The Boys

It is impossible to appreciate Garth Ennis' The Boys fully on a single reading. I am currently rereading all the collections from cover to cover. I have learned the answers to these questions:

What is the Female's surname?
Which James Bond villain is referenced?
Who does the Legend look like?

But not:

Why is Hughie such a prat towards Annie?

For more comments on The Boys, see here.

Highland Laddie II

It is worthwhile to read this a second time, slowly. I realized that I had skipped an entire page on the first reading.

When Hughie and Annie talk above the sea, we follow their conversation while seeing the scenery around them. This does not happen in a prose novel. It does happen in a film but, in graphic fiction, we can read and reread at our own pace, move our eyes from panel to panel across two facing pages and turn backwards and forwards between pages in a way that is not possible even with rewind and fast forward on a DVD.

Learning the identity of one of the smugglers near the end of the story, we can look back for any visual clues that we might have missed earlier.

As Hughie enters his home village, he passes three silhouetted boys seated on a wall with a small dog at their feet and says, "Don't be gettin' sentimental." Whom does he address? The boys resemble Hughie and his two childhood friends whom he re-meets as adults and who are shown in flashbacks. Does Hughie see three boys who remind him of himself and his friends or are the silhouetted figures and the dog a memory?

Later, when we see Hughie as a child returning a lost dog to its home, he is menaced by dinosaurs and World War II hardware that clearly are in his imagination. The cover of no 4 highlights Annie as a child surrounded by other superhero children.

19/4/13: And it is possible to look back and work out in which panels Hughie's pocket must have been picked.

The Manor

In our collective imagination, there is a Manor house where a hidden staircase descends to a secret headquarters in a cave beneath the Manor. The occupant of the Manor leads a double life as a notorious but anonymous vigilante whose costume, equipment, gadgets, vehicles, computer, archives, laboratory, gymnasium etc are housed in the Cave.

Usually, the house is called "Wayne Manor". However, it has counterparts on other fictitious Earths. Zorro's grandfather clock concealed the hidden staircase before Bruce Wayne's did. However, this is not a coincidence because a Zorro film inspired the young Wayne.

Two members of a super powered police force arrest a dog-themed vigilante in the cave beneath his Manor in Alan Moore's Top Ten and I am currently rereading Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson's The Boys, Vol 2, Get Some (London, 2008), in which Butcher and Hughie of the CIA superhero watchdog team interrogate the vigilante Tek-Knight in the cave beneath his Manor.

"Old money" is mentioned in both Top Ten and The Boys. This is familiar territory to the reader even though the names and incidental details of the characters have changed as they always do on different parallel Earths.

When Tek-Knight cannot understand something, he expresses his mystification thus:

"It's a mystery. A grade one, primo, full-on, even the world's greatest detective couldn't solve this motherfucker, mystery...", (Chapter Eight, Get Some, Part Two)

And, of course, in the DC Universe, the world's greatest detective is none other than the Batman - unless we count Holmes who, I think, is still alive in the Himalayas.

Later: As I reread, I realise that Tek-Knight resembles Iron Man in that he is super powered only when wearing his armour. But this also makes him similar to the Batman who fought Kent at the end of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. Parodic super heroes are derived from diverse sources.

Quiet Moments

What I like in comics is quiet moments, conversational passages with graphic art that shows the characters' facial expressions and interactions against colourful detailed backgrounds. There is a lot of this in Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch's The Ultimates but the work that I am currently rereading is Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson's The Boys, Vol 3, Good For The Soul.

Early in this volume, there are six entire pages of Hughie and Annie remeeting and speaking in Central Park, New York. She is so distraught that she initially embraces him. They sit and talk. We see close ups from different angles and some scenes shot from further away. There is a lot of greenery and we should look at the details of the Park.

They arrange to meet that evening and their relationship really starts from here. Neither yet suspects that they are on opposite sides. It is only by chance that a guy like Hughie is getting together with a woman like Annie.

We turn the page and are into a conversation between the Boys who start to spy on a conversation of the Seven while Hughie goes to eavesdrop on Teenage Kix. In fact, the volume opens when Annie speaks to Christ in a church while Hughie goes to speak to the Legend and Butcher talks with Rayner. All of this is more entertaining than when the Boys spend several pages trashing Supes.

