The Boys (2019 Amazon series)

Yes, the original comic is about competent vs. incompetent - but I think it is obvious this show is not the original comic. It has diminished relevance on where this is going. Just for instance, Rebecca Butcher is still alive, and raising Homelander's son - casting doubt on literally everything we could assume about the situation.

They changed a lot from the original comic. Another thing is that Homelander while still an immature man is also a remarkably competent and smart immature man.

Stillwell thought she was living in the original comics - where superheroes are all blithering morons and she could play them without difficulty. That ended with her getting her face melted.

Edited by NickTheSwing on Aug 7th 2019 at 4:08:32 AM

Yes, part of the issue is the heroes are assholes but also humanized celebrities. Perhaps too much.

Except for Homelander, A-Train and Deep apparently were once decent people.

Maeve also was...but abandoned a bunch of people to die because she was intimidated into silence.

On the subject of the religion stuff, the show looks like it actually kiiiiinda downplays the anti-religion angle as it was in the books. In the book, Starlight straight up renounced her faith. In the show you have Mother's Milk saying he's an Episcopalian and Hughie going "ehhhh I dunno" agnostic.

In any case, the work's points about religion tie more into its commentary on the military-industrialist complex than its commentary on the superhero genre.

Edited by Pannic on Aug 7th 2019 at 6:35:40 AM

Yeah, while the comic is more anti-religion, the show is not.

And I wasn't trying to say the show should not be anything other than 'incompetent vs competent', I was just saying that was a large part of the source material. Obviously, things have changed.

Homelander is more competent in general, for sure, and the political side of things with the comic's president being a grotesque parody of George W has been almost completely dropped.

I was just saying I don't expect the show to turn into a straightforward "good vs evil" morality play. I'd be fine with that if it did, I just don't think that's where they're going.

Yeah, that's a thing that doesn't really work in the comic boys.

Superheroes aren't just bad people.

They're STUPID AS A CONCEPT.

So they can't actually do anything worthwhile.

It's a hard sell sadly as Ennis basically requires "invulnerability and other superpowers are worthless."

In the comics, the characters definitely seemed much lower in power. Even top tier superhumans like The Seven and The Boys themselves seemed largely vulnerable to conventional military weapons.

Their entire extended X-Men teams are just killed by a Blackwater expy. Stormfront, probably right around Homelander's level, was vulnerable to glass shards in his eyes.

Here, they seem a lot tougher. Comics Maeve probably would've gotten herself knocked around if she tried to stop a truck by standing in front of it. The comics had a weird 'high strength, low toughness' thing going on.

Edited by ArthurEld on Aug 7th 2019 at 11:39:55 AM

Yeah, the TV Series seems to say that like anything, just being a superhero doesn't predetermine you to good morality - just like being a cop or a popular politician or a public figure / celebrity doesn't guarantee good morality.

And even then, there's a real humanized element in this. The Deep is a bad guy, no question, but he's also subject to denigration and violation.

So while it is accurate to say there are good supes and bad supes, terrible people don't exist in a vacuum. They're people with more to them than just "terrible" written on a cardboard wooden sign.

More to the point, people are complicated, and its not wise to put people on an unimpeachable pedestal. Celebrities / Heroes are people just like everyone else, and its up to you to be discerning.

It's a hard sell sadly as Ennis basically requires "invulnerability and other superpowers are worthless."

Unless The Boys are using them of course. Then they're perfectly fine.

Anyway, Black Noir! Do you think he was powered down in this version or holding back against Kimiko?

Edited by Guy01 on Aug 8th 2019 at 6:44:32 AM

Given what we know about the show so far, he'll probably have a different backstory, and his powers might be different as well.

The book's thesis is probably best summed up in the Get Some arc. In it, Hughie is reading an issue of a book about Swingwing (the gay supe), and after expressing frustration at the Bold Inflation, converses...

I suspect if I were to pick up the old Marshall Law series I'd see a similar take.

Edited by Pannic on Aug 9th 2019 at 8:54:50 AM

Stormfront will apparently be a woman.

Yes, she'll be played by Aya Cash, from You're The Worst. Her racism will probably be "off-camera" stuff, and they might make her a bit more like a modern white supremacist who knows when to keep that stuff to herself but engages in it in private.

