The Boys: All you ever needed was love

While I have fallen very behind in watching The Boys TV show, one of my favourite things about it is seeing fans of the live action version discover the comic and how horrified they are by how crass and silly it is. That always makes my day.

I know enough that the TV show has just ended, so it seems a good time to republish this post I wrote - fuuuuck me - 16 years ago, about the ending of the comic series, and how it was a big old soft romance beneath all that superhero decadence. 

I still stand by this ancient opinion, even if I really failed to get into the bromance side of things. It's also one of the few things I've written for this blog which now somehow has a sensitive content warning on it. Must be the bit about the gerbil up the arse. 

“’Cos all that macho shit – that gunfighter, Dirty Harry bollocks – it looks tasty, but in the end it’s fuckin’ self-defeatin’.

"It just leaves you with bodies in ditches an’ blokes with headfuls o’ broken glass.

“Men are only so much use, Hughie.

“Men are boys.”

Some people say there are no such things as romance comics any more. That there haven’t been any romance books ever since titles like Young Love and My Romance disappeared from newsstand shelves. I say these people haven’t been paying attention to the alternative comic world, where there are loads of unashamedly romantic comics.

I also say these people haven’t been reading the Boys. Because The Boys was as romantic as fuck.

A lot of people could never see behind all the buggering jokes that Ennis and his artistic collaborators rammed into each issue. A lot of readers understandably didn’t find the idea of gerbils up the arse that funny, actually, and who can really blame them?

But there were moments of actual tenderness and intellectual thought, in there amongst the superhero decadence. Somewhere in there, hidden behind elongated cocks and bright red gore, The Boys had some interesting things to say about the extrapolation of power, and the pointlessness of violent revenge.

The reader didn’t even have to look hard to find this stuff. Each issue of The Boys was so narratively stuffed, there were pages and pages where James Stilwell, the ultimate villain of the series – who also happens to be a straight businessman who doesn’t even really pay for his innumerable crimes – clearly explains everything.

This was, incidentally, the scariest aspect of power that The Boys ever touched upon. Sure, the Homelander could devastate entire cities with his psychopathic hissy-fits, and terrible men did terrible deeds to keep the status quo going, but the big bad guy is just a corporation in human form.

(I read every single issue of The Boys, and I can’t even remember his fucking name until I made the effort to look it up, which is kinda the point.)

The corporation that is responsible for the vast majority of horror in The Boys is still there at the end of the series. There have been scapegoats and witch hunts, but the same hands are on the same reins of power.

Because corporations don’t really care about ideologies, and you can take down the people involved, but they will usually be fall guys, and others will take their place, and business goes on. It’s more threatened by Bad Product than anything its enemies could do to it.

This behaviour can be changed – you just have to prove to the corporation that a mode of thinking is unacceptable, and not worth the cost or effort. But it’s a type of modern thinking that can’t really be beaten.

The series could have ended with this down note, but there was more to come. Most of the silly superhero stuff was dealt with in the penultimate story arc, the final story was all about consequences, and revenge, and love.

And yes, it was still taking the piss out of super-heroes, as well. The final issue comments on attempts to strip superheroes back to absolute, blank-page basics, without actually changing anything fundamentally different, and laughs at this particularly super-hero misfortune.

The whole series did spend a lot of its time gleefully ripping into many of the core ideas about superheroes. Ennis isn’t against the fundamental idea behind superheroes – he does a terrific Superman, but he hates the way they became the end-all of comics in most peoples’ minds. And since he has no nostalgia or warmth towards the concept, he rips into them, usually to the point of absolute silliness.

And then there were a lot of moments where the silliness got sublime (especially in the excellent Frenchie issue, or the part when representatives of all the big Allied countries teamed up to kick the fucking shit out a Nazi cocksucker).

But the most successful moments in The Boys weren’t the silly bits, or the parts where a superhero cliché was thoroughly desecrated, they were the moments where somebody shows somebody else a little kindness, or a little compassion, or a little goddamned human feeling, when they have no reason to.

