The Boys: Butcher, Baker, Candlestickmaker #3

[superboyprime]

Ennis delves into the backstory of Billy Butcher, leader of the Boys...

Comments

[filthysize]

Loved this issue, especially the contrast between Billy after he's met Sam here and Billy as an absolute asshole in the last issue, showing how much she changed him.

Both this mini so far and the Highland Laddie mini are leagues better than the actual monthly title. I think it's because both minis center around romance, war and male camaraderie, which are three topics that Ennis is best at. The first one, especially, which is really weird to say, but yeah, Ennis is his best writing romance stories from a bloke's bloke perspective, sort of a Nick Hornby with a sprinkle of smashed skulls and a glaze of "cunt"s.

[filthysize]

Oops, I meant Becky, not Sam. Sam is his dad.

[silverzeo]

Oh... afterschool special...

[shadowpsykie]

i just can't bring myself to read anything Ennis... Ennis' stuff has been violence porn for a long time.... i admit that "The Boys" was at least interesting at first... now... it seems very anti-woman and anti-gay...and very pro violence....

[mrstatham]

The only book of his that I own is The Pro, and that's predominantly down to Amanda Conner's work. To me, Ennis just seems like Mark Millar with a few more brain cells pushing things along. Their books are easily equally nasty..

[ian_karkull]

I'm sorry, but that is a very superficial reading. Yes, Ennis uses a lot of gross out humor and over the top gory violence, but not because he personally thinks they're A-Okay, but because of their proven mass appeal to the immature 13yo boys demographic. Once you get into the work it gets very clear that he's actually making more fun of comics exploitative elements than anything else.
A constant theme in Ellis' work is also how people's small-mindedness is poisonous to them and their environment. Take the above example. The anti-woman/gay rhetoric is there, sure, but it clearly comes from the bad guy. We're not meant to sympathize with the violent, abusive father figure here, if anything, his bigotry serves to make him more despicable.
Sad as it is, underlying prejudice is still a rampant element in our society and Ennis doesn't shy away from exposing it as the harmful element it is.
Meanwhile his Slavers arc in Punisher, the Thing with the Tiger from Kev, Dear Billy from Battlefields and Starlight's running commentary about the exploitation of female superheroes in the Boys are some of the most thoughtful and brutally honest pro-woman and pro-gay comics I've ever seen in mainstream.
Ennis work is fundamentally humanist at it's core.

[shadowpsykie]

okay perhaps you are right... i am well aware that these issues still exist in our day and age, and I have nothing agains using those elements for the bad guys, or exposiing how that line of thought is harmful to society, and I admit, not all of Ennis' stuff is as bad as i am making it out to be.

But his good guys don't seem much better than the bad guys sometimes. It shows how bad things are... but it doesn't show the "Good" that is possible.

One of the only Characters from the Boys I enjoy is Wee Hughie, because out of all the guys he still seems like a genuinely good person... and while this is acknowledged it makes him seem... i don't know... naive compared to them...

i dont know, maybe i should give him more chances... other than Punisher, what do you recomend i should read by him?

[filthysize]

Did you read the Highland Laddie mini? It deals with Hughie's relationship with his parents, his girlfriend and his childhood mates. It's really great stuff, and heartbreakingly honest at the end.

[shadowpsykie]

hmm i might take a look at that....

[espanolbot]

What Ian said, generally whenever someone says anything homophobic or sexist in his comics it's either the bad guys saying it (like the above example) or it's from someone who is shown to be ignorant but not maliciously so (for example, Kevin, who actually wises up with each appearance until he finally gets over it in his last one).

And in terms of violences, if it was pro-violence then Billy's girlfriend would have let him hit his dad (which he would have done prior to meeting her, but her presence makes him a better person, so when she died he went REALLY off the rails).

He's very good at writing people as opposed to characters, which has it's ups and downs, but on the whole the things he protrays in the books are very pro-people of all kinds.

I can't think that he'd taken well to the treatment of some of DC's female characters in the reboot for example...

[shadowpsykie]

okay, it could be i am being too critical.... as i said above, can you recomend some of his work that illustrates these points? filthysize recomends Highland Laddie. And i do like some of his Authority stuff... i just remember reading some of the Boys series and some of the only gay characters i remember being there were either jokes (at least they came off that way to me) or cannon fodder (maybe i am being too sensitive... im a little frayed working on a paper on John Donne's Holy Sonnets as well as trying to do a presentation on Spartan Women...)

