR move.]] He's also responsible for [[spoiler:the President's]] death, opening a cage he thought contained his pet dog rather than a wolverine.

* BigDamnHeroes: Subtle, but no less awesome. Starlight has flat-out refused to go along with the DarkerAndEdgier[=/=]HotterAndSexier {{Retcon}} Vought has planned for her. She's even gone back to her rather modest MinidressOfPower instead of the AbsoluteCleavage version she's been wearing since joining the Seven. The rest of the team (minus Homelander, who just doesn't give a shit, and Queen Maeve, typically too drunk to care about anything but her next martini) are trying to force the issue. Finally, Black Noir presses the issue, holding up the slingshot bikini Vought insisted on for her new costume and vehemently pointing at her. The reactions of everyone involved indicate Black Noir is ''not'' someone with whom you want to argue. . . then Queen Maeve stands between Starlight and Noir, silently daring anyone to press the issue further. Everyone, Noir included, backs down, indicating that Queen Maeve is someone with whom you want to argue '''even less'''.

** After having killed [[spoiler:Mallory, Vas, The Legend, Mother's Milk, the Frenchman, and the Female]], as well as coming up with a plan to [[spoiler:kill every single person with a trace of V in their blood]], the final BigBad of the series is actually [[spoiler:Butcher.]]

* RRatedOpening: The ''very first image'' from the first issue has what looks like a superhero getting his head violently and gorily ''stomped in'' with a combat boot in close-up. The opening of the comic proper has Billy Butcher watching the Seven taking off in the sky, with another panel focusing on Homelander in far-off flight, just before Butcher says, "I'm gonna fuckin' have you. You cunt."

* AnyoneCanDie: By the end of the comic, the vast majority of named characters have been killed off. Damn you, Garth Ennis. Damn you.

* KillThemAll: [[spoiler:The only named characters to survive the series are Hughie, Starlight, The Deep, Kessler (AKA Monkey), Rayner and Stillwell.]] Even out of those, [[spoiler:Rayner's nascent political career is ruined by Kessler releasing a choice piece of blackmail material provided by Hughie, The Deep has been pressganged into another superhero group that's an obvious dead end, and Stillwell is implied to have a breakdown after realizing that his job - turning superhumans into a marketable product - is completely hopeless. But the other three ''finally'' shed their ButtMonkey statuses, with Kessler relatively secure in his CIA directorship and Hughie and Starlight living HappilyEverAfter]].

** ''[[UpToEleven Reverse-strip]]'' Monopoly on a Clue board.

** Most of the superheroes, when they're not performing for the media. Taken UpToEleven by the Homelander and [[spoiler:even more so by Black Noir]], who commit staggeringly nasty acts of violence purely ForTheEvulz.

** From the brief looks we get of it, Vought-American's M-20 assault rifle actually resembles a [[CoolGuns/AssaultRifles Enfield [=SA80=]]], specifically the [=L85A1=] variant that first saw action in the Gulf War, which had a wide range of serious problems and proved to be ultimately very poorly designed. Ennis simply takes it UpToEleven by implying that the M-20 couldn't even get through five rounds before jamming and was best used for impaling the heads of dead [=GIs=].

[[caption-width-right:350:The Last Thing You See Before You Die.]]

* EarnYourHappyEnding: [[spoiler:After finding Susan Raynor was the one who sent him Billy's journal, Hughie decides to put the past to bed. Hughie marries Starlight and burns the journal, ready to put his history with The Boys behind him, but not before writing one last message in Becky's honor.]]

* HappyEndingOverride: Dear Becky shows that Hughie isn't done with The Boys just yet and has to go through one last hurdle before he can get the happy ending he deserves.

* KarmaHoudiniWarranty: In "Dear Becky", it turns out [[spoiler:Stillwell]] never ''did'' recover from [[spoiler:the superhero fiasco at the end of the original series]] and has gone insane, planting pineapples and endlessly muttering fragments of economic theory.

* TheReasonYouSuckSpeech: [[spoiler:Hughie throws Susan Raynor's attempt at political power and trying to make him feel guilty about his time with The Boys back at her face and calls her a loveless, spiteful bitch. Susan is so angry at Hughie that all she can do is throw a whiskey glass at him.]]

* SanitySlippage: We learn that [[spoiler:Stillwell’s]] breakdown at the end of the main series was the start of this. By the time Hughie tracks him down, he’s well off the deep end — almost unrecognizable beneath his wild hair and beard and shabby clothes, rambling about economics on a pineapple farm in Hawaii.

** The Female got her powers from [[spoiler:falling into a big canister of synthesized Compound V]]. The name of the person in charge of the project? Doctor [[ComicBook/{{Asterix}} Uderzo]]. The team that was sent to retrieve Female are about as successful as the marines in ''Film/{{Aliens}}'' and even quote the movie directly. The few comics that aren't on the receiving end of a TakeThat are the ComicBook/TwoThousandAD ones Frenchie buys for Female.