After all, the main character in The Boys wasn’t a brutal butcher, or a big mother’s boy, or a super Aryan nightmare, it was wee Hughie, a little fellow from Scotland.

When Hughie saves the day at the finale of The Boys, he doesn’t do it with violence or anger. He still gives it a go, but he’s totally useless at it. Instead, it’s the fact that he’s a nice guy, that he’s always been a nice guy, that saves everything.

Hughie was – by far – the least violent character in The Boys. Towards the end of the series, he got the revenge he was after since #1, but he just felt a bit sick afterwards. Hughie never gets off on the violence.

At the end, Hughie does stop Butcher from doing something monstrous, and saves the world with blind good luck, and the fact that he's a nice guy, who Butcher can't let fall to an idiotic death.

Even though Hughie does lose his shit at the end (and it’s over his parents, who he also moaned and groaned about, but was finally driven to a murderous rage by the thought that something terrible had happened to them,) and even though he still plays the little political games in the final issues, and even though everybody else in the series spent half their time making fun of him, Hughie's lack of violence and anger does win out.

Because all that macho bullshit didn’t mean anything, and just ruined a lot of peoples’ lives. Hughie is one of the only characters who bothers to sit down and actually talk to people, rather than order them around, or threaten them, like everybody else does.

And by the end of The Boys, it's clear that the old ways of vengeance and blood are just going to lead to more and more bloodshed, and that it's not good enough anymore.

And the thing that saves wee Hughie, when he could have gone as dark and horrible as everybody else, is love.

His relationship with Annie has been crazy, light, funny and genuinely warm, and for the series to end with them in each other's arms is just the perfect way to cap it all off. They sort their shit out and move on together as a proper couple, and they live happily ever after. (It's notable that the phone call where they actually figure it all out for the final time isn't shown in the comic, because it's none of our bloody business what they actually say to each other.)

The Boys had plenty of empty and cruel sex, and showed that without love, men will let hate rule their lives. Ultimately, the comic takes a romantic path into the future.

And despite what all the old comics used to say, romance isn’t just flowers and dancing and restrained tears, romance is about wanting to be with somebody all of the time, and wanting to protect them, and being terrified of losing them.

Romance is hard and scary, and the comic does end with a quesy fear that something terrible happening again. (But it doesn’t. Not today.) And it's totally worth it. It's always worth it.

And seeing this comic finish with a loving embrace beneath a rebuilt bridge is one last reminder that The Boys was more than just a comic about fucking superheroes.

How many decisions can you make in a day?

When I was a teenager and was thinking far too much about how the world works, I tried to count how many decisions I made in a day. I tried to add up all the tiny things, like deciding to stand up and walk, or pick up the dirty clothes on the floor, or grab a snack, or go out into the world. anything.

Not the unconscious things, like the decision to keep breathing, but all the yes/no binary decisions that we all make every day. 

I instantly found out that just thinking about this shit inevitably led to paralyzed inertia, and I didn't even get out of bed. Best just to go with the flow, really.

Absolutely the same old thing

The Absolute comics produced by DC over the past couple of years have been a total sales success. The big comic companies keep trying to do stripped-down version of their most iconic characters to get a bigger audience, and sometimes they do actually resonate with a wide readership.

The Absolutes have got that audience by making their characters as badass as humanly possible, which is always an excellent short-term solution, even if there needs to be more more depth than the usual ultra-metal imagery if you're going to get anywhere. 

I can understand the appeal, and some of it is genuinely inspired - the part in the Martian Manhunter story that has you looking through the page is something I have never seen in a comic before, and ripping Wonder Woman away from the tedium of Paradise Island and shoving her straight into hell is an inspired touch.

But I'm just not getting onboard this comic book juggernaut. I wasn't inspired to check them out initially mainly because many of the creators involved had already done plenty of Superman and Batman comics, and I really felt I'd read everything someone like Scott Snyder had to say about the Dark Knight. 

So I read the trade paperbacks from the library and they are okay. Some really nice art, some interesting storytelling and an absolute dedication to that badass ideal, and it's all a bit familiar, really.