Verbals And Visuals

Rereading a Poul Anderson science fiction novel late at night, I suddenly wanted visual as well as verbal input so I switched to rereading The Boys Vol 4, We Gotta Go Now, by Garth Ennis.

A novelist describes a scene to his readers so that we can visualise it whereas a comics script writer describes a scene to the artist so that we can see it. The same fictive process, the transmission of an image from author to reader, is mediated differently.

Occasionally, the writer is also the artist. In that case, he does not merely relate but realises the visuals of the scene or event to be communicated. In either case, whether there is a writer-artist team or a solo writer-artist, the visualising has been done for us but it is down to us to notice the details in each panel, not just to follow the narrative from panel to panel by reading speech balloons and captions. In a purely verbal medium, our attention moves continuously along the lines of the text and from page to page whereas, with graphic fiction, we need to pause in order to look as well as to read.

Returning to the novel the following day, I immediately found one of Anderson's rich descriptive passages. Two of the characters:

"...turned north into Riverside, a road cut from the left bank of the Jayin. On their right, trees screened them from view of town, a long row of deep-rooted swordleaf, preserved amidst this terrestrialized ecology to be a windbreak when tornados whirled out of the west. Opposite, the stream flowed broad, murmurous, evening ablaze upon it...On the farther shore, native pastureland rolled into blue remoteness...a peacefulness that Sparling wished Constable could have painted...Westward under a sinking Bel, a few clouds glowed orange. Elsewhere the sky stood unutterably clear." (Fire Time, London, 1977, pp. 68-69)

There is a lot more but I can't quote indefinitely. Appropriately, for the comparison that I am making between prose and graphics, one of the characters wishes for a pictorial representation.

In The Boys, we get:

beautiful pictures of Hughie and Annie naked in a field or in bed together;
a distant horizon seen through the wall-sized window of a superhero team's hovering headquarters;
an American corporate executive talking importantly into a mobile phone while driving around a golf course;
close-ups of our characters' wistful glances, enigmatic smiles, horrified stares etc;
a gallery of covers by big name comic book artists, including Dave Gibbons of Watchmen.

Far out. Vive la difference.

The Boys 72

Well, Garth gave us the happy ending we wanted for which I am grateful after everything else that had happened. The conclusions of the story seem to be that:

despite the distasteful cover, life and business continue as before;

Hughie has come through it in control - he is even able to speak facetiously of Butcher despite the nasty trick that that nutcase had played on him right at the end.

I am now buying the complete series in the collected volumes because it will be easier to keep and reread in that format.

Addendum, 26/11/12: I do not find Monkey's breaking of Raynor's confidentiality amusing.

27/11/12: Or is she called Rayner? I am abroad without access to the comics.

Herogasm

DC Comics had an annual Justice League of America - Justice Society of America crossover for twenty years. The context of the crossovers was the multiverse which was fused into a single universe by the 50th year anniversary Crisis On Infinite Earths. The Crisis should have initiated fifty years of new stories. Instead it started another twenty or so years of Company-wide crossovers. If something works, repeat it till it stops working.

Company-wide crossovers are parodied in the opening pages of Garth Ennis' Herogasm. The heroes of the Boys universe claim to be fighting aliens in space in a sequel to the Chaocrisis while really they are having an organised orgy on an island in the Pacific.

Herogasm is the best of the three Boys miniseries. We see the characters interacting and learn important background details. Herogasm is easy to obtain as it is Vol 5 in the Boys collected series.

The Boys II

Garth Ennis credibly and beautifully shows a loving, mutually enjoyable, relationship starting, then snowballing, between two people, Hughie and Annie, who meet on a bench in Central Park. (For Annie, see The Boys no 15 cover. For Hughie, see Simon Pegg.) He then shows how, later, each finds it hard to cope with the other's past and the relationship is tested beyond its breaking point.

But how does the story end? I don't know yet. One or two more issues to go. But:

Annie is a superhero;
Hughie's boss, Butcher, is now trying to kill every superhero;
with all their colleagues dead, it seems that Hughie will have to go up against Butcher but we would not expect Hughie to win against that mad bastard;
will Annie find out, intervene and tip the balance between Hughie and Butcher?

That is my best guess at how the story might end but I cannot anticipate Garth Ennis' scripts.