->And there was nothing on the marker to explain to Mrs. Feathers why her only daughter had married a known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously violent and intemperate disposition.\\
-- ''Film/{{Unforgiven}}'', screenplay by Creator/DavidWebbPeoples

** You can generally pinpoint how much Ennis dislikes certain characters. Some of the most venomous depictions of characters are ones that Ennis has gone on record as hating:
*** Wolverine becomes a near-mute freak who can't eat his own food without assistance (and the creature that ripped off the President's face, causing Vic the Veep to be sworn in, was a wolverine (and the Pre-Wiz leader who says 'bub' and is animal themed is named [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catamite Cat O'Mite]])), {{Nineties Anti Hero}}es are CListFodder, and Soldier Boy is regularly referred to as "an insult", an opinion Ennis has often offered about heroes being involved in real-world events. Consider the following: the very first line of dialogue after the comic left DC because DC was worried it would taint their brand was a Batman expy proclaiming "I like to have sex with things."
On the other hand, he has a soft spot for the Big Three Justice Leaguers, and as a result;
*** Tek-Knight is a relatively nice guy who even dies heroically, saving a mother and child from a wheelbarrow-full of bricks falling from a construction site (though he has a pretty awesome DyingDream of saving the world from an asteroid by fucking it back into space.) It's even revealed that his recent bouts of unwilling hypersexuality were caused by a fist-sized brain tumor.

*** And the [[spoiler:BigBad Homelander]] has a nasty FreudianExcuse (would ''you'' be sane if you were raised by [[PredatoryBusiness Wal-Mart]]?), and his truly disgusting acts were the result of [[spoiler:Black Noir's {{Gaslighting}}. Some weren't even things he personally did.]]

*** He has a weird take on the DC/Marvel feud; VAC's first generation of supers is dubbed "[[Comicbook/TheAvengers The Avenging Squad]]", but Bush and the VAC rep says it isn't final - the company's still deciding whether the group's theme will be "Justice" or "Revenge." The entire squad is massacred at the Battle of the Bulge, and [[Franchise/JusticeLeagueOfAmerica the Seven]] are established soon afterwards - except VAC hires "[[Creator/StanLee The Legend]]" as the mind behind the comic book franchise. Mallory bemoans that everything started to go wrong right after UsefulNotes/WorldWarII for one basic reason;

* ItIsDehumanizing: Butcher's diary shows he thinks of supers this way (in this case, a [[spoiler:ten-year old kid]] well on the way to Homelander levels of evil.

-- ''Film/{{Unforgiven}}'', screenplay by Creator/DavidWebbPeoples

* TokenGoodTeammate: A few examples, mainly Hughie. Whilst you could argue that all of The Boys bar Butcher have [[HeartOfGold hearts of gold]], they still revel in their extremely violent jobs and are desensitised to it. Hughie is about as close to a normal bloke as this world has, and seems ''extremely'' unsuited to a job in a CIA black ops surveillance operations. Turns out that [[spoiler: this was the point. Butcher didn't recruit Hughie for his skills but his decent moral outlook, relying on him to be the one that stops Butcher's plan to wipe out all of the superhumans in the world.]]

** Agent Michael Lucero from the ''Herogasm'' serial. In a comic that has an extremely poor view on Americans and their government, Lucero stands out as a level-headed, loyal and committed Secret Service agent who is genuinely devoted to his country. He works with The Boys mostly out of sheer disgust at the mockery that Vought's attempts to insert superheroes into the US military have made of his country. He [[spoilers: uses his dying breath to call the orchestrator of the plot a disgrace.]]

* PoliticallyIncorrectHero: While Mother's Milk claims otherwise when Hughie complains about it, Butcher isn't above casually tossing around homophobic slurs, which he first demonstrates by telling Hughie of the dark secrets of superheroes whose comics are on display and refers to several of them as a "poof" or a "dyke".

* OOCIsSeriousBusiness: The Female speaks exactly one time during the whole series: when the other Boys [[spoiler:offer her a chance to retire and not go after Butcher with them. She refuses.]]

*** Ironically enough, one of the main secondary characters in the comic ''is'' Trans, and Hughie and Annie emphatise with her when it is revealed that she can't get any legal hormone medication as a result of Brexit.

* EatsBabies: [[spoiler:The Homelander, albeit only in one particularly psychotic episode that had him doing horrific things to what looked like an entire family.]]
** Subverted. [[spoiler:It wasn't him.]]

* SanitySlippage: We learn that Stillwell’s breakdown at the end of the main series was the start of this. By the time Hughie tracks him down, he’s well off the deep end — almost unrecognizable beneath his wild hair and beard and shabby clothes, rambling about economics on a pineapple farm in Hawaii.

* TheReasonYouSuckSpeech: [[spoiler:Hughie throws Susan Raynor's attempt at political power and trying to make him feel guilty about his time with The Boys back at her face and calls her a loveless, spiteful bitch. Susan is so angry at Hugie that all she can do is throw a whiskey glass at him.]]

* EarnYourHappyEnding: [[spoiler:After discovering Susan Raynor was the one who sent Billy's journal to him, Hughie decides to put the past to bed. He marries Starlight and burns the journal, showing that he's ready to put his history with The Boys behind him. But not before sending a final note to Becky's memory.]]
-->[[spoiler:''[[TitleDrop Dear Becky]]. You were with him all the way''.]]