Kneel before Zod style.
Well sure. He’d prefer to be loved, but if that’s taken away, being feared is A one okey doke by him.
It’s really well done. Reminds me of the ‘previews’ before Tropic Thunder. I didn’t expect them to go into so much detail about these side projects. Charlize Theron playing Stormfront in the “Dawn of the Seven” movie was great as well.
I’m thinking Stan is saving Victoria/Nadia as his trump card against Homelander. Maybe she’s powerful enough to take him down.
I continue to be amazed at how well this show is written compared to the comic book. Truly a situation in which the adaption surpasses the original.
That would certainly explain a lot in terms of how all these threads could come together.
I wonder if Homelander will ever punish Deep for retrieving the video from the doomed plane, and handing it over to Maeve.
The fact that Homelander has acknowledged that he would be happy ruling by fear is a game changer. No way to go backwards from there.
So much for Supersonic. Never even found out what he did. Not sure why the boys gave up, the Russians still had to have some kind of weapon to stop Soldier Boy.
If people are liking this story line I would suggest you check out the comic Irredeemable. It’s set in a world where a hero like Homelander (i.e. a Not Superman) makes good on that threat and smashes the world. There was also a sequel series Incorruptible where a former villain becomes a hero.
Speaking of comics, can someone please tell me the relationship between the series and the comic book? No plot or character specifics needed. Is it the same universe, timeline, characters, and/or plot? Or how different are they?
The general premise is the same. Vought America has a formula that gives people super powers. The corporation thinks only of profit and does its best to use its wealth to influence government and everything else. It strictly manages the Supers to maintain their monetary value, and doesn’t care at all about doing good, except to maintain their image. Vought also engages in absolutely horrific acts, the worst imaginable. Government officials are generally corrupt and on the take.
However, the show is a much more sophisticated critique of commercialism, celebrity culture, greed, the corruptive influence of power, and the influence of money in government.
The comics are just straight hateful cynicism and an orgy of explicit gore, racism, violence, sexism, sex, and nudity. The characters for the most part are irredeemable and hateful, and the Boys (who use V from the beginning to give themselves an edge) are almost nothing but instruments of pure vengeance against Supers.
There are also a lot more supergroups of various types, and most of them are fighting each other to a bloody pulp.
The treatment of Starlight in the comics is also far more debasing and exploitative.
By the end of the comic series, you just want all the fuckers to die. It left me feeling dirty and slightly sick. But I read to the end because I needed to see Homelander brought down.
The specific storylines in the series only occasionally touch on story elements in the comics. One major member of the Seven in the comics–Jack From Jupiter–seems largely missing from the series.
Also, the characters that do appear in the series tend to have a lot more character depth than the characters in the comics. Even major characters like Homelander, Starlight, Mallory, the Deep, Mother’s Milk, Stilwell, Stormfront are given much more personality and background than in the comics.
To be fair, it has been a while since I read them, but these are the feelings that stick with me. I did read the entire series, so there must have been some character development that kept me going, but I don’t really feel like going back and review it all for the details.
I got a good laugh out of their take on the Kendall Jenner Pepsi commercial!
It really seems like Garth Ennis hated being forced to do superhero comics so much that he went to the absolute extreme to portray superheroes in the worst way possible in every last panel of his book.
I see one of the later episodes in this season has the same title as possibly the most notorious arc in the comics. It will be interesting to see what they do with that.
100% agreed. The comic had some things going for it, including a good premise (Garth Ennis is talented), but just wallowed in ridiculous excess (Garth Ennis can’t help himself). The TV series is really just much more clever and far better at satire. It’s telling that despite the truly extreme gore in the TV show, it’s still a lot less gross than the comic.
I don’t think I’ve spoiled anything for the series, but I’ll blur it just in case:
Universe: Yes, I guess it’s the same universe, but it has a much different feel to it. The TV show is far more grounded in reality and modern issues. Also, Ennis’s writing sometimes shows signs of his Britishness: There are times when the American characters or situations seem slightly off in some way.
Timeline: I don’t know how to address this really. I’m not sure it’s a relevant characteristic.