[filthysize]

Highland Laddie has a trans character that's Hughie's best friend and portrayed in a very positive light.

[espanolbot]

I thought that his Dan Dare stuff was excellent, a homage to a very old and famous British comicbook hero and was both a well done piece of military science fiction and an examination of British attitudes towards patriotism in the 21st century. None of his trademark toilet humour but all of his naturalistic interactions between the characters, with Dare getting the treatment he normally reserves for Superman (very respectful).

Highland Laddie is good, it's both funny and has a lot of very good relationship stuff, between Hughie and Annie, between Hughie and his friends etc. But as it's in the Boys Universe there is the occasionally squicky joke in there. Overall it is very good, though I am hopelessly sentimental when it comes to Hughie and Annie's relationship.

Fury: Peacemaker is also good, it basically is Ennis' retelling of the forming of the Howling Commandos and how Nick got his eyepatch. It's very much a homage to 1970s WW2 action movies like Where Eagles Dare and the Dirty Dozen, doesn't have his more vulgar jokes and I think is very, very good.

I'd recommend Crossed as one of more gay friend books BUT... it's very, very, very violent. Excessively so. But despite that, the friendships that form between the characters are very sweet and are in all very well presented.

[filthysize]

Agreed. This issue especially is the exact opposite of pro-violence. With respect to superboyprime, I kinda wish he'd chosen the pages of Billy and Becky going out on dates. The scene where Becky gently points out to Butcher that he's subconsciously using beer to justify his violence is really effective, I thought. It portrays a form of alcoholism that's rarely shown in fiction: the type that's not about addiction to the substance but about deliberately using it to lower the inhibition that's keeping a certain latent desire to come out.

One of the things that Ennis does all the time in his stories but is always misconstrued by most is that he's all about subverting the macho male mentality and suggesting that there's some kind of mental damage and deep insecurities in tough guys who act "badass." He does this even with his protagonists, which is probably why people jump to the comclusion that he endorses that behavior when it's actually the opposite.

It's almost a trope with him: show a typical guy acting or saying something very "guy" that a bunch of male readers would fawn over, then introduce a smart woman who would point out how it's all a bunch of bullshit. Tulip did this frequently to both Jesse and Cassidy in PREACHER, Tiegel to Tommy in HITMAN, Kit to Constantine in HELLBLAZER, Starlight to Hughie in THE BOYS, etc.

[salinea]

Can you put some warnings before the cut for the misogynist and homophobic language in the comic?

[stubbleupdate]

Not to be confused with Butcher Baker the Righteous Maker

[ian_karkull]

I'm kind of tempted with this, more Boys backstory is always a good thing, but I'm not sure I want Butcher humanized. He's pretty much an asshole in the main series and the "Both sides are kind of horrible" aspect of the Boys works very well for me. Flipping through the last issue made it seem like it was pretty much Kev 2.0, with none of the likeable douchebag comedy aspects of that book.

[espanolbot]

I think that it's interesting as it shows just why he is so psychopathically obsessed with killing superheroes, even harmless ones like the Innocents and Annie January. He was always a violent man, but when the woman that managed to make him actually sort of nice violent died Billy went into meltdown.

Highland Laddie was good because it showed that Hughie was always surrounded with assorted weirdness, and how (unlike Billy) Hughie always tries to help and think the best of people.

[mola_ram]

This is GREAT stuff!

I like how Ennis is humanizing Butcher, before tearing his heart out in the end.
Butcher may have been "damaged goods" from the beginning, but the tale of a single man damning himself forever by choosing a life of violence and lashing out at everyone that even remotely reminds him of his loss (like the Punisher) is always pure gold when handled by Ennis.

My only major beef with this comic so far has been the major backtracking on how Starlight suddenly turned out to be Tulip/Kit all along...
A girl that smart would never consider for even a single second to suck Homelander, A-Train and Black Noir off.

[stolisomancer]

Starlight's U-turn on that is one of the things that makes me wonder if The Boys has departed dramatically from its original plot. It's not hard to figure, given the sheer amount of money and fame at stake, that an otherwise smart woman would be tempted to make some deeply unwise decisions, but it's hard to look back at that issue and think of her as the character she'd eventually become.

[mola_ram]

Agree, especially since her tale of her pasts paints her as a otherwise smart woman who got the lowdown on how Vought do business, which contradicts her hysteric rambling about hypnorays and whatnot and how Homelander and the seven are supposed to be beacons of hope etc. when they asks her to suck them off.
I'd imagine she'd already lost any "comic book illusions" waaaaaay before that point.