Just finished it

Just finished it.
Extremely meh. Thoughts?

Garth Ennis repeating the same joke for 60+ issues with his cool edgy OC anti-hero team taking out expys of popular superheroes. Marshal Law did the same thing in 6 issues without wearing out the joke.

I think it should have gone full comedy instead of that weird serious tone it goes for halfway through. The first half (or third) of the series has some very funny moments.

>Marshal Law did the same thing in 6 issues without wearing out the joke.

Yeah but after the first mini it kinda did wear out the joke after a while, too.

The retard team arc is one of my favorite arcs of all time in any comic.
>tfw no eternally concussed gf to take advantage of

Oh but yeah as a whole it's just okay.

Here’s what the Boys is:

80% of the scenes are Character A sits down and listens to Character B telling an grotesquely violent episode that happened to him many years prior.

10% of the scenes are Character A sits down and reads a report of a grotesquely violent episode that happened to someone many years prior.

The other 10% is a grotesquely violent episode that is happening right now.

It’s something I noticed in Ennis Punisher as well, every other issue is just one character listening as another own goes on and on and on for pages, about some fucked up shit that happened, all spliced in with fuck dup shit happening. It’s really noticeable once you’ve read enough of him.

I noticed many Ennis tropes as well, but honestly in Punisher it never went in the way of the story in my opinion. Preacher too is very verbose, but The Boys is the first one that made me actually skip pages because I knew for a fact that all that shit was unnecessary for the most part.

I liked the character beats, I liked the characters themselves, I was emotionally attached to Simon Pegg and Billy Butcher and the Frenchman and The Female.

I genuinely got invested in the world it constructed, I do have a love of the edge. But if it starts off strong, it falters in the same way Warren Ellis's No Hero did, it substitutes this weird hypersexual, hyperviolent superhumanity that depends on pharmaceuticals and a corporate mission to function, and thus in the end it has to either abandon the parody aspects or abandon its focus on its own world.

I can accept a lot, but it just felt like a dumb gimmick to have Stan Lee be one of the highest knowledge brokers in the business because comic books used to be something. It feels weird when they try to explain away crisos crossovers as island paradise fuckfests.

Give me a version of a deconstruction or at least a good alternate take on certain groups. Deal with the X-men being a terrorist organization, not just have Professor X diddle kids. You can't just create a surface level pastiche and seriously try to make a serious point on why superheroes suck or what have you.

The best parts focus on the human relationships between characters, I do like Super Duper and how Wee Hughie got sucked into liking G-Whiz, and I do like the Butcher mini-series which returns us to the strong start the comic gave us.

If it hadn't been such an oddly manufactured world, maybe it would have been much better. As it is, its a comic that I read all the way through not bothering to stop.

I sort of get what it's trying to do in the same way that Marshal Law was trying to do, is that if superheroes were like celebrities a whole lot of them would be fucked up kind of like the Hollywood Babylon and Crazy Days and Nights stuff. But yeah there were parts that dragged on too much. I just hope that if the show on Amazon actually happens that they improve on it more.

I have 3 memories of what I read of The Boys before dropping it, years ago.
>Simon Pegg's girlfriend is killed by Flash
>Justice League is full of retards, one asks a new female member to suck his dick in order to get accepted
>There's a russian hero with a gigantic cock and who looks like a hobo Santa Claus
I remember having fun reading it, but I was too young to really care, I just read it for the edge.

I recommend anyone wanting a good "Heroes as celebrities" story to read Milligan's run on X-force that starts with #116, and continues into the X-Statix.

IMO that run does what The Boys tried to do, in a more comedic fashion of course, and is criminally underrated.

Butch is a boring Mary Sue and it should have focused on the corrupt Superhero community more

It wasn't even explained how supervillains worked

thought it was a great concept and the first half or two-thirds was excellent. but, as the series wound down, i got the sense that ennis had a ton of material to cover that he didn't really have the time or inclination to address in an interesting, entertaining, or narratively organic way, which resulted in dozens of extremely boring, exposition-heavy issues. it was one of my favorite series for a few years, but the last 12 to 18 months especially left me cold.

Those were great comics. Easily my favorite thing Milligan's ever done.

Man, I read a comic magazine (Wizard? Maybe something else) while X-Force/X-Statix was going on and I seem to remember it being hyped in that.
They had a list of like, the hottest comics to get and X-Force 116 was on it for what seemed like ages. Hard to believe it's only worth a few bucks now...
Omnibus was like 30 bucks a few years back, couldn't believe it.

