Sorry, TordelBack, but I just don’t agree. There’s a thin line between satire and becoming the thing you are satirising. The Boys to me sits in more or less the same space as Big Dave. It’s not shining a light on unpleasantness – it actually
is unpleasant, baked into its very core. The best bits are when Hughie fucks off back to Scotland and gets all talky; but even there, Ennis ends up with a horribly male-gaze view of the world, where I just ended up feeling icky regarding quite a lot of what Starlight was saying. Again, this perhaps isn’t surprising given Preacher and the like. But it was rather stark here, given the nature of the comic.
On Rusty’s comment – “[Hughie] is constantly defending the opposite sex, and those of a different sexual orientation throughout.” – that’s to some extent true. He does pull up Butcher a number of times for how he refers to people who are gay. And yet throughout the entire run, he’s responding and saying things in a manner that are basically homophobic as well. He’s just saying “you can’t call them X” and then saying and doing things that aren’t as bad. It’s like the bloke who objects when someone pinches a woman’s bum, but nonetheless gets in their personal space and sticks their arm around them when it’s not wanted. That’s not as bad, sure, but it’s still in the ballpark.
As for the event, Hughie was perhaps manipulated, but the idea he
ends up a good guy and not a monster, given everything he does during the run, is to my mind laughable. Incidentally, I’m well aware people will read strips differently; I just found at least half of The Boys abhorrent at a structural level (like, say, Skyfall) rather than a character level, and that was the problem.
