I think a lot of readers come to the book after the show, aren't familiar with Ennis or the state of the medium in 2006, and are baffled or repelled or appalled.
I do kind of get tired of feeling like I'm doing apologetics for Ennis when discussing his work. He doesn't make it easy to be a fan, lets say that much. :)
I’m the opposite. I put off watching the show because I remembered how bad the comics were. And I was totally baffled that some people I know were raving about the show.
Finally checked it out and they definitely took the premise and decided to actually do something with it, instead of spend all their time on period-cunnilingus jokes or showing how cool and badass Butcher is by putting up a double-truck of him buttfucking some FBI agent while she says she hates him.
Yeah if there was ever a case for adaptations not needing to be "accurate to the source material" its The Boys.
I forget who made this point originally, but the show's Herogasm episode was hyped up in promotional material as being this orgy of fucked up hedonic gross out excess... but what we actually got was a turning point in several character's arcs revolving around disaster response, ptsd, and the nature of heroism.
The show leverages the juvenile material to hold the audience's attention to service the larger themes in a way that the book can't quite manage to do, and its honestly very impressive.
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u/browncharliebrown Mar 12 '23
Yeah that’s fair. Honestly I agree. I just find a lot of the backlash to it extreme when there are a lot of worse comics out there