Ennis in general is overrated as fuck, I blame punisherfags

I own the omnibus, got it for $40. Its amazing how stuff that got hyped up just disappears from the zeitgeist. But it still remains to me one of the most important examples of how you can subvert and make fun of and tear down a genre and medium, and still be a top notch example of that genre and medium.

I liked The Boys, but I can remember Mr Sensitive's fight vs Tony Stark better than I can any fight that doesn't involve Love Sausage.

I dunno man, I think everyone except the main protagonist had quite thin paper personalities.

Completely agree on both points. And Butcher's motivations to attempt a genocide are quite idiotic, especially considering he's 100% aware that he's acting completely crazy.

Oh, and on a side note, I found quite annoying that very often Ennis is just shoehorning his opinions through characters' voices. Being someone who read many of his stories I could tell from a mile away that those weren't a character's opinion on something but Ennis'.

"And let me tell you about the Germans and the British. Did you know that the average German tank was literally invincible, and could take down on average 3 million Britons every day? How we actually won WWII is a mystery not even I know."

Ennis writes WWII Germany almost as if Uber actually happened

How about expys of popular supervillians taking out expys of edgy anti-heroes because they keep starting trouble?

Good solid series.

I liked it, but I think that it was helped by the fact that I read it monthly and not in one go, as a collective story read in a few days it does drag a lot but I liked it nonetheless.

The WW2 bit and the whole segments about failing weapons and the government being bought and sold were pretty great as well as the 9/11 segment with the Seven just failing and letting the planes crash because they weren't really trained for shit.
Herogasm was pretty decent as well because it took the piss out of yearly "event" books.
I even felt bad for the Homelander when he found out that he'd not done half the things he was blackmailed for, because he'd gone so far that he couldn't turn back and was just a puppet all along.

>IMO that run does what The Boys tried to do

holy shit no, you couldn't have interpreted it any worse.

The Boys is about an American megacorporation trying to sell capeshit into the army, and to that end they create a gigantic media machine to hype supes (and to fill their own pocket with merchandising). And for the sake of good PR, they do their best to hide the fact that the capes are either well intended assholes out of their depth at best, or baby eaters with genocidal tendencies at worst. Most of them being the latter, since superstardom and godlike powers make it impossible for them to be raised as normal people.

>Did you know that the average German tank was literally invincible, and could take down on average 3 million Britons every day?

This is not far from the truth for the majority of the war, it was only around the end that they finally started using tanks that could penetrate Panthers and Tigers.

The allies could barely even start up captured Tiger tanks, while the Germans were cruisin' with those like nothing (mind you, a Tiger crews orders included them spending every single free minute they have on fixing the tank, which is why they could manage to keep it running).

That was the only thing that irked me in that Hitman arc where they find a Tiger in bumfuck middle of the sahara. While it's not impossible one made it that far, it is impossible for it to be still working after being left in the desert, unmaintained for who knows how long.

Three things...

1.The concept of "What if superhero's where real?(and if they where they would be assholes)" was done to perfection by Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neil in Marshal Law.

2. It hurts me to say this, but Garth Ennis is kind of a hack who used shock to sell this but it wasn't really all that shocking. "Out preacher, the preacher?" Bullshit. There's some really daft, post 9/11 knee jerk politics going on here about justifying the War in Iraq.

3. I don't like how it was made to be quickly adaptable into a movie or TV series. It's the same thing with Kick-Ass. If it's a comic, it should stand alone as a comic and shoudn't just be a convenient springboard in to Hollywood.

>Extremely meh
were my thoughts exactly. i don't think i even finished it

Nah, Ennis has been overrated since before he even touched Punisher.

You cannot even imagine how much Preacher got dickrode back in the day.

a lot of the fights in the boys were just start and like one panel its done with i understand the boys are supposed to be better fighters then the supes but when fight with stormfront a guy who in the story is said to be close to homefront level boil down to like maybe 4 pages it's dissapointing

This, they're not comparable.
X-Statix uber alles tho

I only read halfway and then skipped to the end, I didn't felt I missed anything. A lot of the arcs played similarly with the boys finding that the superheroes of the week are a bunch of incompetent horny psychopaths, and then proceed to kill them since the boys were better at fighting than them. Felt that the series was way too long and heavy-handed even when I skipped a lot of chapters.

There's only a few things I really enjoyed in the book. I enjoyed G-Wiz and Starlight's arc. But overall the series just dragged on.

I think is too young to remember the 90's. But I do remember it and how much Preacher and Hitman got recommended by Wizard and other places.

I thought Hitman was better than Preacher, though.