The Boys Presents: Diabolical offers some nourishing little appetizers ahead of season 3
The anthology series, a spin-off of Amazon's The Boys, showcases a wide range of talents.
TV Reviews The Boys
The season-two finale of Amazon’s hit series The Boys was released in October 2020. While the pandemic has made the passage of time feel somewhat meaningless to put it in context, it has, in many respects, been a very long wait to find out what will happen next for Hughie (Jack Quaid), Butcher (Karl Urban), Starlight (Erin Moriarty), and company.
Well, there’s still some more waiting to do as season three isn’t due until June. In the meantime, fans’ appetites will have to be sated by The Boys Presents: Diabolical, an animated anthology series consisting of eight episodes, each in different animation styles, that tell stories set within The Boys universe. Some involve characters we already know and love/hate, and others who have no connection beyond the interference of Vought Industries or the use of Compound V.
With most anthology series, the accepted wisdom is that there will be hits and misses; while the standard isn’t uniform across all eight episodes, there are no calamitous “misses” in the mix. Each entry lands a couple of solid jokes and is successfully animated in its own distinct style.
The installment that ventures closest to being a dud is “BFFs,” written by and starring Awkwafina as Sky, a socially inept young woman whose encounter with Compound V leaves her befriending her sentient turd. Awkwafina is a talented voice actor, the animation inspired by “Saturday morning animation imports” is delightful, and appearances from aquatic psychopath The Deep (Chase Crawford) are great fun, but this is still essentially a one-joke premise and even the greatest poop jokes can’t sustain a full 13 minutes.
Taking on an equally simple premise but executing it with more aplomb is “Laser Baby’s Day Out,” made in classic Looney Tunes style. It is an entirely dialogue-free look at a Vought scientist who, rather than let a baby who shoots lasers out of her eyes be exterminated by Vought, smuggles her out of the facility, but is pursued by a plethora of heavily armed Vought employees. Of all the episodes, “Laser Baby” has the cutest moments and the warmest nostalgia, but this being The Boys, it also has the highest death count, easily reaching into the mid-hundreds.
Coming closest to its bloodiness is the aptly titled “An Animated Short Where Pissed-Off Supes Kill Their Parents” from Rick And Morty creator Justin Roiland—who, along with Ben Bayouth, creates a short in his signature animation style and tone. In it, a group of supes in a foster home seek revenge on the parents who abandoned them. The characters themselves feel plucked straight from Rick And Morty with hilariously absurd powers including Human Tongue, The Narrator and Ranch Dressing Cum Squirter. The ending is true to Boys fashion, and a little more brutal than we are used to from Roiland, but the two universes make for great partners in crime.
Similarly plumbing maximum dark laughs out of its premise is Aisha Tyler’s “Nubia Vs. Nubia,” whose title alludes to Kramer Vs. Kramer rather than a big splashy supe battle. Young Maya (Somali Rose) tries to get her supe parents to halt divorce proceedings by recreating the mission that they first bonded over. What ensues is predictable, particularly since we are all well aware of what sadistic creeps the supes are, but Tyler has a knack for writing and delivering witty dialogue that breathes life into familiar proceedings. An equally dysfunctional relationship lies at the heart of “Boyd In 3D,” in which a budding romance is complicated by some experimental Vought face cream that helps you take on your ideal appearance. The French animation style and final twist are extremely effective, but some of the satire lands a little heavy, even for The Boys.
Perhaps the biggest departure in tone comes from Andy Samberg, who writes and does some supporting voice work on the Korean-drama- and horror-inspired “John And Sun Lee.” John is an elderly janitor at Vought whose beloved wife has been given days to live. Desperate and unable to accept losing the love of his life, he steals a syringe of Compound V and administers it, hoping that it will give them some more time together. Unlike the other entries, “John And Sun Lee” doesn’t rely on laughs; instead, it’s a moving and tender portrait of long-lasting love and grief, made lovelier still by the Korean-inspired animation that bursts with intricate texture and bold color.
And for those who just want to spend more time with the characters they’re most familiar with, there’s “One Plus One Equal Two” and “I’m Your Pusher.” The first, made in the style of modern American superhero animation, works as an origin story for Homelander, voiced by the ever-chilling Antony Starr. It also sees a welcome return of Elisabeth Shue as Madelyn Stillwell, who is tasked with introducing Homelander to the American public and shaping him into a beloved supe despite his vicious streak.
Perhaps even more fun is “I’m Your Pusher,” in which Butcher confronts the supes’ main drug dealer. It’s utterly depraved and raucous, animated in the style of the comics that inspired the series. In an additional nod to readers, the episode finds Simon Pegg stepping into the role of Hughie—the Boys character played in live-action by Jack Quaid, but originally modeled on the Shaun Of The Dead star. Pegg’s presence amounts to little more than a cameo, but is still heartwarming in the midst of all the heroin enemas, disembowelments, and supes that can only get aroused when drinking the blood of children with leukemia.
We’re still a few long months from The Boys’ third season, and it remains to be seen if we’ll finally see the titular boys take Compound V, if Black Noir will ever recover from eating that Almond Joy, or if we’ll get another head-exploding extravaganza courtesy of Congresswoman Neuman (Claudia Doumit). In the meantime, The Boys Presents: Diabolical is a reminder of just how gross and fun a world of superpowered sociopaths can be.
