I've been seeing ads for Amazon's new show The Boys, based on the Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson comic from Dynamite Studios (and previously Wildstorm, which I just learned about reading the Wikipedia page a moment ago). It looks fairly well done, but I'm not totally sure how I feel about it, especially given this review on the AV Club, which I also read just a few minutes ago.
I guess the issue I have is the source material - Garth Ennis has long reveled in nihilism, and while it was entertaining when I was reading Preacher or Hitman, I wonder if it's not gotten out of hand, even for him?
He's one of that cohort of British comics writers who came up in the 80s and 90s on stuff like 2000AD, and then made their way to the US via Vertigo, and from there ended up in superhero comics. But whereas someone like Grant Morrison loves superhero comics and has continued working in the genre, Ennis went on a similar route to Warren Ellis and turned his back on superheroes as soon as he could.
I don't entirely blame him, since I think that most superhero books are basically the same now as they were 20-30 years ago, if a little more gross and intense. But what I've seen of his work since Preacher has lacked heart, for lack of a better term.
It might have been the switch to Marvel in the early 2000s that precipitated it. Preacher was graphic, extreme and sometimes all you could do was laugh in horror (cf. the Meat Woman), but you could see he held affection for characters like Jesse, Tulip and Cassidy, or even Arseface. It was so thematically rich that it actually got me into Western movies, especially John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. Even now I don't think I can name a more perfect comics series, other than Ennis's run on Hellblazer or Neil Gaiman's Sandman.
And it seemed like he was onto something similar with War Stories, the one-shots he did for Vertigo after Preacher, about wars (mainly World War 2, one of his favorite themes). But then he went for Marvel's MAX line, and I think his worst instincts got the better of him. Mainly in the final issue of his Fury mini-series, where Nick Fury (pre Samuel L Jackson) strangles the main villain with his own intestines. Apparently George Clooney had been attached to play Fury, but was put off by that book.
From there Ennis went on to the Punisher, first under Marvel Knights and then MAX. His first storyline was fun, in a back-to-basics way, but the impression I get of some of the MAX issues is that he was just there to rack up as much of a body count as possible. This is notwithstanding my pleasure at seeing his fingerprints all over Punisher War Zone, of course, but I can't deny that those stories aren't really his absolute best.
Another one that I dip into from time to time is Crossed, which he did for Avatar. Crossed is basically just gross and disturbing, a version of zombies where instead of the mindless walking dead, the zombies are maniacal rapists and murderers acting out their civilized selves' worst impulses. There's room for thematically rich stuff there, which is why I have a look every once in a while, but for the most part it's unrelentingly brutal.
The Boys is kind of in this vein, from what I've seen. The first image of the series, essentially, is the crushed, armless corpse of the main character's girlfriend, a hapless victim of collateral damage during a superhero fight. I do think the story plays well with one of Ennis's best-loved themes, which is the ease with which the people in charge of society get subverted into immorality, but I guess my experience has been that he's more concerned with grossing out the reader than giving us characters to care about.
Maybe that's unfair - Wee Hughie is a pretty good character, but somehow I've never connected enough with the book to buy the trade paperbacks, even having skipped ahead a few collections to the end, where things go pretty crazy.
It might just be that, overall, I'm tired with all the relentless negativity and nihilism of media at the moment. I've talked about it on Star Trek Discovery (though my complaint there is more the writing than the tone), and it's present in a number of other shows and comics at the moment. The problem is that nihilism is also present in the real world, much more so than in 2006 when Ennis and Robertson started The Boys, and it gets a little tiring to see that kind of thing even in the places I go to escape from the real world.
Now, I should point out one other, slightly contradictory thing, which is that I'm pleased for him and Darick Robertson that they've had the show optioned, and are getting paid well for it (I presume). I think he's one of those writers whose work deserves more recognition - I just wish it was for some of his better work. I know Preacher's on AMC, but I also don't get the sense it's taken off the way other AMC shows have... and that's a real shame.
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