Bringing the Graphic to the Novel
4/5
Spoilers
Any regular readers of my reviews may have gotten the impression that I approach all artforms with a deep and meaningful thoughtfulness. At the very least, you may think I like to treat all works with a seriousness that ignores belies their roots. You may think I'm talking nonsense. It is true that I try to see the meaning of the piece or explore what themes are conveyed when writing. But often I do find things that I just enjoy on a puerile level, something that is just there to make me snigger. And, apologies for those of you with a sensitive demeanour, nothing tickles me more than Karl Urban dropping the 'C-bomb' every couple of minutes on Amazon's The Boys.
That particular expletive, though quite shocking to many, isn't funny in of itself. It is more the raw, vulgar, repetitiveness with which Urban's character of Billy Butcher uses it. That and his thick cockney accent oozing out of a very self-satisfied smile. This combination very much sums up the TV series of The Boys. Self-aware, raw, and vulgar.
For my birthday, Mrs. C got me Volume 1 of the graphic novel that The Boys is based on. My sister-in-law and her fiancé gave me Volume 2. Thus I was presented with a chance to look at the source material and compare it with the diluted TV form. I am, as you will undoubtedly be surprised to hear, a comicbook fan, so this foray into the origin story of a programme I have enjoyed was not going to be unfamiliar territory. Or so I assumed.
To a certain degree, the usual patter of a comic book series was present. Four panels of action a page. Plots that built to mini-climaxes as an issue finished, finding resolutions at the start of the next. The dialogue was a bit heavier than modern Marvel or DC fare, but, considering the price of modern graphic novels, more dialogue is always welcome in extending reading time.
Where The Boys departs from its comic heritage is in how it treats its superheroes. In the TV series we see a group of mercenaries trying to take down an Avengers-style team who work for an evil corporation. Within the comic book, the mercenaries work directly for the CIA and, although The Seven (said Avengers-style team) exist, there are hundred more superheroes in this world. And they are all some combination of stupid, narcissistic, and perverse. Over multiple stories we are shown superhero characters who are as thinly developed as the paper they are realised on. The superheroes are there as moronic cannon fodder.
Here the series lives up to its promise. The language is coarse. The characters, both protagonists and the dense super-hoards, engage in a wide variety of sexual proclivity. And each time the titular Boys go after a group of heroes, gory, cartoonish, ultra-realistic violence spills from the pages. Where in DC a punch from Superman will send a villain into a building from which they can climb out of, a punch from anyone superpowered here is likely to see their whole faces explode. In one scene alone, Billy Butcher blows up the heads of over one hundred Russian 'supes'.
But why all the violence? Why all the raucous behaviour? I think the first reason is probably the most obvious. This comic book series is a reaction to the growing philosophical nature that your standard superhero comic books have been gaining. Over the past two decades more and more titles have begun to question 'Why?' with each character they work with. A recent Wonder Woman graphic novel I read, dating to the late noughties, saw Diana (Wonder Woman) representing Themyscira at the U.N., balancing bad guys fights with what message that sent to the world. Can diplomats take the law into their own hands? And what does it mean for a Christian country like the U.S. (in all but designation) when a Greek God of sorts is roaming the land. Although many find this an enjoyable spin on the superhero tales of old, The Boys seeks to remind readers that these characters, and the powerhouse companies behind them, might not be as authoritative as they would like to appear on such weighty matters. And, possibly, moral commentary coming from characters in super-tight spandex seems a bit out-of-place.
Some have seen The Boys as playing into tropes of the modern era, revelling in the hyper-violent and hyper-shocking. I have never really ascribed to that concept within the arts; much of humanity's creativity across the ages has paid homage to war, murder, and brutality, and has often sought to shock. It is not a new phenomenon. But I most certainly do not see that really as the basis of what writer Garth Ennis was aiming for here. The sense of reality, of responsibility, absent in most blockbuster fiction is at the fore here. Dead means dead, or, at least, a resurrected 'supe' is going to be a walking vegetable. In many ways, instead of glorifying violence as its detractors would have you believe, it shows what would actually happen if a girl is hit by the fastest man on earth (she gets smushed into a wall). Whereas, most blockbuster action films, and especially war films, will show protagonists doing incredibly unbelievable things and surviving terrible injuries with ease. The world is not like that and war, as Sherman said, is hell.
The stories told within these pages are humorous and as well as perceptive. They provide a solid long term story that draws you back issue after issue with a nicotine whiff. My one reservation with the series was, strangely enough, the art work. Though artist Darick Robertson is inventive in his creation of Marvel / DC parodies (chief being the antagonist Homelander, who appears as some ungodly hybrid of Superman and Captain America) he seems to struggle to repeatedly draw faces. Between panels characters will morph making it hard to always tell who is talking. This aspect I did find off putting at times, but the lunacy of the stories always kept me hooked. Although this is very much not for the faint-hearted.
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