Monday, October 09, 2006
Where were you a year ago?
a month or so Phrancq mentioned The Boys in passing. i haven't really had much time for single issues in the last few months, but since i've been Recovering From A Painful Injury of late he's been piling me up high with comics of all varieties, but the most recent package included the first 3 issues of this new Wildstorm title.
effectively, in creating The Boys, Garth Ennis (famous for, among other things, Preacher) has nabbed Darick Robertson (illustrator of, among other things, Transmetropolitan) and gone out to show that what superheros really need is, among other things, to be insulted, beaten the crap out of and then raped by a very large bulldog. there's more swearing in the first 3 issues than a drunken conversation with Vinnie Jones, a psychopathic Frenchman who looks like Spider Jerusalem (who headbutts people), a sociopathic Female who looks like Yelena Rossini (who rips peoples faces off), a Vaugely Regular Guy (who looks like Simon Pegg from, among other things, Spaced and Shaun of the Dead)... and did i mention the bulldog? no, seriously.
i loved Transmet. it's got me through some bad times of my life and my trades have been so well thumbed i've had to give a few away and replace them (kinda like the last 3 copies of Snow Crash i've owned, but i should stick to the point) and for ages and ages i've been waiting for something else as nasty and brutally self-indulgent to show up, and i think that The Boys is it. it is, right now, exactly what i needed to remember that "people are scum, no matter what they look like" (Spider Jerusalem - Transmetropolitan Book 2).
now, i know that i'm comparing The Boys to Transmet when it's actually written by Ennis and not Ellis... but then that's a lot to do with The Boys having more of the satirical feel of Transmet. Preacher (the only thing i've read by Ennis to date) is more... for want of a better word: serious, and grounded in... reality. Robertson seems to have brought a lot of the jokes along with him which seems to be part of what gives The Boys a feeling of being another Transmet, but in a different time-period, with superheros and an whole new set of Bastards. and a fucking big fucking bulldog called Terror who fucks things on command.
... and no, i'm not joking.
# posted by Raven @ 11:04 PM 
