Ennis gets Ugly: The Downward Spiral of The Boys

I’m not the squeamish sort.

As a matter of fact, I’ve been told, on occasion, that I have absolutely disgusting tastes when it comes to both graphic content and unpleasant themes. I enjoy the films of Takashi Miike and Lars von Trier. I love Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, and paid an ungodly sum for a signed copy of Lost Girls. I do, on occasion, think Garth Ennis is a brilliant writer, despite what some would call a heavy reliance on shock tactics.

Nor do I hold the superhero genre in such esteem that I deem any deviations from the Kirby/Lee model to be an affront to my personal dignity. As much as I love All-Star Superman, there’s plenty of room for different, less pleasant, takes on the spandex set.

I offer this preface to explain that I’m not opposed to the entire milieu of Garth Ennis and what he’s attempting to do on The Boys with Darick Robertson. It’s certainly an interesting idea: In a world where superheroes are out of control, someone has to rein them in. The destruction they cause is obvious, and it’s not ridiculous to suggest that men and women with the powers of gods might start thinking the are gods. It’s all been done before, of course, but so has just about everything else; Ennis’ good stuff usually comes not from a terribly original idea, but in putting his own unique spin on it.

It started out well enough: The first issue set up the basic premise (superheroes are dangerous) and introduced the two main characters: Butcher, who’s a typical Ennis hardass, and Wee Hughie, a regular guy whose girlfriend was killed in the crossfire of a hero/villain brawl. The image of Hughie holding onto his girlfriend’s disembodied arms was both tragic and comedic, the sort of thing Ennis does very well; that Darick Robertson understands how Ennis works made it even better.

The second issue continued the setup. Personally, I think the first two issues should have been put together as a single, giant-sized debut, but that seems to be a lost cause. But still, it was decent enough: Butcher made his formal offer to Hughie to join the team, and we got our introduction to the rest of The Boys. They don’t have a great deal of personality yet, but The Female seems interesting. It was a bit slow, but I didn’t mind.

The third issue showed the greatest promise, but also started going off the rails. Wee Hughie still isn’t sure he wants to join Butcher’s gang, but at least he meets the rest of the crew. We finally meet the enemy, as bright young Starlight receives a rude initiation when she joins The Seven. The superheroes are egotistical, abusive, and self-centred.

The most effective statement the book has to make is a striking spread of the destruction wrought on New York by various super-brawls. That should be the motivation for hating the superheroes: Regardless of their motivation, their actions cause untold destruction and cost hundreds, if not thousands, of lives. But Ennis seems less interested in that angle than exploring The Seven’s sex drives. It’s effective enough, again mixing tragedy and comedy nicely. The Seven do seem like assholes, particularly the too-cutely-named Homelander.

Of course, when Butcher finally gets around to announcing the team’s first target, the Seven isn’t even on his radar screen – instead they’re going to take out the youthful punk heroes of Teenage Kix. So what, then, was the point of building up The Seven at this point? Those pages could be much better served by either some character development for the Boys or some previews of Teenage Kix, the actual subject of Butcher’s plans.

Unfortunately, Ennis continues to pursue the sordid superheroes into issue four, at which point he beats the joke into the ground. In addition to continuing to show the Seven as depraved, greedy, and self-obsessed, Ennis also shows us the Teenage Kix involved in drug-fuelled orgies with prostitutes. Which seemed to be overdoing it, but I was okay with it until one panel: A prostitute sitting in the bathroom after servicing the superheroes with her hand covered in blood.

That was just too much. First it disgusted me, then it angered me. The image was bad enough, but not entirely offensive in and of itself – there are ways one could justify it with the story. But Ennis and Robertson have done no such thing. After four issues, The Boys seems interested in one thing: Being ugly. The depictions of violence and depravity serve only one point – showing how awful the superheroes are.

We get it. They’re awful people. But there’s such a thing as overdoing it. Ennis has spent more time convincing us the superheroes are awful than he has doing just about anything with the nominal stars of the book: Butcher is a badass who wants to get the superheroes. Hughie is a nice guy who’s sad about his girlfriend dying but isn’t sure he wants to go around killing superheroes. The rest of the Boys seem lucky to get a panel an issue. Ennis has created “superheroes” so reprehensible they may as well be supervillains. And with the revelation in #4 that Hughie has been injected with some sort of super-serum, we’ve now got a bunch of super-powered good guys fighting super-powered bad guys. Somehow, Ennis took an unexplored concept and made it less original in his quest to be as dirty and depraved as possible.

Ennis certainly displayed his fair share of depravity on Preacher. But there, it was often in service of the story and characters. Jody & TC may have been sick bastards, but they never seemed depraved just for the heck of it. On top of that, they were always opposite some much more likeable characters. What Ennis & Robertson have given us in The Boys is Good Old Boys. Except not as funny. And spread out over four issues so far.

Many of Ennis’ critics accuse him of gross-out humour and gratuitous violence. While they may be correct sometimes, they also miss the point at others: These elements are just tools he uses to tell his stories. The tag line Ennis used to describe The Boys was that it would “out-Preacher Preacher.” Unfortunately, he seems to have adopted his critics’ opinion of that work and assumed that it’s assumed modern classic status because it’s really violent and gross. And by that criteria, The Boys is certainly a success – I can’t think of another book that’s this actively unpleasant to read without offering any redemptive qualities.

Bravo, Garth.