Monday, August 19, 2019

Confusion

I was not tempted in the slightest to watch the Amazon adaptation of Garth Ennis' stupid and violent comic book series The Boys, because I think Mr. Ennis makes a career out of anti-human stories that have mistaken vulgarity and brutality for transgressive art.

I did read a little bit about it, though, because while I was sitting in the hospital waiting room for my father to get out of surgery I ran out of things on the internet that I really wanted to read and had to settle for whatever was there. According to the two or three articles I skimmed and the one I read, The Boys is a fantastically creative idea and brilliant deconstruction of modern super-herodom. The premise, it seems, is that the superheroes of this particular universe bear watching and being taken down by a squad of folks who've been wronged by them. They're all caricatures of their more famous counterparts such as Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman and so on and they're narcissistic bullies who use their powers to cover up their debauched lifestyles filled with sex and drugs. That is, when they're not complete sociopaths to begin with.

So they're villains. I didn't know villains were new.

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