THE END OF AN ERA: R.I.P. THE BOYS

[Before we begin, I just wanted to say one thing.  My mother and I shared a lot of the same tastes when it came to comic books.  (And music, too.  Reading actual books, though?  Couldn’t be more different.)  She liked PREACHER and HITMAN and EVIL ERNIE.  Didn’t like HELLBLAZER, though.  Near the end of her life, she was a huge fan of three books (also, my three favorites):  LOCKE & KEY, THE WALKING DEAD, and THE BOYS.  I think she liked L&K most, but she loved the shit out of THE BOYS.

The last time I saw her alive, I’d gone to visit her at the hospital.  They’d just put her into hospice, so we all knew she was going soon.  This wasn’t her first time in the hospital.  Near the end, she’d been in and out, but a long time ago, when I was in high school, she’d gotten into a horrible car accident that put her in a coma for more than a year.  When she came out of it, she told me she had vivid memories of me and my grandparents and brothers coming to visit her when she was out.

So even though she was in a coma again (and would never wake up), I knew she could hear me.  Personally, if I was in her place, I would want to know how all of the ongoing books I’m reading will end.  With that in mind, I sat by her bedside and made up endings to LOCKE & KEY, THE WALKING DEAD, and THE BOYS, and I gave them all happy endings.  I hope it brought her peace.  She died the very next day.

Now that I finally know how THE BOYS ends, I didn’t do my fake ending justice.  I short-changed Mom by far, and I hope that if there’s an afterlife, she can forgive me.

This one’s for you, Mom.]

[One more thing:  this isn’t really a review.  It’s more about my thoughts regarding the final issue of THE BOYS.  If you have not read the ending, you might want to come back later.  There will be spoilers, and you will be angry with me.]

The first thing you notice is the cover.  How appropriate that a book about shitting all over superheroes ends with every supe in the history of the title flying directly into a toilet.  It’s a very John McCrea thing to do, yet somehow, it’s done by co-creator, Darick Robertson.

This is a super-sized epilogue to the story, just like with the final issue of PREACHER.  It happens six months after Wee Hughie kills Billy Butcher and assumes his role as the final remaining member of the Boys.  More importantly, it ends with the repair of an event that has always lingered in the background of this story, since issue one.  You see, in the world of THE BOYS, terrorists didn’t crash a plane into the Twin Towers on 9/11; they took out the Brooklyn Bridge.  Here we see workers triumphantly hammering in the final girder, bringing New York back to its previous glory.  As Hughie walks down its length, a recognized hero for saving everyone from Butcher’s insanity, he hardly seems to be the same guy we’ve known throughout the series.  He’s got steel in him, as if everything he’s gone through has made him a better, harder person.

And he’s been through a lot, especially in the most recent issues.  The final battle with the supes, in particular Butcher vs. the Homelander in the Oval Office, then Butcher vs. Black Noir on the White House lawn, left everyone a bit ragged.  But when Butcher went off the reservation and killed Mother’s Milk, Frenchie, and the Female, that’s when Hughie was really run through the ringer.  When he suddenly realized that he was the only one who could stop Butcher, he just about shit his pants.  He knew for a fact that even though he stood no chance of succeeding, considering Butcher’s ruthless intelligence and overpowering strength, Hughie went ahead and tried anyway.  Granted, he won by sheer luck (and with a little help from Butcher’s final manipulation against him), but he still did what very few of us would do:  against insurmountable odds and his own fearful urge to run away, Hughie went ahead and did it anyway.  No one would have blamed him if he’d turned tail.

And it seems that this has finally given him the backbone that Butcher always wanted to give him.  Hughie is finally the strong man Butcher wanted him to be.  And best of all, in Hughie’s own words, “I came right through the whole thing in one piece.  I never had to turn into a monster.  There might be folk that think I did, but I’m happy to let them.  I saw all sorts o’ nightmares an’ made all sorts o’ daft mistakes, but I got to stay the fella I am.”

Even so, it’s great to see him go up against the spook from Vought American.  It would seem that the corporation has rebranded themselves to American Consolidated, and Hughie wants to make sure they stay out of the supe business by showing that he still has some of the chemical that Butcher planned on using to wipe out anyone with V in their systems, implying that any VA supes out there will have a difficult time keeping their heads if the corporation continues on their path.

Yet at the same time, the spook remains the consummate professional.  Even though Hughie has him over a barrel, it doesn’t seem to faze him.  In his words:  “I’m an expression of the corporation.  I’m the voice that says—you’re right, sue us.  That never gets upset.”  So yeah.  The fucker gets away scot-free.

But Rayner sure doesn’t.  With the aid of Monkey (who we can only hope someday marries a handicapped athlete), Hughie completely torpedoes her bid for election to the U.S. Senate in a scene that needs to be seen to be believed.  I kind of wish this would happen in real life.  I would love to see what would have happened if, for example, Romney had hired a plane to cruise by an Obama speech with the message OBAMA IS A COCKSUCKER flying from the back.  SUSAN RAYNER IS A WHORE.  Nice.

Oh yeah, and it looks like Consolidated America is going to have trouble cooking up new supes.  The new batch they march out for the spook is very disappointing, and he demands that they try again.  With what?  “Something that isn’t just the same old shit dressed up.”  Can it be that writer Garth Ennis, notorious for disliking superheroes (which is an odd trait for a comic book scribe to have), is taking yet another shot at the industry?

So it sounds like everything ends pretty badly for all concerned, right?  And what about Wee Hughie and Annie January?  It’s an Ennis production, so what do you think?  As cynical as his work tends to be, he always believes in the power of romance.  Jesse Custer got Tulip in the end of PREACHER, and so Hughie gets to live happily ever after with Annie.  In a great moment, we see him whirling about with her, just like he had with his previous girlfriend from issue one.  It brings back the memory of that moment, which A-Train completely ruined by running into her and killing her so hard her arms came off in Hughie’s hands.  Without this incident, Hughie would have never had reason to join up with the Boys.  He probably would have spent the rest of his life in Scotland, living whatever dreary life he had planned out for him.

 

It’s nice to bring the story full circle, and the kiss Hughie and Annie share in the very last panel, with the Brooklyn Bridge in the background, is a magical and powerful moment.

I think Mom would have really liked that.

And so it ends.  72 issues is a long run, and it’s been fun.  It’s been my favorite ongoing book, and now it’s done.  Many of you will remember that it originally started out at Wildstorm, but its anti-superhero theme bothered the shit out of DC so much that they had to cancel it.  I remember thinking that was bullshit at the time, and being very upset.  It wasn’t yet my favorite, but I still loved the hell out of it.  I’m glad that Dynamite picked it up.  They’re a shit company, focused far too much on retro characters like the Spider, the Bionic Man, John Carter, and others, but at least they recognize talent.  The best move they ever made was picking up THE BOYS.

 

I hope you had as much fun with it as I did.  I’m going to miss talking about it in Cool Shit.  At least we still have LOCKE & KEY, right?  Oh wait.  That ends in seven issues.  Well . . . at least we still have HELLBLAZ—oh, right.  Four issues on that one.

THE WALKING DEAD.  I think we’ll have that one for a while.

 

Here’s to whatever Garth Ennis has planned for us next.