There is definitely some multiversal burnout - here's another version of all those characters, to go with the trillion others we've seen thrown around in the past decade. But I'm also just totally over the endless twists on the legend, cliffhanger endings that rely on someone showing up in a new guise or role, and it's only shocking because it's something familiar given a new coat of paint.

It's a brand new world where Jimmy Olsen is the Gotham Police Commissioner, or Steve Trevor is really the goddess Athena. There's always a twist on the idea of Robin, and wait until you see what spin they're putting on Lex Luthor this time.

It's easy shock tactics to shuffle things around like this, but it's not really anything new, and that newness is always what I crave in my super comics. I wish all the Absolute comics good fortune in the wars to come, but I don't think I'm ever going to fight for them.

When Thor broke the need for everything

And for a while there, I am literally buying every new Marvel and DC comic I can get my hands on. It's the early 90s, I've started working and getting a weekly pay, and my obsession with comics has never been higher. I want to buy all the comics I can.

Unfortunately, I live hundreds of kilometers away from any kind of comic store, so when it comes to new comics, I have to rely on what shows up in the local bookstores and corner dairies. I have no control on what appears on those shelves and the pickings are slim, and irregular. 

It's fairly easy to keep up with the X-Men, because they're way more available, although you would always miss at least an issue a year, and sometimes you wouldn't see the New Mutants anywhere for months at a time (I miss the first Liefeld issues because of this). But I might get one of the four Superman titles (which was a bitch during the triangle era where it was all one long story) or the random issue of Star Trek or Deathlok that shows up.

Some things are there every month, more or less. I end up with things like as significant amount of the Tom DeFalco/Paul Ryan Fantastic Four, all the Dan Jurgens run on Justice League and a disturbing amount of What The-?! 

But I'm just buying everything I can. I've got disposable income for the first time in my life, and my driver's licence, so I'm getting a couple of dozen comics every month.

And then, when I buy a Thor comic for $3.95 (in 1992 money) from an Ashburton bookstore, it's deeply, deeply average, and something surprisingly tiny and delicate breaks inside of me, and I realise I don't have to get everything.

More than anything else, this one issue broke some habits that were getting out of hand. I saw the next Thor issue on the shelves and I am amazed by how easy it is to leave it there. And maybe I don't have to grab everything I can get my hands on.

Then I started going further afield and going to an actual comic store where I obviously can't just buy everything, so I focus on dropping a couple of hundred bucks on Alpha Flight and Hellblazer comics instead of just grabbing what I could.

I still had a completist mentality when it comes to certain creators for a lot longer. It took me another decade before I realised I didn't need every single Alan Moore comic (I can thank the Spawn/WildCATS crossover for that particular tiny revelation), but I stopped getting everything a long, long time ago.

And all it took was a mediocre thunder god adventure to realise that.

Prism Stalker: I can do this.

- Prism Stalker #4
Art and story by Sloane Leong
Letters by Ariana Maher

The Sandman and the pissing tree

When the last few issues of the regular Sandman comic book were slowly coming out, somewhere in the 1990s, I got into the habit of buying the latest issue, sitting under a particular tree in a nearby park, and really indulging in the final misadventures of  Morpheus and his chums.

I did this for several months, and then a week before the final issue came out, I realised that tree was actually right between a notorious student pub in town and the local university accommodations, and dozens and dozens of inebriated young people were taking a piss on that tree every weekend.

Not all stories have a moral, but there's probably one in here somewhere if I look hard enough.

Everybody joins in with Spartacus!

Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus remains a proper epic of a film - three hours of cinematic glory, full of desperate rebellion and fleeting love and blatant homoeroticism.  

It has been rightly celebrated for some of the great moments in 50s cinema - the 'I'm, Spartacus' moment, which is the natural emotional culmination of the failed slave rebellion; the movement of the armies like faceless ants; the sheer cruelty of the endless crucifixions.

But my favourite part of the whole thing happens incredibly quickly, almost without explanation, and no obvious foreshadowing. It's the sequence when the title character, having endured a lifetime of slavery and degradation, sees the love of his life being spirited away forever, and realises he has just had enough of this shit, and suddenly rebels against the masters.

