'The Boys' Comic Was Kinda Terrible

superheroes are over saturated what a bold claim I know it's such a non-statement to make online that I apologize for being the 15th person to tell you that opinion today you might be annoyed by the sheer volume of media coming out over the past oh God has it been that long maybe you've tried tuning it out but there's just no escaping it you might have become jaded even if you hated the MCU for years he can't keep getting away with it even if you were Martin Scorsese burning copies of Thor 3 in his backyard even if you violently assaulted a trick-or-treater for wearing a Captain America outfit on Halloween you will never hate superheroes more than Garth Ennis the writer of the 2006 comic the boys foreign eventually for any genre once it goes on for long enough common tropes develop and are recognized by the audience a jump scare and a horror movie The dear God moment in a disaster film the obligatory All Is Lost moment superhero films are no exception in fact the MCU became so successful it established new tropes that never previously existed before we'd have to break anything clearly you've never made an omelet he beat me by one second the funniest thing I've seen in Ages which is why an adaptation of the boys was seen as a breath of fresh air it poked fun at what the superhero genre had become a satire of every soulless company that only cared about marketing and Public Image soups existed in a world of cinematic universes and to promote the next product but before knowing what the show would actually be the only thing the promotions showed was this guy's girlfriend getting turned into jelly by a knockoff version of The Flash and that was enough for me you see I never heard of the boys comic before the show was announced and before the first season even premiered I decided to read the entire comic run from beginning to end my takeaway after reading through all of this was that it was alright like I enjoyed it but it was in the same brain space as postal it was grimy made you feel kind of dirty reading through it but I had entertainment value after season one outside of the initial premise characters and certain events turns out the adaptation changed pretty much everything the joke was on me for reading it I guess the original boy's comic was like it was written by an edgy teen that thought adding the most amount of graphic violence swearing sex and racial slurs would make his story stand out uh yeah he's Superman but he uh he eats babies uh you know when book readers have their favorite novel adapted and then swear until their dying breath that the book was better than the adaptation this is the exact opposite of that the show makes small but necessary changes that had they not otherwise it would be far lesser for it now is the show always perfect no sometimes it's a bit on the nose with its satire but I truly believe no matter where you sit on the aisle or what your views on the show's politics are the show at least has something to say something that the comic tried to do sort of but then gave up halfway through the show takes seeds that were planted and lets them grow leading to a story that isn't simply for shock value think of this as an interesting lesson in writing garthennis is a comic writer most famous for writing preacher and that Punisher one-off where he kills literally everyone it's a pretty open secret that Ennis hates superheroes and I'm not just saying what superheroes became or superhero media like like the very notion of them he believes they have done nothing but Sully the medium of comics and make them only for kids which I mean is he wrong and he likes Superman Wonder Woman and Batman and then that's it everything else he despises especially Captain America oh don't get him started on that old cap he's kind of the original hater of Cape which while respectable that hatred goes incredibly far goes farther than just making jokes about MCU fans the way the boys is written is almost like a Manifesto against the very idea of costume soups and throughout the entire run the plot follows a similar formula the boys come across a superhero who is a loose parody of a pre-existing character this soup though has some terrible flaw and usually it's just the same flaw this hero is Martian Manhunter but he's a degenerate this character is Iron Man but he's a pervert oh look it's the X-Men but Professor X actually diddles kids there is really no deconstruction of the Trope like with Watchmen or a clever parody like one punch man it's more like straight up hatred like you can imagine Garth writing every possible scenario for how a soup can get massacred by his edgy guys dressed in trench coats or the military in the show superheroes are allegories for the egotistical celebrity they will do anything for their own image it's a game that you play for fame and fortune and that reflects in every aspect of how these characters think drives them to be selfish do terrible things but not to an unrealistic degree you can see parallels to real world shitty Behavior the thing is most of that complexity doesn't exist in the Comics superheroes in this world that Ennis wrote are irredeemable cartoonish Psychopaths there is no complexity to them their mentality is less based on Celebrity Status and the corrupting influence of Fame and more like the mentality of the gang from Clockwork Orange any costume suit in some way is a sexual deviant a racist or a violent psycho now if I could I would show you a lot of examples but I'm trying to not get demonetized and banned off the site all of these horrendous things that my eyes had to witness never build on to something instead it just feels like a hit piece on fictional people that don't actually exist sometimes simply the message in the boys is this hero is gay these heroes are ghetto the boys collect more often than anything else pictures of sex acts that they can blackmail people with now sometimes there are superheroes that happen to be good people and if they are they're portrayed as pathetic jokes who literally could not heard a fly maybe their only quality is that they look stupid or sometimes as the comic goes on there's no reason at all they're just a soup and their fodder for the boys to defend themselves against Eva even when they aren't supposed to kill subs and Huey accidentally punches right through a guy it turns out to be all right and Huey shouldn't feel bad because the guy had a hamster shoved up his ass the entire time the original boy's comic is that guy that stumbles onto the stage at open mic night says they're a master of satire and then says the n-word now just because a story has edgy elements that doesn't make it necessarily lesser the show has messed up stuff all the time it's just it contributes to the bigger story showcases how far a character is gone or what the stakes are the comics showcases [ __ ] up stuff just for shock value and as a result it makes the story less about our protagonists facing off against