Also, I was just thinking about the plane scene and while it's a great scene and a nice adaptation of the 9/11 moment from the comics (which I was 99% positive the show wouldn't touch at all), but it does niggle away at me that its such a contrived accident. Aside from Homelander leaving the door open (which is handwaved even though yes it would have been a problem all on its own), his powers literally function differently from one usage to the other, only for the purpose of setting the disaster up. I wish they had done it just a tad differently.

There was a lot of discussion but my assumption was that Homelander fully intended it unlike in the comics. He was crashing the plane deliberately and just not letting Maeve know about it. It's all because a failure is much bigger for their purpose.

Because Homelander is a Evil Genius on the show, not a deluded dumbass.

Going by the last scene, it seems like Homelander's kid shares his powers. I'm wondering how things are gonna develop with that boy. Also, that is going to be the world's most uncontrollable teenager.

I mean, Becca, how do you keep that little guy calm?

Which itself was probably a mock-up of the "Superman isn't smart" claim the Fan Dumb makes

We know how much Ennis hates George W Bush, so I'm wondering if they'll update that to digs at Trump in the show compared to how in the comics the actual Dubya killed himself playing with a chainsaw, and I am pretty sure Vic the Veep is a mockery of him in some way(Dakota Bob is being he's everything Dubya isn't in Garth's opinion)

I'm inclined to think Homelander is actually the Trump EXPY.

He's far too competent for that.

That's like when Daredevil season 3 came out and people compared Fisk to Trump. Which is honestly straight up insulting to Fisk.

Interestingly both 80s Lex Luthor and Fisk DID have Trump influences.

So did the more accurate Biff Tannen of Back to the Future III.

Trump has informed a lot of villains in the past, and given the downright baffling immortality scheme and human breeding project (yes, he was the kind of despicable Emperor Scientist wannabe that didn't just rape young girls, he did it for a eugenicist / transhumanist scheme), I suspect Jeffrey Epstein might be the next to inform a bunch of villains.

Now, back on subject, a theory I've heard posted around is that Becca Butcher is doing this all as part of a plan to make a "Homeland Boy" who can dethrone and defeat his evil father. Which might be foreshadowed by the whole "I am your father" speech Homelander gave - nigh identical to Darth Vader on Luke Skywalker.

Edited by NickTheSwing on Aug 10th 2019 at 9:08:22 AM

I confess, I am hoping for a "The Reason You Suck" Speech where Becca informs Billy that he scared her, was deeply unstable, and she was just glad to get away from him even if it meant she became Homelander's kept mistress and babymama.

Just deconstruct his entire Nick Fury/Punisher persona.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Aug 11th 2019 at 2:36:57 AM

So I watched the first half of the season with a friend. I initially just thought it was something like Kick-Ass or Brightburn, darker superhero twists, but it is a lot more engaging than I thought it would be. Something that bugged me about the last season of Justice League Unlimited as well as Young Justice was that when you have heroes who are so well organized, the villains motivations become more Card-Carrying Villain because otherwise you have to be really dedicated to your Evil Plan to withstand the combined power of the heroes. So both went with a Legion of Doom and you get the impression that the entire world is just a battleground between these N.G.O. Superpower heroes and villains, regular people don't matter except as casualties.

But this show makes the whole premise a bit more plausible, particularly how they are public relations and marketing tools treated as emergency operations like the police or firefighters. But combine the powers, the responsibility and the celebrity status is a recipe for really dysfunctional, psychopathic people. And super villains are functionally nowhere to be found, precisely because government sponsorship and a license to kill ("in self defense") would eliminate Joker Immunity. The Boys are both The Cowl type vigilantes trying to rally against a corrupt system due to personal tragedy and their own Lex Luthor-esque criminal element seeking to take down the heroes. Like I said, a lot more engaging than I expected.

The first couple episodes reminded me of Breaking Bad, mostly for the obvious "We have a hostage rather than a dead body, what do we do about that?" situation.

I mean, nothing we've seen has shown us that Billy was any of those things before he lost Becca.

Plus, Homelander had apparently no idea Becca or his son even existed.

So none of that would make much sense.

Goran Visnjic and Claudia Doumit from Timeless will be joining season 2 in recurring roles[1] and Malcolm Barrett is set to return.

So if the big twist with Black Noir is implemented in any way, how do you think it'll be implemented? While he can't have raped and killed Becca, he could've still been gaslighting Homelander into being more villainous

More villainous?