Bastard To The Last: The Boys #71 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: In a world where costumed heroes soar through the sky and masked vigilantes prowl the night, someone’s got to make sure the “spoilers” don’t get out of line. And someone will.

I’ve read The Boys #71 a few times now, and I keep going back and forth on how I feel about it. Because it’s operating on a couple of different levels, and one of them is on the character level. At this point, we’ve spent six or seven years with Wee Hughie and Butcher, and what with this being the second-to-last issue, writer Garth Ennis needs to wrap up the relationship between those two guys, which has gone through older brother / younger brother, to stern mentor / insecure student, to mortal enemies. And this issue accomplishes that, in the standard Garth Ennis fashion of violence and manly bonding. Which is always interesting to read, if it doesn’t bear a lot of resemblance to any male friendship I’ve ever been in; I find we tend to resolve our differences with hard liquor , repeat viewings of Caddyshack and the copious application of the word “homo.”

However, on another level, when Ennis debuted The Boys back in 2006, he promised that the series would “out Preacher Preacher.” And now as we wind into the final couple of issues, it’s becoming apparent that The Boys is certainly following the narrative structure of Preacher‘s conclusion, with two close friends battling each other to a standstill, before coming to a final reconciliation, concluding with the apparent death of the “bad guy,” who started out as the “good guy’s” closest friend. With all of it happening in the shadow of an American national monument, with the relationship between the “good guy” and his estranged girlfriend unresolved and hanging in the balance. From a structural standpoint, the main difference between the second-to-last issue of Preacher and the second-to-last issue of The Boys is that Cassidy committed suicide by sunlight and Butcher did it via rank, threatening douchebaggery.

Maybe they should’ve just watched Caddyshack.

Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Episode 8: The Kick of Osteoporosis

Guess who found their microphones?

That’s right, after five months, and literally no waiting with bated – or any – breath, it’s time for another exciting episode of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast!

In this week’s episode, we drunkenly rant about:

• Digital Comics. Specifically, it was a big week encompassing the closing of the Graphic.ly Web storefront and the release of the first of Marvel’s Infinite Comics via ComiXology, so we talk about how faithful customers of digital comics get to be in the vanguard of comics publishing while eventually being doomed to wind up with fuckall for their money!
• Marvel’s Augmented Reality application, which forces you to read your printed comics through your cell phone like Commander Data or some other robotic autistic person!
• Fanboys Vs. Zombies, and how it is an awesome book if you have been to SDCC, want to go to SDCC, or want to see Joe Quesada eaten by a grue!
• The Avengers movie: can it possibly be as good as the trailers and the TV spots make it look?
• Agent Coulson: Xander of the Marvel Movie Universe?
• Hawkeye: Like a Boss? Or Like a Miss?
• SDCC Hotel Sales: big mess or biggest mess?
• Plus: Justice League Dark and The Boys!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:47 — 52.0MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Play | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS | More

As always, if you listen to this show at work, wear headphones unless you want to explain to your boss why you’re listening to someone bemoan the lack of glory holes in San Diego hotel rooms! And if you can listen to the whole thing, see if you can tell the moment when the booze gets on top of us!

As always: thanks for listening, suckers!

Delayed Gratification: The Boys #63 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: Crisis On Infinite Midlives is proud to provide you with one final review from last week’s books before the comic store opens up with the new books. You, however, will have to provide your own shitty Thin Lizzy joke.

If you’ve been reading Garth Ennis’s The Boys for a while, this is the stuff you’ve been waiting for almost since the book started at Wildstorm Comics back in 2006. If you haven’t been reading it, well, you’re kinda screwed. There aren’t enough pixels on this page to bring you up to speed on what the hell is going on, so yeah: you’re boned. If it helps, there are at least two dismemberments and three decapitations. Superhero comics, everybody!

The Boys is almost a prototypical comic written for the trade. Comprised almost exclusively of six-issue, reprint-friendly arcs, it is truly a long form novel in comic form… to the point where when I almost have to recommend that you don’t buy the individual issues – and I’m a fan. I initially bought in when the book was announced, and as an old Preacher fan, I told my local comic store owner, who knows me by name and asks me to remember that the Voice Of God usually smells less of garlic and bourbon, to add it to my pulls as soon as issue one was solicited.

And I didn’t like it. The build was slow, the plot was talky, and it seemed like to took forever for it to get going. In retrospect, for me the best thing that could have happened to this book was its cancellation by Wildstorm after the sixth issue, apparently over the miniscule and ridiculous concern that the Homelander, the Superman analogue of The Boys, orally raped a superheroine with a couple of his buddies. Superhero comics, everybody!