And he doesn't have to ask for help - his fellow slaves just pile straight into the fight without hesitation, fighting and dying for their freedom. They are not asked for help, they don't make plans, and there are no heroic speeches before the action kicks off, they just all instantly pile in and beat the living shit out of the slavers.

Some of them notably sit it out at first, but then quickly join in to smash the gates, and join the big man's army, all the way to their mutual end.

Watching the film again, there is so much in the glances the gladiatorial slaves give each other, the silent understanding that this is bullshit. And when they get the chance, they're all in, because if they had all stood back and let Spartacus impotently rage on his own, they would never have got another chance.

It's a beautiful piece of cinema, often replicated - Braveheart cheerfully rips off vast parts of the earlier film, including the moment where William Wallace snaps and rebels, and is instantly joined by his clanfolk - but it remains universal. Because we're all in it together sometimes, and might have to join in the fight without being asked.

Too much volume in my Star Wars

Even though they all take place in a galaxy far, far away, one of the great appeals of the Star Wars movies has always been the use of real world locations. Places like Tunisia were are vital as Kenny Baker or Ben Burtt to the overall success of the series, grounding it in the real, making it all feel lived in.

Most of those locations were exotic areas of our planet, but you only needed a touch of freaky technology or creatures to make it feel truly out of this world. The real snow used for Hoth made the giant robot camels much more palatable, and it really felt like the giant redwoods of northern California went on forever around the moon of Endor.

Getting off the soundstage that had mostly been used for science fiction in the past made Star Wars stand out, just as much as the lightsabers and roaring spaceships did.

Some of the more modern Star Wars films and movies still follow this lesson, and use locations well, even if they are not always aware of what they have got. I still find it very funny how there was a shot in Rogue One that was used early on in the hype cycle - featuring sinister stormtroopers wading through the water of a tropical paradise - and the weird disappointment when there wasn't so many shots like that in the finished film, because the filmmakers just didn't think to get more, and were apparently more focused on the weird and dull business with a space claw machine sequence instead.

The prequels got some grief for the overuse of greenscreen silliness, but still made use of some fine locations for the palaces of Naboo, and back on those endless sands of Tatooine. But in recent years it's been all about the Volume, the VFX technology that provides magnificent backdrops for all the space adventuring.

And it's such a huge effort for something that is not needed, because that first great lesson of film-making from Star Wars that often gets ignored is that you use what you've got in the wild, and make it otherworldly by slapping a power convertor onto a tree trunk or something, or have some strange creature's skeleton blowing in the sand. The shamefully lost art of matte work literally painted over the seams, and that was all that was needed.

There's just a lot of suspension of disbelief in watching Star Wars - being able to hear explosions in the vacuum of space is just the start of it - but it's a lot easier to take Boba Fett seriously when he is in an actual physical space.

For someone who does truly enjoy a lot of Star Wars movies, I spend a lot of time complaining bout them, but I assure it, it's only because I cafe. I can usually find the good parts in any of the movies

(the TV shows are a different story, and the animation stuff has always felt completely dispensable to me,) and sometimes all it takes is a glimpse of the real world being shot up with lasers to keep me happy.

The gloves of a vampire

Like everyone else in the world, I consume so much media that it's amazing that anything sticks in the brain. And sometimes it's just the stupidest and tiniest little detail that remains.

I watched every episode of the most recent Interview With A Vampire TV show because there was a good six months of my life where it was my favourite book of all time (I was, of course, 16 years old), and it was well made and acted and everything. But there wasn't a lot that stuck in my mind, except for the part where the great Eric Bogosian sneers at the idea of wearing gloves to handle a delicate and ancient journal, because he argues that any benefit from using the gloves is outweighed by the loss of sensation and the greater possibility that you might accidentally tear the pages.

And then I read a comic book all about the history of the cocktail, and that's full of historical data, but a week later, the only thing I remember - and something I'll be pulling out at parties for the rest of my pitiful life - is the origin of the word 'cocktail', and what it has to do with sticking objects up a horse's arse.

There's only so much space in my head, so I am, of course, only remembering the best parts.