Shallow Parody / Comic Books

• The Nagma in Asterix and the Falling Sky is supposed to be a Take That! to manga and anime culture, but it's very obvious from the character's appearance and behavior that Uderzo's knowledge of the entire art form extends to having flicked through some Super Robot thing on television back in the '70s and seeing some Beyblades in a toy shop. In his public apology for the quality of the book, he admitted that his hatred of manga stemmed from flipping through a sexually-explicit one at the library and wishing the Japanese would Think of the Children! (it's worth noting that France has legally binding age restrictions for comics). Many questioned this apology, as Uderzo had also previously claimed his distaste for Anime and Manga came from an argument with someone who claimed they were superior to his own work.
• While some of the satire of corporate sponsorship and their control and manipulation of superhero identities for ugly and nefarious processes in The Boys is valid, a lot of it does fall flat in the takedown on specific targets.
  • Soldier Boy is a Captain Patriotic a la Steve Rogers, presented by Garth Ennis as a mockery and insult to The Real Heroes of World War II. The problem is that Captain America was a Propaganda Hero created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby before America entered World War II and was in the context a bold anti-fascist gesture. Likewise, Kirby who drew Captain America and later revived him as a soldier out of time in The Avengers, served as a soldier in the US Infantry during the war, as a draftsman for reconnaissance maps, and the comics which Ennis mocks were popular with actual American servicemen of the time (specifically Captain Marvel whose Expy he makes into a Nazi hero called Stormfront, was extremely popular among American GI). So in other words, Ennis, a World War II-buff, is merely projecting his own ideas and values on to that of an earlier generation without actually engaging with it.
  • It doesn't help that The Boys are more or less superheroes themselves with Billy Butcher being a British Punisher, and where Marshal Law didn't spare the title character from criticism, Ennis being a Punisher fanboy and fond of the Vigilante Man archetype in general, doesn't actually go as far as Mills and O'Neill did, or for that matter Alan Moore did in Watchmen, which was attack the idea of a hero, and people's need for one, or the desire to be one.
  • The other problem is that most of his takes on superheroes are more or less they are frauds and fakes, celebrity shills, and don't actually deal with threats. This doesn't quite work as a satire or Deconstruction since it doesn't accept the possibility, as even Moore did, that some of these superheroes do have good intentions and do want to do help and even can help in ways regular people can't, and there are genuine problems in society that complicates their basic altruism. Ennis' argument is mainly that these superheroes are evil, fakes, or pathetic without any variation for 60+ issues. In a way, The Boys come closer to fitting the classic superhero archetype themselves than many of the "heroes" they fight do!
  • The attack on X-Men is more or less Professor X/Godolkin being a pedophile and the rest of the X-Men being his victims and/or brainwashed cultists without any engagement with legitimate avenues to criticize the X-Men, namely the debate on the "Mutant Metaphor" and how well the X-Men actually work as a representation of minority rights advocacy. Likewise, the parody also involves Jive Turkey riffs on West Coast-East Coast hip-hop rivalries which makes the whole thing come off as tin-eared and not something that either X-Men fans or critics can really recognize.
  • Black Noir, the Expy of Batman on The Seven, the comic's stand in for Justice League of America, is eventually revealed to be clone of Homelander, the comic's Superman Substitute. The comic book's deconstruction of the Justice League has a version of Batman, the most well known Badass Normal in superhero comics, whose origin is nothing like Batman's, and has superpowers.
  • The series’ main argument is that superheroes are ridiculous and not needed, when the very universes they inhabit contain all sorts of dangers and horrors neither the police, the army, or even the most determined Badass Normal vigilantes that Garth Ennis idolizes would be able to properly handle by themselves. In fact, Ennis goes out of his way to make sure that the world is specifically designed to not need the presence of superheroes. The in-universe comics for the supes are all Based on a Great Big Lie, having them off fighting time terrorists or extradimensional aliens or some nonsense, things which don't exist in the universe of The Boys. Thus, the supes have nothing to do except sit on their asses, engage in publicity stunts, or take down supes who don't agree to toe Vought's company line (and there's few enough of them, since Vought has a pretty sweet deal to offer anyone with superpowers). Since fighting actual crime is beneath them (and handled well enough by existing law enforcement) and they simply have no idea how to handle actual disasters (see the whole 9/11 debacle), there's just no need for them, other than Vought wanting to force a market for their "product". In a world where Lex Luthor isn't building giant robots to rob banks every other week, do we really need Superman? If The Boys' verse had anyone like the Skrulls, Brainiac, Thanos or Apokolips, the supes would actually have a valuable job to perform and might not be the sociopathic assholes they are. Also, even without extraterrestrial or interdimensional threats, many villains in superhero comics are superpowered humans that decide to use their powers for evil (think Magneto) and requires superheroes to be dealt with, yet another archetype that the story fits perfectly. Not to mention that a Villain with Good Publicity abusing their power while keeping a good facade and working with the government isn't exactly unheard of in superhero comics, and the series fits the archetype perfectly. As a result, Garth Ennis’ argument falls apart because he has to deliberately make the world the way it is to justify his feelings about superheroes.
