Following on from our first review of Y: The Last Man last week, we continue with Fantasy Bazaar No.2. This week we’re featuring a relatively recent comic from Garth Ennis (Preacher) and Darick Robertson (Transmetropolitan). With titles like these behind the team, you know The Boys is going to be good. The first volume was published in 2007 with four volumes having been released to date.
Billy Butcher
The Boys focuses on a world, very similar to ours, where Super Heroes live as crime fighters for normal people. But these are not exemplary boy scouts like our pals Superman and Spider-Man. No Sir. These are power hungry men and women. People whose private lives leave a lot to be desired. People who, when it boils down to it, may not differ in psychological profiling to some of the criminals that they are responsible for apparently ’saving the world’ from.
And it is one of these so-called super heroes that accidently flattens our protagonist’s girlfriend into a wall in our first scene, leaving him with nothing but her arms in his hands.
‘Wee Hughie’ is actually based on Simon Pegg. He’s a bit of a down and out and when the love of his life is taken from him, he retracts into his shell, asking to be left alone by the world. But then we have Billy Butcher, a Cockney Geezer whose goal in life is to bring crooked super-heroes to justice and keep an eye on the rest. He re-assembles a special CIA team of mercenaries in order to keep watch, intimidate and if necessary, kill any super hero that steps out of line. Wee Hughie is brought on-board to provide the team with assistance from somebody who has lost someone by the super heroes.
It’s an absolute blast of a series. Funny, Violent, and shocking in equal measure, I would be fully in agreement with Garth Ennis when he said that his new series was going to ‘Out-Preacher Preacher’. By this, of course, he means that his new series would have more blood, gore and sex than his previous efforts. And by God it does.
Let’s hope that Simon Pegg will take an interest in bringing this series to the big (or small?) screen, because it’s one of the most enjoyable comics I’ve ever read.
Fantasy Bazaar is back in two weeks when we’ll be discussing Brian Azzarello’s ‘100 Bullets’.
