Though Billy's methods are ultimate proven to be wrong though, as his targets begin including not just non-violent superheroes (the group in the Innocents, for example, where both harmless and good people and he was fully prepared to murder them if not for Hughie's intervention) but EVERYONE who had traces of the superpower compound in their blood stream.
This didn't just include superheroes, but also his friends and just regular people with the misfortune of getting exposed to it by accident (the daughter of one of the Boys suffered from hormone problems due to her dad's infected bloodstream, which he only had because his mother was herself infected by working in a factory that used to produce the stuff).
Billy IS a hypocrite (his solo story implied that he got it from his abusive dad to an extent), and he's not so much a traumatised veteran as he is an inherently violent person willing to do anything he likes to get what he wants. The fact that the story comes down to Hughie (who is a normal, decent person) versus Billy (an uber-macho psychopath) seems to underline that Billy isn't really the person we should be attaching ourselves to as an audience, it's Hughie.
He seemed to be making a point regarding what kind of person would it take to be a stoic retro-action film badass when it came to Billy... whether he succeeded or not is another matter entirely.
The contrast between "old fashioned male protagonist versus reality" was also made in his first Nick Fury series for Marvel... which seemed partly a satire of how the 1990s had removed the teeth from the action/spy genre, with Traditional Action Protagonist Nick Fury quickly realising that the world neither needs nor wants him anymore... Personally I prefer his WW2-set Peacemaker series more, as it's more of a straight homage to films like the Dirty Dozen and Where Eagles Dare without the tedious "Why isn't life like an Arnie movie anymore?" commentary.
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This didn't just include superheroes, but also his friends and just regular people with the misfortune of getting exposed to it by accident (the daughter of one of the Boys suffered from hormone problems due to her dad's infected bloodstream, which he only had because his mother was herself infected by working in a factory that used to produce the stuff).
Billy IS a hypocrite (his solo story implied that he got it from his abusive dad to an extent), and he's not so much a traumatised veteran as he is an inherently violent person willing to do anything he likes to get what he wants. The fact that the story comes down to Hughie (who is a normal, decent person) versus Billy (an uber-macho psychopath) seems to underline that Billy isn't really the person we should be attaching ourselves to as an audience, it's Hughie.
He seemed to be making a point regarding what kind of person would it take to be a stoic retro-action film badass when it came to Billy... whether he succeeded or not is another matter entirely.
The contrast between "old fashioned male protagonist versus reality" was also made in his first Nick Fury series for Marvel... which seemed partly a satire of how the 1990s had removed the teeth from the action/spy genre, with Traditional Action Protagonist Nick Fury quickly realising that the world neither needs nor wants him anymore... Personally I prefer his WW2-set Peacemaker series more, as it's more of a straight homage to films like the Dirty Dozen and Where Eagles Dare without the tedious "Why isn't life like an Arnie movie anymore?" commentary.