Meanwhile, over at WildStorm, Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson launch The Boys, a series about a group of black ops guys who really hate superheroes.

This is a tricky one.  Ennis has been over this ground before.  He's not a big fan of superheroes, and he's made that perfectly plain.  He can summon up a degree of respect for the truly iconic characters like Superman on occasion.  But when it comes to most of the actual stories told in the genre, he finds them either irritating or ludicrous.

For the most part, this hasn't presented him with a problem because he just tends to ignore the superheroes.  When he enters the Marvel or DC Universes, it tends to be in relatively fringe books like Punisher or Hitman that give him a licence to take the piss.  But with The Boys, we've got what seems to be a bunch of hard men - Ennis' stock ex-military heroes - taking on the bastard superheroes.

Books like this rarely work.  WildStorm tried something similar a few years back with StormWatch: Team Achilles, a title that had a similarly undisguised contempt for conventional superheroes.  It wasn't tremendously successful, although admittedly, the title had all manner of interesting problems.  Fundamentally, though, I think books like this tend to fall between two stools.  Who exactly is the target audience for a comic about hating superheroes?  It's the sort of thing that used to go down well with the crusading indie fans on the Warren Ellis Forum, because it's essentially a dramatisation of comic-book industry politics and the little guys raging against the big dumb dominant genre.  If you're not deeply involved in that sort of comic book politics, why in the name of god would you care?

I'd hoped that Ennis might have a different spin on the approach, but it doesn't really seem so.  He has a hugely unsympathetic main character who's obviously driven by hate, in the same way that many of his leads are.  He has an ineffective but loveable loser who's obviously the reader identification figure.  He has a superhero who's a dick.  It's the usual stuff, really.  It's about what you'd expect.  The token likeable guy, Hughie, at least has a couple of scenes with genuine emotion.  But there's not much else.  Just characters you have no reason to like, going through the motions.

Of course, having said all that, Ennis is still one of the best instinctive storytellers in the business, and he's working here with Darick Robertson, an artist who can virtually do no wrong.  Even when they're working from a concept that isn't the best, they're still far better than most people in the industry.  It's smoothly done, and has some beautifully paced scenes.

Ennis and Robertson really are incapable of making a bad comic.  And to be fair, I'm not sure this is so much a bad idea as a concept of very narrow appeal.  It's so beautifully put together that you might almost think there was more to it.  But then you re-read it and think... well, most of the characters are stereotypes or ciphers.  And the anti-superhero stuff had worn kind of thin even by the time Punisher became a Max book.

It's alright, because these guys are great storytellers.  But from the look of this first issue, they're not telling an especially great story.

Rating: B

back | continue