a corporation and its celebrity Heroes and more our protagonists just going around taking out crazy cartoon people as you see despite the show mainly being around the boys and Vaught that is not what the comics portray at all probably should have said this at the start but spoilers for all of the comics and all three seasons it wasn't until season three when I realized what truly made the adaptation so different than the comics and it was the inclusion of temporary compound V you see the Vault Labs cooked up some green temporary V that makes you a soup for 24 hours Huey and butcher both start taking v as a way to even that power Dynamic while mm and Frenchie believes this crosses a line and will make them Hypocrites this dilemma never exists in the comics despite hating soups butcher injects Huey with V without his consent and then laughs at him for getting mad through experiments butcher is actually super powered at the start of the story all the boys are this ethical question of whether using compound V is hypocritical or not just never comes up and considering how many soups they do kill if they didn't have V they probably would just die but what this does is it removes an essential element that makes the show work so well tension in the show whenever the boys run into a superhero it feels like they're up against a legitimate thread it's like having a bomb in the middle of the room these are people who can do whatever they want without repercussions and to defeat them regular people have to use their wits and skills to take them down the reason why the boys hate soup so much is reinforced with every scene but in the comics since the boys use V that threat is gone in fact because most of the time the boys are just running into low-level idiots Butcher and his gang often have the advantage so the story is reduced to edgy characters dressed in trench coats just brutally tearing apart a bunch of costume dorks it's like Billy butcher is just ennis's cool OC that only exists to act out violent Revenge fantasies against fictional people when talking about characters I don't want to make this a list of differences between the show and Comics if you want a true comparison watch a watch Mojo both of these have gone through so many differences we'd be here all day if I listed them out because because of the path the show has gone down it has drastically altered these characters it's put them in situations and challenges that have shaped them over three seasons which can't really be said about the comics Starlight and Huey for most of the comic don't even know what the other is doing so many of their interactions are just Simon Pegg with a blonde naked chick the show was able to deepen pretty shallow pools and nowhere is that better shown than homelander the live-action adaptation of homelander is one of the best villains in a show I've seen birth from a test tube born to be a corporate product homelander is one big ball of narcissism self-consciousness and psychopathy one aspect of this Show's plot is just seeing the mental deterioration of homelander now while that's kind of there in the comics homelander isn't really anything particularly special he's done terrible things he's forced himself onto women leading to the death of butcher's wife but the comics have shown that superheroes do that all the time in fact homelander forced himself onto Starlight along with black noir and a train and this right here is a good example of my point in the show it's more of a message about workplace assault and in the comics it's just oh that critical element of his character isn't really special in the comics we see characters that are depicted in a far worse light than homelander now as you might remember I did say that homelander ate a baby which is yes incredibly bad but in the comic these are simply shown in pictures in fact these pictures are something that homelander doesn't remember doing he talks to himself in a mirror and then suddenly has a realization that he can do anything in the show when he does something bad he knows he's doing it and he doesn't care but the comic homelander actually does he's disturbed by these pictures homelander just kind of is like I'm crazy now and decides to lead a superhero Revolution so let's talk about the worst part of the boy's comic the ending and so the soups take over the white house because pretty much every hero had already been thinking about the same thing homelander kills the president and that's that except there's a plot twist it turns out homelander didn't actually eat a child or did any of those horrible things it was black noir the entire time who could have guessed that Noir was actually a clone of homelander yep Noir was a clone whole time the complex deterioration of a spoiled soup with parental issues that we see in the TV show yeah that that doesn't happen at the end of the day butcher sums it all up as homelander was just trekked into becoming a psychopath which is just the worst twist it undermines everything that made homelander even remotely worse than other soups most of the bad things we thought homelander did well black noir did it at the end of the day he's simply a big dummy that got Bamboozled into [Music] all homelander really did was simply suggest to a bunch of other crazy people that they should take over the country don't worry this plot line is resolved in like five minutes because it turns out the military had anti-suit missiles the entire time so this really wasn't even that big of a deal they all just die like idiots that was it that was the reason why garthenis wanted the soups to join homelanders Revolution it's so they could get absolutely decimated by the real cool guys the military industrial complex and with everything wrapped up in a nice neat bow butcher just decides to kill all the boys wait what Garth Ennis hates superheroes so he wrote a power fantasy about people not dressed in costumes ripping apart nerds with their bare hands to justify this every superhero is an absolute lunatic a narrative that explores the idea of superheroes like that flash game where you blow up your buddy the message is just that superhero rows are cringe which might not be untrue in these times of MCU fatigue but at the end of the day the boys teaches us a valuable lesson to remember that too much hate towards something can become just as annoying and intolerable as the thing it's making fun of [Music] foreign

Channel: PointlessHub

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Keywords: The Boys review, The Boys Season 3, The Boys, The Boys comic, PointlessHub, PointlessHub Transformers, PointlessHub the Boys, The Boys Season finale, The Boys Soldier Boy, The Boys Butcher, The Boys comic isnt good, Garth Ennis, The Boys Amazon, The Boys Season 3 Review, The Boys comedy, the boys opinion, review the boys, season 3, pointlesshub review, the show is better

Id: JyKliIF49JQ

Length: 15min 22sec (922 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 13 2022