I’ve been meaning to write about The Boys again for a while. Readers of Best Shots know that I’m a die-hard Garth Ennis fan, and it’s not just because I too have the sense of humor of a 12-year-old. That helps, but the difference that I see between Ennis’s over-the-top physical humor (and the artists who take it to the next level, particularly Steve Dillon and Darick Robertson) and some other writers is that it’s almost always gross-out humor as parody. There’s a point to be made with it.
Someday I’m going to write about THAT issue of The Boys, bust out some academic theory, and send it off to a journal or something. For today, I’m here to introduce you to Herogasm, the first Boys spin-off miniseries. It comes out tomorrow, and you won’t want to miss it.
Readers of The Boys know the story already–the superheroes in this world are (very) thinly veiled parodies of known and loved Marvel and DC heroes, and Ennis has peeled back any layers of civility to show them as depraved, selfish wankers who do what they do just to get recognition in the pages of comics. The superheroes are all property of a faceless corporation who just keep them around to make money. It’s metafiction and a statement against corporatism and a poke in the eye of overzealous superhero fans and a laugh at military spending and dick jokes–lots of dick jokes–all at once. No wonder I love it.
Herogasm is what happens when all the superheroes team up to fight a massive enemy–except they don’t actually team up, that’s just a gimmick to sell comics. Instead, they fly off to a hidden island somewhere for some rest, relaxation, and, well, you can figure out the rest from the title, even if you haven’t gotten the pattern by now.
Ennis spoofs all the big-named crossover events in Marvel and DC history and sets new artists John McCrea and Keith Burns up with some expansive sex scenes to draw–this book is in no way safe for work–but underneath it we get some good old-fashioned intrigue, introducing a new bad guy to the scene. The superheroes, for all their powers, are just pawns being shuffled around by corporate entities. A commentary on the comic book industry, or the world at large? It’s probably both.
Slow scenes of a one-sided telephone conversation aboard Air Force Two are intercut with epic splash pages of poolside, er, relaxation, and as usual, Annie is out of her depth but playing along to keep her job. Meanwhile, the Boys are up to no good in their own way, doing surveillance, but this time their eyes are on the real superpowers. And the Homelander has a rather big secret to keep.
Ennis is setting up something big and potentially explosive here. Strangely, you can feel the tension because for all the debauchery in these pages, it’s rather tame. It’s par for the course perversion that we’ve grown used to over thirty issues of Ennis and Robertson set free to try anything. I suppose that can be the problem with a book built on taking that joke just too far, skating the line between alienating and fascinating readers. You’ve got to keep coming up with something new, something crazier.
It’s not immediately clear why this is a spinoff and not just an arc of The Boys, and that’s the other reason I know something huge must be coming. After all, we can trust these guys not to give us a spinoff just to sell comics, right? That’s exactly what they’re parodying here.
Either way, you know you want to read it, even if it’s just for the…art! That’s it.
(Don’t worry, I won’t tell.)
May 19th, 2009 at 7:39 am
I heard about this title, but didn’t know until recently that it was a Boys spinoff. My LCS probably wasn’t motivated enough to order it for me without asking either.
TPB here I come
May 19th, 2009 at 8:08 am
I honest to God HATE The Boys. There is nothing worthwhile in it at all. I find its “hur hur superheroes are TEHGAY!11!!” humour to be something only a 12 year old Xbox Live using child would find amusing and the stories to be cliched nonsense.
So, yeah, I won’t be buying this spin-off either.
May 19th, 2009 at 8:34 am
Herogasm? Oy Vey
It’s only gonna get worse
May 19th, 2009 at 8:47 am
I don’t know GQ. I didn’t think I would enjoy it for all the same reasons you dislike it, but I ended up finding it quite entertaining, and not for the humor which i’m usually not that interested in.
There is something horribly tragic about some of the characters that makes the potty mouthed obscenity a little more acceptable for me.
May 19th, 2009 at 10:53 am
Re: Cisco
Your LCS wasn’t motivated enough to order it WITHOUT you ASKING for it? Are you kidding me? As a LCS worker you know that once we order it we HAVE to PAY for it, and if it turns out you don’t want it, we’re STUCK with it.
If YOU can’t be motivated to order something that YOU want, how is that THEIR fault?
just wondering
fernald.
May 19th, 2009 at 11:41 am
you guys must live in some ass backwards country cities or something.
even in houston this stuff sells well enough for the stores to stock it w/out me asking them to.
i think the only special order i’ve ever had to do with them was with Ubu Bubu from slave labor.
just about everything else they’re cool enough to stock.
and here i was thinking houston was conservative.
but any book where the protagonist keeps a gerbil that was stuck up the villians rear always gets good points with me.
points as in my money.
money shot.
May 19th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
It’s worth reading if you’re interested in what the comics world would look like without altruism. Have a seat on your favorite couch with a double feature of Geoff Johns’s Flash or Superman and The Boys. I enjoy both because they’re so different.
Sarah- did Walter Fisher come up with anything that you could use for analysis? I’ve only taken one class, but I recall liking what he had to say.
May 19th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
i agree, on what the other poster said. you can only say so many times “superheroes are silly”.
and that comes from someone who thinks Ennis is one the greatest contemporary writers in comics. and if you really want some laughs read the exploits of sixpack and gang (dogwelder)
May 19th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
I think the reason it’s a spin-off is that it didn’t fit into Garth’s full story arc. He has said from the beginning that THE BOYS will be 60 issues total. So, perhaps this storyline popped in his head that he wanted to tell, but it would have disrupted the flow of the regular book. Yet, it’s probably there to add to the main story (as you suggested).
May 20th, 2009 at 6:40 am
No way THE BOYS is just a series of puerile jokes about superheroes. Those are there in abundance, but Ennis weaves them into some very gripping stories. I honestly expected to hate this title, and now it’s one of my favorites.
May 20th, 2009 at 7:42 am
fernald,
Yeah, gee, how silly of Cisco to expect a direct market store that’s supposed to specialize in selling comics to have a comic series for sale. Doesn’t Cisco know every business requires customers to specify exactly what they want 3 months ahead of time?
The direct market is such a joke. The way they view their customers, as an inconvenience to be treated like dirt, is exactly why the majority or readers left are sad, old babymen who can’t let go of their childhood.
May 20th, 2009 at 8:21 am
‘The Boys’ doesn’t appeal to me at all. To me, it’s another of Ennis’ failures to complete a good idea without falling into his standard tropes of goofy violence and stupid perversion. I’m not offended by the content of his comics, I’m offended at the poor quality of the writing. It’s lazy, cheap laughs that ruin his otherwise amazing ideas. He can be a great writer if he didn’t (sometimes literally) emasculate his characters to an extent that it renders them little more than puerile punchlines. “This super-hero has to hump everything he sees! Hurrhurr!” “This villain gets his head cut so he looks like a penis, then his leg gets eaten by backwoods cannibals, and his nards get bit off by a dog! LULZ!” “That dog has huge balls! Wooo!” “He had a hamster up his butt the whole time! *wheeze* i can’t breathe!” The more I read of Ennis the less I like him. He destroys his own writing talent. If he wrote more stuff like his “War Stories” he’d be one of my favorites.
June 18th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Wonder if Ennis ever gets hate mail and death threats from riffing on the likes of Cappy and Superman?
If he does, I’d love to see Ennis post them on the internet or something. That’d be just as big of a riot as this gem.
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