  • In another degree, there's a great deal of linking between Conservative Christians and superheroes, coming up in the Believe arc and also playing a big role in the TV adaptation, where they portray superheroes as advocating Evangelicalism (while also portraying them as hypocrites using religion to manipulate people) and act as if superheroes as a whole encourage hardline Christian values, which is...weak. While Superman has some Christ parallels that are played up in some works, most superheroes' religious beliefs rarely come up, to the point superheroes who are religious end up being notable because of it, and their religions tend to vary from the strict White-Protestant faith portrayed as the norm in The Boys ^note for instance, Daredevil is the most prominent Christian hero, but he's a Catholic, and religious cultural beliefs more come up with characters like Magneto, Kitty Pryde and Ben Grimm (who are Jewish), or Simon Baz and Kamala Khan (who are Muslim); Evangelicalism like the kind portrayed in The Boys is mostly limited to The Purifiers, a supervillain entity. This sort of uncritical evangelical Christian superhero is limited to Christian media like Bibleman. In other words, Ennis appears to have mistaken The Moral Substitute for actual superhero media.
  • The main antagonist, Homelander, is like Soldier Boy presented as a deconstruction of Superman and Superman-expies. The problem is that, aside from his powerset, Homelander has absolutely nothing in common with Superman, so there's no real criticism of the character taking place. The argument seems to be that someone with Superman's powers would ultimately be corrupt, but that completely ignores every other aspect of Superman's character and background that make him who he is, as though the powers were the sole defining element of his character. What's more, by the time the comic was published, the concept of "What if Superman was evil?" had been done and re-done so much that many feel it had become more of a cliche than Superman himself ever was, and were frankly bored of it.
• Many point out that Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is often unfair to its targets:
  • Volume 3 features numerous references to the characters and locations of Harry Potter (albeit never by name), with the idea that all of Harry's adventures have been manipulated in order to drive him to destroy the world as the Anti-Christ. However, Harry himself is distinctly off, being more or less just a generic "whiny asshole teenaged chav" stereotype while his actual flaws are mostly ignored in favor of making him into a caricature of an entitled young person. The Moonchild's big villainous vice is that he's a Small Name, Big Ego who moans about being given any responsibility but also sees himself as the greatest guy ever, which is pretty far off from Harry, whose character is mostly defined as a Humble Hero who believes that It Sucks to Be the Chosen One but still steps up whenever needed.
  • Moore's distaste for Harry Potter, as explained in one of his interviews, also smacks of a strange variety of Misaimed Fandom and blaming J. K. Rowling for opinions that are not really hers. Moore is a true believer in magic and sees it as a creative process, while Rowling portrays magic as something full of rules and taught by an institution. However, Moore misses the point that Rowling isn't trying to make any sort of point about real life systems of magic, since as a rationalist she doesn't really believe in any of it. Curiously, Moore is considering Harry Potter at face value, in the same way Christian Fundamentalists do, when they criticize Rowling for "popularizing magic for kids", when for her magic is just a fictional element in worldbuilding. Likewise, Moore also takes exception to Rowling "gushing about boarding schools", when that was never Rowling's intention either.
  • Volume 3 often led many to see it as a satire of the entire millennial generation since its main theme was that the 21st Century is culturally barren compared to The '60s and Victorian Britain, a judgment that many instinctively find offensive, and which isn't helped by the fact that Moore isn't particularly familiar with contemporary culture. (President Bartlett, for example, is mentioned in terms that suggest him to be an analogue to George W. Bush, whereas you don't have to watch the series for very long to realise that he's actually a lot closer to Bill Clinton). The third volume's criticism of twenty-first-century popular culture is rather undercut by the evidence suggesting that Moore doesn't actually know a lot about twenty-first-century popular culture, and the lack of public domain character from the contemporary era means that he can't make the deep cuts he did in his more celebrated first two volumes.
• Marshal Law, like The Boys, claims that wartime-created heroes are an insult to soldiers who actually fought in World War II, unaware that Captain America was created before America entered the war, by a real-life US soldier, and was actually quite popular with American servicemen. Likewise, it depicts characters from the The Golden Age of Comic Books and The Silver Age of Comic Books as inept, only going after easy targets, ignoring that Captain America was actually a bold anti-fascist statement at the time, or that The Adventures of Superman saw Superman battle a paper-thin allegory for the Ku Klux Klan back when they were still considered a respectable organization. The Golden Age characters are also depicted as conservative Christians, a trope often mocked in superhero comics that never actually existed^note In fact, the majority of famous comic creators from the Gold and Silver Ages were, in fact, Jewish.
