The Satirical Superhero Genre
Ever since I was a kid I have been interested in comic book super heroes. The costumes are eye catching. The challenges of fighting super villians while maintaining a normal life and having a secret identity makes for captivating story telling. My friends and I would talk on and on about who was the best character, what character would beat what character, what power you would want if you were a super hero and the ever popular marvel vs dc fanboy debate.
When I first saw The Boys, back in 2019, I thought it was kind of cool but didn’t go that crazy over it. At that point Avenger’s Endgame and Spiderman: Homecoming had come out earlier that year. The MCUwas still at it’s height. Also, since I didn’t read The Boys comic, I was a little underwhelmed by the fact that a lot of the characters backstories weren’t covered in the first season. You mainly follow Hugie’s backstory and some of Starlight’s. You get a little more on Butcher and Homelander but not until the tail end of the season. I still think that the The Boys season 1 is good but also the weakest season in the series so far but that’s not really a bad thing because each season has been able to top itself and more backstory is revealed in each subsequent season and the characters really feel more nuanced and less one dimensional as the story continues to evolve.
The Boys has had a winning formula since it’s first season. Where as the MCUhas been on a downturn since the end of 2019, The Boys has managed to exceed my expectations. I even like the spin-off series The Boys: Gen V. I went in with low expectations and after only a few episodes I found myself eager to watch what would happen next each week. It was pretty much everything I would want from a spin-off series. It feels in line with the main series because people have powers and the world is incredibly corrupt. But it also manages to feel very different in a good way because we get to explore the world in a different way. This first season of Gen V also avoides my gripe with season one of The Boys main series by having a smaller cast in which you can focus on and learn each of their backstory a bit more thoroughly in the initial season. But I’ll save my gushing over Gen V for another time.
At a glance The Boys appears to be a satire or parody of traditional super hero comics. Most notably in The Boys universe is “The Seven” a rather direct parody of DC’s Justice League. Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman and The Flash are staples in both teams with fairly close one to one ratios. Sitting in for Batman on The Seven I suppose is Black Noir, although to me he comes off more as a GI Joe ninja or maybe a mercenary like Deathstroke. In the first season of the show he actually doesn’t talk at all, kind of like a Silent Bob character, which overall I wasn’t a fan of but it does have it’s comedic moments. Filling in for Green Lantern on The Seven I guess is Lamplighter, who you don’t even get to see until season 2. Lamp, Lantern, get it? He’s more like the Pyro character from Marvel and I think it’s really awesome that they got the actor that played Iceman from the original X-Men movie to play him, a nice little nod. The Final spot would be for Martian Manhunter which I guess it taken place by Translucent in The Boys universe. In The Boys comic there is a closer one to one ratio in the form of Jack from Jupiter. But since in the comic he actually is an alien, The Boys show runner wanted to make the show more grounded and less convoluted by only having “Supes” be born from compound V. Which is great because when I was first watching the show I thought that they were all some form of a take on “mutants”, like a parody of Marvel’s X-Men, that were inheriently born with their powers. It’s not until the later half of season 1 that it’s actually revealed that all Supes are the result of an experimental drug injection called compound V which is manufactured by a pharmaceutical company called Vought. That’s when I realized that The Boys is so much more than just a parody of popular comic book franchises.
The Boys is sometimes referred to as a criticism or deconstruction of the superhero genre. And it’s not the first comic to attempt to imagine what a more grounded, less rose colored look at what superheroes would look like in our actual world. The first time I was introduced to this concept was the Watchmen movie. A friend of mine had heard about the buzz of the movie being greenlit a few years prior to it’s release and told me that it had critical acclaim from the New York Times and was in some ways the opposite of a superhero comic. I didn’t quite understand what he meant by this, I was a comic fan my whole life and had never heard of Watchmen or even the concept of a comic book like it. I was excited to see Watchmen in theaters and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Whereas traditional superhero comics are more of a feel good joy ride with battles between good and evil, Watchmen was more gritty, with more complex politics and deeper looks into human actions and emotions. My second introduction to this type of genre was the movie Kick-Ass. I thought this movie was okay but had a lower scope than Watchmen. And I actually first heard about director, James Gunn, through his film called Super. It was actually my favorite film for a long time, I think it nails dressing up as a super hero and fighting against criminals perfectly. Two very different stories but Super really spoke to me, while it also doesn’t have the scope or scale of Watchmen I think it nails the human societal problems and emotion a bit better than Kick-Ass. Now, for me, these are all good stories that I enjoy in their own way but it did feel somewhat limited as there isn’t a actual person with super powers in any of these films except for Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen. I think that the creators felt that introducing powers would take away from the criticism that they were showing in the super hero genre. It does make for a grounded take to have no powers but The Boys manages to stay grounded all while poking fun of the prospects of having powers in the real world.
The Boys universe has a lot of super powered people but our “heroes” in the show aren’t costumed crusaders at all, they are the underdogs, they are the boys. In fact I would argue that there aren’t really any “heroes” at all in the show. There are only at few times or instances of characters having maybe a heroic moment. Which is perhaps part of the point of the show, that we are all human and that “heroes” like the traditional ones in comics don’t exist. This is a rather unique approach because another recent comic book adaptation called Invincible is also a superhero parody complete with it’s own evil Superman and fake Justice League. However while Invincible focuses on a new costumed hero and his journey, in the form of Mark Grayson, aka Invincible, The Boys focuses on just plain human actions taken by both the supes and non-supes alike. I love both shows and I am fascinated at how similar and yet how different they are from each other at the same time. I think that perhaps Invincible is an overall better deconstruction of the traditional super hero genre but The Boys, on the other hand, is not just a deconstruction of the super hero genre but a deconstruction on our society as well.
My favorite aspect of motion pictures and comics is the ability to try to make the audience think about how they view their world. That is one of the reasons I love the original Matrix movie so much. I really do feel like the Matrix changed our world forever but in ways we can’t fully comprehend. It allowed for many conversations to be had about the nature of reality and if our society is a somewhat unfeeling machine. In the very first episode of The Boys there are two Matrix references. While The Boys is very different from The Matrix film it does try to confront the facade of wholesome superheroes and wholesome pr campaigns and wholesome corporations. While I don’t think The Boys is a perfect show by any means, I do think it has a good artistic message beyond some of it’s many overly shock value moments. In fact I think it is a little bit of a shame that some of the moments in the show are so grotesque that it no doubt makes the show have a limited audience appeal. While on one hand it is great to see them push the genre with sex, nudity and gore that you would never see in the MCU or DCEU, I do think that there are some scenes that just don’t really land for me. Maybe that is the point though, to make you feel uncomfortable. The show is not meant to be only a fluff piece of entertainment but to bring about the full range of human emotions. These aren’t comfortable characters, most of them are very flawed and traumatized characters. I think most of us can relate to something or someone in this show, most us have had traumatizing moments in our lives. I think that’s what this genre is meant to explore in opposition to the escapism of the traditional superhero, the satirical superhero genre asks us to take a deeper look at our own lives.
