The Boys - An Amazon Prime adaptation of the Ennis comic series

[Mayoush]

It never gets old to be lectured about "corporations bad" by people that are on the payroll of the biggest corporations on the planet, living lives of wealth and privilege on the company's dime, that the average prole can only dream about.

For real they will keep selling out until AI or robots replaces them

I think the show is worse since the creator is furious that people like homelander that's why he doesn't want to do the comic twist of black noir, there is not much depth to the comic either , what if superman was evil and ate kids alive and raped women and all of the characters are former nazi and also sexual deviants the show toned down all these themes and made it about the evil orange man instead not counting the countless gender and race swaps

 

[regalterry]

what if superman was evil and ate kids alive and raped women and all of the characters are former nazi and also sexual deviants

Which had already been done in Wanted from 2003, and it was just as crass and cringe there as it was in the Boys.

We also already had "Superman, but evil" with Miracleman from the 1980s by resident demon cocksleve Alan Moore.

I have no clue what the Boys had to offer that was so novel besides the explicit and in-your-face shock value.

 

[Not A Bunny]

It never gets old to be lectured about "corporations bad" by people that are on the payroll of the biggest corporations on the planet, living lives of wealth and privilege on the company's dime, that the average prole can only dream about.

Art reflects life. We've kind a reached a point where everyone's been trained to believe that whatever corporations tell us is good, so much so that nobody questions it when the message they put out is "corporations bad", and yet somehow, we accept that message without keeling over from the cognitive dissonance.

It thoroughly astounds me how often people cheer it when someone more obscenely wealthy than they are falls in line with the social agenda they were fed, yet it somehow never occurs to them that the same obscenely wealthy motherfuckers have no real motivation to adhere to that agenda except that it keeps the audience in their corner.

I actually had a point here, and that is, this is the reason that it doesn't astound me that Eric Kripke hasn't been called out for the sick motherfucker he is. He says the right words and pisses off all the right people, so whatever perverse idea he has for putting things onscreen (I'm not a prude, I just lost my taste for shock-value shit when I burned myself out on True Crime) is that same shit that's going to get amped up on social media.

Which had already been done in Wanted from 2003, and it was just as crass and cringe there as it was in the Boys.

And that's another thing that pisses me off about modern media. It's like everyone thinks they have an original idea. I suppose corporations will exploit this when all of their new-agey ideas get thrown out just to jangle the keys at consumers.

 

[BubbaRobot887]

So the guy sitting next to me on the plane was watching this show and it just seems to be a crass meanspirited show made by people who hate life and it's only message seems to be "Corporations and Christians are bad, M'Kay", I can't understand how this got five seasons or how anything it does is seen as original.

 

[RSU 1741]

We also already had "Superman, but evil" with Miracleman from the 1980s by resident demon cocksleve Alan Moore.

I have no clue what the Boys had to offer that was so novel besides the explicit and in-your-face shock value.

Again I find myself attracted to this thread by Moore.

Miracleman is indeed in some weird sense a predecessor to The Boys, but not for the "Superman is Evil" approach (Miracleman's supers are more of the otherwordly horror type of supes, distinct and alien from human experience) but for the gore. Bates/Kid Miracleman was the kind of psychotic, deranged edgelord fond of hyper-graphic violence so dear to Ennis. On other regards, they're clearly opposite: superpowered beings in Miracleman quickly go beyond humanity (leaving always though the little sore note that for all their powers and supposed enlightenment the end result is .... unsatisfactory) while supes in The Boys are deranged thugs enslaved to their basest desires. I don't think there's much of MM in The Boys.

Thematically and often-repeated, the real predecessors to Ennis' work are The Brat Pack (personally I find it mediocre, but the combo of corrupting the innocent, sex&violence is here) and of course Pat Mill's Marshal Law. Law may be flawed (the parody becomes excessive, the political bent predictable, the developments silly and the crossovers ridicolous) but the basic narrative gist? It's already there. Bar of course O'Neill's phenomenal art that makes re-reading Marshal Law decades later a joy. I wonder, why The Boys is so badly drawn? Bad writing calling for awful art, maybe?

 

[Overly Serious]

I don't watch The Boys. I watched some of Season 1 and dropped. If I could summarise my view it would something I don't like done very well. (At least up to the points I watched).

But the constant exposure has nudged me into reading a little of this thread out of curiousity for how the show has gone. And regards the below:

Which had already been done in Wanted from 2003, and it was just as crass and cringe there as it was in the Boys.

I think the Amazon show The Tick did an interesting and subversive take on all of this. You had a Superman figure (Superian) who was fantastically powerful but also flawed. You had a powerful organisation that commercialised superheroes. You had villains who it hinted weren't so much villains exactly as much as on the opposing team. It was very like The Boys in many elements, actually. Only, funny and heart-warming.

I suspect that The Boys is one of the reasons for The Tick's cancellation. I liked that show.