  • Like The Boys the comic also makes the argument superheroes would be a bad thing to have in the real world, and like The Boys is also intentionally constructs its world to not need superheroes. The kinds of threats that superheroes would actually be needed to deal with don't exist, or superheroes are simply depicted as ineffective like its depiction of Golden Age heroes.
• Marvel's Marville hopes irrelevant pop culture is enough to count as parody. It even explains the shallow parodies to people in the first page, like nobody would get the jokes. Even its title and first cover imply it to be a parody of Smallville, before that particular series had even aired; the closest it comes to parodying Smallville is a rather confused and generic Superman parody in the first issue.
• Alan Moore's "deconstruction" of H. P. Lovecraft, Neonomicon, does make one wonder how much Lovecraft he's actually read. His take on The Shadow Over Innsmouth is particularly questionable, since he seems to think it's a book about women getting raped by brutish Fish People (something Neonomicon depicts in almost pornographic detail), when it's actually mostly a book about men having consensual sex with extremely intelligent Fish People... but that's a lot less sensationalistic.
• Ninja High School: The series often runs into this problem. There's a lot of references and name drops but don't go beyond that outside of appearances, making the comic come off more as a meme machine. Ironic, since this series was made long before the advent of the Internet). What doesn't help is several the targets of parody, such as Urusei Yatsura, were already farcical comedies or parodies thus the comic tends to Spoofed the Ironic Film Seriously.
• Marvel's parody comic Not Brand Ecch portrays the Doom Patrol as shameless rip-offs of the more popular X-Men, when in reality the Patrol came first (though only by a few months, at a time when comic book scripts were written longer in advance than that). The creator of the Doom Patrol used to work for Marvel.
• Preteen Dirty-Gene Kung-Fu Kangaroos is clearly meant to be a parody of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. However, the comic bares very little resemblance to the thing it's parodying. Preteen Dirty-Gene Kung-Fu Kangaroos takes place in a world of World of Funny Animals, whereas Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has the anthropomorphic animals being a result of Applied Phlebotinum. In addition, the titular kangaroos have superpowers, whereas the Ninja Turtles don't and are just trained in the art of being a ninja. The kangaroos are distinct in appearance, whereas the Ninja Turtles wear their mask so the audience can tell them apart. Not helping is how their mentor is, for some reason, a parody of Ruben Flagg and not Splinter.
• In a glaring example of Tropes Are Not Bad, the first issue of RatMan was intended to be a parody of Tim Burton's Batman... which the author had never seen. Despite this, it won the Lucca Comics award for best script and set the foundation for a cult in Italian comic book history.
• Warren Ellis's Ruins is clearly intended as a Darker and Edgier Deconstructive Parody of Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross' Marvels, as it follows the latter series' protagonist Phil Sheldon as he documents a version of the Marvel universe where pretty much every Marvel Comics superhero is either a sadistic maniac, a grossly-deformed collection of tumours slowly dying from radiation poisoning after being exposed to toxic chemicals, or both. It seems to be trying to act as a corrective to what it views as the other series' overly optimistic approach to the Marvel universe, but either through ignorance or carelessness seems to have missed the fact that the other work actually isn't just a rosy-eyed Lighter and Softer celebration of Marvel Comics, and actually spends a bit of time exploring the darker side of what living in such a world would be like itself.
• The LucasArts Sam & Max strips frequently fall into this, possibly deliberately. Being produced for the LucasArts company newsletter and Sam & Max not starting out as LucasArts characters, Steve Purcell was allowed to draw them only if he parodied whatever games were coming out at the time. Because of this, he preferred to take the basic setting of the game he was parodying, dress Sam up as the main character of that game, and then just have the characters do their own thing - being more like one-off themed adventures about fighting monsters or being bikers instead of parodies of Maniac Mansion and Full Throttle. Notably, the Monkey Island parody has Sam and Max in pirate costumes going to a desert island... full of monkeys. To be fair, the strips are probably more hilarious for not being true parody.
• The sixth issue of the Comic-Book Adaptation of Toxic Crusaders featured an unflattering parody of Captain Planet and the Planeteers called Corporal Globe and the Globiteers. Not only did the characters only superficially resemble the characters they were spoofing (for instance, Corporal Globe is depicted as a pompous and arrogant show-boater while Captain Planet was altruistic and always treated his battles seriously), but the story also exaggerated Captain Planet's notoriety for heavy-handed environmental messages by devoting an entire page to the Globiteers annoying the hell out of the citizens of Tromaville by interrupting their activities to give long-winded lectures on how they can take better care of the environment that boiled down to "Doing anything at all is harmful to the environment".

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