Written by Garth Ennis
Illustrated by John McCreaChristmas 1944 sees Captain Greg Mallory safely in reserve, far from the front line with Nazi Germany. A good time to rest and refit, to recover from the horrors of war. Not such a good time for a unit of very special soldiers — backed by the Vought-American-Consolidated corp — to show up looking for combat experience. Hughie gets a war story he’ll never forget, as the Battle Of The Bulge begins with a bang… The Boys #53, part two of Barbary Coast.
In this comic book, two things are established: superheroes are stupid people with brain problems, and World War II was pretty awesome aside from all the horror. Now that people who have never heard of Garth Ennis before are caught up, we can go ahead and talk more about The Boys #53 after the jump.
When you buy a comic by Garth Ennis, you can be sure of a couple things — they might as well be stamped on the cover like the Nintendo Seal of Quality. There will be some focal character, nominally the hero, taking the piss out of the ridiculous stuff going on around him constantly. There will be a bureaucrat who fails completely to understand what is going on, and as such that hero needs to tell them they’re a moron at some point, just before Consequences Occur. There will be blood and gore and swearing; depending on the book, there will also be demeaning sex of some kind and a fair chance that something is going up someone’s ass without permission. And if superheroes are involved? Well, heaven help them.
The Boys is Ennis’s compulsion to mock superheroes brought to the fore and given no limits. As a deconstruction of superheroic genre conventions, it’s not a particularly elegant or graceful one; the first story arc of the book, if you’ll recall, featured a Teen Titans parody so steeped in wanton perversity and abusive violence that DC Comics effectively tried to forget the project had ever been greenlit. That was issue one; this is issue fifty-three. What lessons are there to learn nearly five years on? Well, for one, superheroes were just as stupid back during the Big One.
One Ennis hallmark I neglected to mention above is that the man has, like many 2000 AD veterans, an almost unshakably solid grasp on the fundamentals of the comic format. Whereas you could liken some writers to free-jazz Fire Music players, blaring and honking for twenty minutes to some theoretical structure that ensures the whole thing is capital-A Art, Ennis and his ilk might load up on experimentation, but always present it in three minutes, verse-chorus-verse. Issues of content aside, Ennis writes comics that are easily read on a structural level, and that almost always find a complete point to express across 20-odd pages. For example: this is part two of “Barbary Coast,” and while I haven’t read part one, it’s remarkably easy to figure out what’s going on. The sooner I can do that, the sooner I can get into the comic’s groove and ride it out to wherever it’s going.
To that end, The Boys #53 is not challenging stuff: Wee Hughie, longtime POV character, sits and listens to a story about what went wrong with using superhumans in World War II. This story-within-a-story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, even. It’s an important piece of Boys-verse (Earth-Boys?) backstory, and it’s also a grim little vignette in its own right. So far so good! The only problem comes when you actually sit down and read it, and discover just how little new territory is actually mined.
That Ennis thinks superheroes are goofy and not particularly relevant to the human condition is something made obvious across a wide variety of works, from the “Confederacy of Dunces” arc in Punisher, to Green Lantern’s guest spot in Hitman, to the entirety of The Pro, et cetera. Just as obvious, if not moreso, is that he reveres soldiers (if not armies), and that he considers them very relevant to the human condition. Imagine that you are handed a comic book and told three things: one, it has superheroes in it; two, it is behind enemy lines in World War II; three, it is written by Garth Ennis. Well, what do you think’s going to happen? Because any half-educated guess nails it.
The only question we really have is not “will these heroes die gorily and humiliatingly,” but “will the artist be up to the task.” Joining us on this arc is Ennis’s longtime collaborator John McCrea, who you might remember from Hitman, Dicks, and so on. He and Ennis are often perfectly on one another’s wavelength: McCrea’s work is exaggerated and cartoonish when it needs to be, brooding and taciturn in the next panel. There’s often something subtly ‘off’ in the people that he draws; both in their established personalities, and in the looks on their faces. All this, and he can do gore like nobody’s business (just look at the fate of Soldier Boy, one of the more effective “shock moments” I’ve had pulled on me lately).
McCrea’s art is almost unusually subdued, though — panels of machine-gun fire exploding people’s heads aside, he minimizes his usual cartoony touches and seems to be taking great care to give his figures a certain… for lack of a better word, sobriety, especially with Tony Avina’s muted, desaturated color palette in the flashback sequences. This isn’t a bad thing by any means; indeed, I think it’s a pretty good choice, considering that the story is already ridiculous enough. Giving it a more restrained visual sensibility makes the absurdity stand out even more, rather than pushing the whole thing into hyper-gonzo territory, where it’s harder to get people to take the serious bits seriously.
What you have with The Boys #53 is two craftsmen providing capable work; McCrea offers a slight surprise, but Ennis falls back on what we’ve known he can do for decades now. Is it readable? Yes. Is it a bit fun? If you’re into tanks crushing people, also yes. That’s all it is, though; the points made are ones well-worked-over in the Ennis canon, and even within The Boys itself. Okay, we’re fifty-three issues in; do we need to keep explaining that the heroes are utter morons? Isn’t it time for the team to start truly and conclusively doing something about it?
Final Verdict: 6.5 – Browse-ish-buy-ish
