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Comic Corner: 'The Boys'

Dafna Pleban (Contact)
Published: Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Garth Ennis, Darick Robertson “The Boys” #1-3 WILDSTORM COMICS (Out of 5)

It wouldn’t be wrong to say that “The Boys” is what Garth Ennis does best: grotesque set-pieces, needless violence and human misery played for laughs. Normally all this – as with his seminal work “Preacher” – is underscored with a deep appreciation for the human spirit. However, in the three issues of “The Boys” released so far, there hardly seems to be even a flicker. The story is straight from the late 1990s glut of superhero deconstruction: a grimy group of government agents tasked with keeping the increasingly careless superhero community in line, by any means necessary. These “means” usually involve excessive violence or sexual violation by dog – sometimes both. The first issue introduces the reader to Wee Hughie, a British bloke who loses his girlfriend to the careless antics of a corporate speedster. Her death is as graphic as artist Robertson can make it, and his tenure on Warren Ellis’ “Transmetropolitan” certainly shows. The mutilated body of Hughie’s girlfriend smashed against the wall is expertly detailed. However, the potency of the image of Hughie still clutching onto his girlfriend’s arms, even when she’s not connected to them anymore, becomes lost under a deluge of equally gratuitous violence. Encouragingly, Darick Robertson’s art is expressive as ever. The defined features of his characters express fleeting, conflicting emotions in a single panel. Unfortunately the colorist is hardly up to the task, often covering Robertson’s clean lines with badly blended colors, while Ennis’ writing barely gives him anything to work with other then the demand for more gore. With Brian K. Vaughan’s “Y: The Last Man” winding to a close, I was looking forward to a nice, long, plotty 60-issue maxi series from one of comic’s best writers. But “The Boys” misses the mark that made “Preacher” such a resounding work.