And, like many Phil Dick stories, a central question is “what does it mean to be human?”
I watched the first four episodes after reading the positive reviews, and it’s actually quite good. Yes, it’s dark and depressing, but it doesn’t wallow in it as much as the comic. Yes, the supers are terrible people, but they have understandable motivations, unlike the comic where they seem to be arbitrarily horrible. I mean, Starlight still gets raped, but in the comic it was by the whole squad. Homelanders weird Oedipal thing is so creepy and pathetic I feel sorry for him, and his disgust at having to pretend to have had a normal childhood is telling.
The plot changes are a bit of an improvement, with the whole “what is compound V” mystery giving the crew a goal beyond killing random Supers in gory and humiliating ways. I like selling supers to cities like sports teams- something that makes a lot of sense but I don’t think was in the comic.
And yeah, it doesn’t have much in common with Mystery Men besides a corporate sponsored hero.
The only needed Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto to get the whole team back together.
Liked it, will watch season 2 when it comes out.
Captain Amazing is/was very powerful.
And the 7 are just the Justice league, more or less.
It’s hard to disagree with this statement.
But easy to disagree with this one. “Team of superheroes” is where the similarities end, IMO.
Overall, I agree with What Exit?'s assessment of your assessment:
To be fair to DrDeth I agree with him that they were pretty obviously meant to be a pastiche/parody of the Justice League.
Homelander = Superman
Queen Maeve = Wonder Woman
The Deep = Aquaman
A-Train = Flash
Lamplighter = Green Lantern
Black Noir = Batman
Jack from Jupiter(comics )/Translucent( show ) = Martian Manhunter
It’s very slightly less obvious in the show vs. the comic, as “Jack from Jupiter” is a very blatant tell. But still pretty clear.
But other than that, I agree with you. Not getting much of a similarity to Mystery Men, other than the coincidental blond superhero.
Oh, both Mystery Men and The Boys are postmodern deconstructions of Super Heroes.
Neither were the first. There was Marshall Law, Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen…
Hell, Roy Thomas created the Squadron Sinister in 1969.
And, of course, Gardner Fox created the Crime Syndicate of America in '64.
The vocal resemblance is not as close as the physical one. And that goes no further than “man with beard”. 
So “dead ringer” then? No real differences, eh? 
Daaaamn…
This show was amazing. Great story, very well interconnected, highly relevant, and just done REALLY well.
The plane scene was PHENOMENAL. Still gives me shivers.
And baby-lasers. You can’t go wrong with baby-lasers.
Loved that scene as well. However, given Butcher’s hatred of all sup’s, I’m surprised he didn’t try and kill the babies in the lab, but actually took great care to put it back into its incubator.
Last year I read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia (I was curious after seeing that they were filming in Toronto), and it sounded a bit distasteful (to me) in terms of its EXXXTREME violence. So I was pleasantly surprised by how the TV series turned out.
Went into this blind. Holy shit, it is dark. But good so far.
I don’t know how to process the short dolphin rescue scene. I laughed, but what the hell!
Which is exactly how you’re supposed to process it. Garth Ennis writes some seriously dark, but funny stuff.
Is it wrong I’m glad the dolphin died instead of it turning into a sex scene?
That wasn’t actually in the comics, though. Now, Ennis is still a producer, so it could still have been his idea, but in the comics The Deep was a largely irrelevant side character that appeared in few pages, mostly as background. He wore an old-timey diver’s helmet.
I didn’t. He could have just grabbed onto the wing spars and carried the plane down. It would have easily handled the stress.
I just took that as him trying to calm Maeve down- He seems to be something of a sadistic prick. I think he likes being able to cause the death of us squishy normals on a whim, as evidenced in the scene where he unnecessarily kills the lone gunman in the high rise, staring him in the eyes as he dies.
He had the barest pretense to allow the plane to go down, and he took it.
I still have three episodes to go, which I’ll be finishing up tonight.
Really enjoyed it. But I kept seeing seeing Jack Quaid (Hughie) as a young Michael Shannon.