Characters: Most of the characters from the comic appear by name in the show, but are often quite different in many ways. Wee Hughie is the main character in both, although in the comic he’s very Scottish.
Billy Butcher is still a brutal Cockney guy in both, but much more likable and understandable in the show. We first meet him having mutual hate sex with his C.I.A. boss Rayner. Butcher’s bulldog Terror is a very important character in the comics. Butcher does far more horrible things in the comics than he has done in the show. Also, he murdered his abusive father as a teen-ager.
Mother’s Milk, Frenchie, and the Female (I can’t recall whether she ever got a name in the comics) are very similar to their comic roles, but, again, much more filled out. In the comic, Mother’s family is full of very crass racial stereotypes. He also has a very different backstory.
The Boys have an ally called the Legend, who seems to be based somewhat on Stan Lee. He is an important source of information because he has read all the comics.
Stormfront was the first Supe, created by the Nazis. He’s somewhat based on Captain Marvel (Shazam). He was leader of Payback (Soldier Boy III, Crimson Countess II, Gunpowder, Black Noir, Mindstorm, Swatto, and the TNT Twins).
The Seven in the comics are:
- Homelander
- Queen Maeve - She’s blonde and has a huge 80s hairdo in the comics - she doesn’t just pretend to constantly drink and sleep around
- Black Noir - There’s huge secret regarding his identity late in the comic series, and it doesn’t look like the series is going to follow that story line.
- The Deep- he’s a guy in an old-fashioned diving suit, with one of those giant bell-shaped helmets with tiny portholes
- A-Train
- Jack from Jupiter - (I don’t think Translucent is in the comics at all) - he is involved in a storyline that reflects a lot of homophobia and transphobia and racism
- Starlight (who takes Lamplighter’s place)
There’s a lot of characters who are a different gender or race in the show (A-Train, the Deep, Mallory, Stillwell, Stormfront). I don’t recall that Rep. Neuman or Alistair Adana and the Collective appear at all in the comics.
Soldier Boy I and the Avenging Squad (Crimson Countess I, Eagle the Archer, Laddio, Manbot, Steel Knight, and the Buzzer) were fuckups in World War II.
Lamplighter has become a gibbering, degenerate animalistic mess kept chained up in a cave from a failed attempt at resurrection, not an attendant at an experimental facility.
In the comics, on Starlight’s first day with the Seven, it’s Homelander who initiates the sexual assault. A-Train and Black Noir join in as well. The Deep isn’t involved. It’s Homelander himself that forces Starlight to change her costume to be much more revealing - it gets gradually worse over time and she is eventually dressed in an outfit that is like something you would see on the cover of a porno film.
The screwup with the airliner is related to 9/11 in the comics, I believe.
There’s a long story arc that parodies the proliferation of X-Men related groups in the 1990s, so there are a whole bunch of super teams under the control of a Professor X stand-in, who happens to be a pedophile and all the team members suffer long-term psychological damage from his abuse of them as children. Not only is that story line itself rather sick, but the way it’s resolved is quite sickening too.
Also in the comics, Butcher’s wife is never found alive, and he never hoped to because he witnessed her death first hand.
In the comics, Homelander snuck into her hotel room while Butcher was out and raped her. She kept that incident secret, but Butcher found out one night when the super foetus ripped through her body, killing her instantly. Butcher managed to kill the foetus, but couldn’t save her.
In the show it seems to be somewhat ambiguous whether her relationship with Homelander was consensual. It the comics, there is no ambiguity. Homelander is an unrepentant rapist.
Oh, I made a mistake above. There is a political figure named Vic Neuman in the comics, but he is a very different character from Victoria/Nadia. There is also a Vought-aligned politician called Dakota Bob in the comics.
It’s been many years, but I remember liking Irredeemable as well. I never read Incorruptible, so now I have something new to hunt up and read, thanks.
Thanks. It doesn’t sound like I should pick up the comic right away. I like what I see on the series, don’t want to dilute it for now.
Is it weird that I feel really sorry for The Deep? Not forgiving or condoning, but the poor fishy bastard’s really been smacked with the karma stick hard.