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Garth Ennis HATES Superheroes. He hates them with the white-hot intensity of a thousand burning suns. It’s an interesting point of view for someone in the comic industry, particularly for someone so well-regarded. Personally, I LOVE Garth Ennis. He brought us some of the greatest issues of The Punisher and John Constantine: Hellblazer, as well as some other brilliant original series like Enemy Ace: War In Heaven and War Stories. But for my money, he also created the greatest long-running series ever, which was Preacher. When I say long-running, I mean it had more than 24 issues. But I digress, because we’re not here to praise Preacher. We’re here to praise The Boys, Ennis’ latest all-out assault on the superhero genre. He’s explored it before with the Punisher arc, “Confederacy of Dunces”, but in The Boys, we’ve got superheroes running wild all over the world, doing everything from accidentally splattering the occasional innocent bystander to rampant sexual deviance to out-and-out evil deeds like rape and murder. This is a world where the good guys have to be watched more closely than the bad guys and that’s when you call in The Boys. Now, anyone who reads The Boys knows that this is easily the most offensive comic on the shelves, for reasons that are too numerous to list here. But that’s par for the course for Ennis. When he does mature readers comics, they are definitely not for the kiddies. Bear in mind, this is a series so incendiary that DC/Wildstorm dropped it after only six issues. Then the maverick publisher Dynamite picked it up and Ennis and his artist/collaborator Darick Robertson pulled out all the stops… and all the hamsters.

Issue 18 brings about the aftermath of the hilariously offensive (or offensively hilarious) sexual tryst of Hughie and Annie (who, unbeknownst to Hughie, is actually one of the superheroic members of The Seven) and also the (hopefully) final battle between Hughie and the resurrected Blarney smurfin, whom Hughie accidentally killed in his first super-powered confrontation. But the only reason that Hughie even confronts Blarney smurfin (if you read the comic, you know how that actually translates) is because Hughie’s pet hamster Jamie formerly belonged to B.C., who kept it… well, decorum prohibits me talking about that here (but it does bring an old urban myth surrounding Richard Gere to mind). Only Ennis. But there are some other matters here as well, as to what is the secret of Mother’s Milk and his mother? Why does he have an aversion to giant snakes? What is the nature of the truce between The Boys and The Seven? Many questions are asked here, including how does one dispose of a dead body effectively?

This is the final issue of the “Good for the Soul” arc, and it’s very satisfying. We get to see Annie grow a spine when dealing with A-Train; we get to see the confession of Hughie and his feelings about killing Blarney smurfin and his eventual realization of his silly funeral pyre speech; and we get to see a hilariously disgusting Blarney smurfin in all his fecal-stained glory. Robertson’s art is spot-on as per usual. Again, this is SO not a comic for everyone. It’s been accused of being, well, everything that it is. It takes some of the best-known and loved superheroes in the world and makes fun of them at every turn. It’s filled to the brim with so much offensive language, violence, nudity and sex that it could make Robert Mapplethorpe blush. The one accusation that I take issue with is people’s claim that this is a very homophobic comic. I can see why overly-sensitive people might believe that, but this is not a comic for overly-sensitive people. This is so far from P.C. that it almost balances the scales. Garth Ennis, in his fictional world of The Boys, is an equal-opportunity hater.

Except for superheroes. He hates them most of all.

By the way, ‘smurfin’ means something else here.

The Boys #18
“Good for the Soul: Conclusion”
Written by Garth Ennis
Art by Darick Robertson
Colors by Tony Avina
Letters by Simon Bowland

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