Warning: The following article contains spoilers for The Boys comic books.
The Boys might just be one of the best comic book adaptations out there, but the source material is deeply flawed and at times an outright mess, and fans are calling it out.
A post shared on Reddit has started a discussion surrounding The Boys comic book origins. The post in question was a screenshot of a tweet that pointed out a few glaring holes in the story and themes of the original material. The caption reads “How did this get a successful live action show!?” But is the original comic really that bad?
Listen, I love Garth Ennis as much as the next guy, but The Boys is definitely one of his weaker comic runs. Often falling back upon the same old hyper-violence and sex that Ennis is notorious for time and time again. The message of the books gets drowned underneath the author’s need to show the reader the most messed up stuff he could think of.
As the tweet shared online suggests, there were indeed supervillains in the original story, which kind of defeats the point of the “superheroes” being the real villains. The ending also completely deflates the stakes to the point of being laughable. Don’t even get me started on that twist with Black Noir. Hopefully season 3’s finale removed any possibility of that coming to pass, but if you know what I’m talking about you’ll know how poorly executed the reveal was in the comics.
You also had The Boys using temp V from the get go rather than it being something that actually has dire consequences for whoever uses it. This also removes the stakes somewhat as our main characters are put on the same playing field as the villains, it doesn’t feel like such an impossible struggle when it’s just supes vs supes. There’s less of that moral dilemma from the show. In fact most of the stuff from the comic just misses the mark.
Fans had plenty of their own gripes with the source material too with many claiming the Prime Video show to be one of the few adaptations to surpass the source material.
“The Boys Amazon series is one of the few cases where the adaptation exceeds its source material
Someone called the comics a revenge fantasy against people who don’t exist”
And yes, the comics do feel like a strange revenge fantasy against something that Ennis has made up in his head.
“It was more of a revenge fantasy against a genre that does exist.
Ennis hates superhero comics. He thinks that they over-dominate the comic landscape.
He’s kind of an odd duck.”
“That’s the comic, the show is actually fire, and is a lot more logically and thematically sound”
To be fair, Garth Ennis is credited as a co-executive producer (along with Seth Rogen) on the series, so perhaps he’s decided to reel in his rage a bit as the show is pretty solid.
As for how the show got made, the truth is that Ennis is actually a solid writer. There had already been successful adaptations of his work before including Preacher, arguably one of the best comics ever made. Similar to The Boys, the Preacher comics and it’s adaptation reveled in the hyper-violence.
Ennis has proven that he can write good comics and shows this just isn’t the best reflection of his work. There are clearly a lot of problems with the source material, but lucky for us someone saw a diamond in the rough and decided to polish that diamond until it shined.