20 Comments
Not sure if they’ll ever go the give-all-The-Boys-Compound-V bit, as they already have supes (Annie and Kimiko) on the team, and they already did the Compound-V-as-addictive-drug plot with A Train. Bluntly, that plot point in the comic was one of the things that led me to give up on the comic, and Garth Ennis’ work, entirely; Ennis grinding on and on about his hatred of superheroes—while getting fully behind people who are basically superheroes, only they wear trenchcoats instead of capes—wore very thin very quickly.
“while getting fully behind people who are basically superheroes”Well, except for the part where almost all of them die horrible deaths and their leader is the literal Big Bad, but sure.
Yeah I think Ennis was able to display that V can corrupt lots of people, even those who get take it for “The Right Reasons” and start out as a deterrent to Supes running amuck, then of course by the end their leader is almost as big of a bastard as Homelander. Like, early on I kind of agreed with halloweenjack’s point, that the line between The Boys and their enemies was rather thin, and the CIA was just fighting a corporation with their own weapons. But by the end I realized that rather than it being an oversight, Ennis did that on purpose. Power corrupting etc.
A last-act comeuppance that doesn’t begin to justify everything that went before it.
Hey, come back here with those goalposts!
The Boys is one of the best things on TV, but it’s one of the worst comics Ennis has ever written, IMHO. His Hellblazer, Hitman, Preacher, Punisher Max etc are all brilliant.
I’ve read most of his output up to about two-thirds of the way through The Boys, and while a lot of it seemed like a breath of fresh air at first, after a while it was pretty obvious that Ennis kept repeating the same tropes over and over: God is evil, superheroes are bad and dumb, cool tough guys who wear black are the best, World War II is a subject of endless fascination, etc. Preacher, in particular, just falls apart on a re-read.
A lot of that is fair, but I love that early stuff. The All in the Family arc in Preacher is almost perfect. So well structured, so many cool moments, but they all come out of character. I know the overall series is all over the place, but that storyline is one of my all time faves.I find that there’s an issue with comic books where writers have to create such a volume of stuff, if you’re a fan, it’s easy to get sick of them. The repeated tropes, habits, dialogue ticks, themes etc all become very pronounced if they’re doing 3 comics month for years. Compared to a favourite director making one movie every few years or a TV writer making 10 episodes one show that runs for years, it’s a lot. I think there’s been a point with pretty much all of my favourite writers where I’ve just been burned out and had to take a break.
My favorite part of Preacher is probably Cassidy’s arc. There’s a ton of potential in the idea of a vampire who, while seeking out some kind of human connection, gets away with using, screwing over, or just plain abandoning people because he knows that he’ll eventually outlive them (and escape any real physical consequences of his addictions and bad behavior), and I would have liked a graphic novel just of him. I think that I may also take a crack at the TV series adaptation, as I saw the pilot and it seemed to possibly address some of the problems that I had with the comic, plus, of course, Ruth Negga.
Cassidy is also a great deconstruction of that fun loving Irish lad archetype.I wanted to love the TV series and it gets a ton right (tone, casting, etc) but it’s far too slow for me. It takes the entire first series to get to page 5 of the first issue. They didn’t have the budget or ambition to make it a road trip show and it never recovered.
This single change is the reason why I love the show dozens of times more than the comics.
The very fact that they’re so underpowered and at any given moment can get brutally vaporized, adds that extra layer of excitement and thrill to the show as a whole.
I thought it was Hugh that took Compund V because he went undiscovered with a D list bunch of supes. MM’s Milk, The Girl were powered already and Frenchie is their normal tech guy.
, but is still heartwarming in the midst of all the heroin enemas, disembowelments, and supes that can only get aroused when drinking the blood of children with leukemia. Yeah , I’m guessing that’s the Garth Ennis written one.(and barring one or two mistakes , like the Holy Shit how the hell are they letting me write this ‘Crossed , I like Ennis stuff )
I’ve read most of Ennis’s stuff, though I agree, never going near Crossed. It just seems like him at his worst impulses whereas his “Punisher Max” run seems to focus on the more impressive aspects of his writing, such as attention to detail concerning military history and disdain for armchair generals/exploitative politicians who cause so many geopolitical problems. That version of Frank Castle was awesome, bit of a surprise given a few years previous Ennis also wrote an incredibly silly (though obviously still brutal) Punisher.
I’ve read almost all of the various Crossed comics and there is one series I would recommend if you were to ever consider any of the titles which is Crossed: Wish You Were Here. The violence isn’t gratuitous believe it or not and quite sparing after the initial outbreak.Also it’s got some of the best storytelling and especially character work I’ve ever seen in a comic. I encountered it as a free webcomic presumably as a promotion to help promote the other Crossed titles which I think backfired because it’s better than all of them, often by quite a lot. It’s written by Si Spurrier, had some very interesting discussions on the message boards about his work.
As much as I hate it when people hijack comment threads to complain about Kinja . . . does anyone have any idea why this keeps happening? Anytime I try to add any links or styling to a comment, it gets fucked.
Kinja will never ever get better, so the more other things are updated the worse it’ll work. Nothing else to it sorry. If it helps disqus is also getting as bad these days.
It’s whatever they did to the system when they changed it so we couldn’t post links. I didn’t post links often, but just one day it was changed to where I couldn’t do it anymore. Instead I got rearranged sentences. It was disappointing at first but, hey, still get to post pictures, right? Not too bad. Accept your fate.
Roiland’s tedious drunk act is so boring this many years on.
Much like with Invincible, I am left scratching my head as to why the animation for this isn’t more dynamic. They’re presumably working with decent budgets, and outsourcing to a lot of Asian studios, and yet TV anime at often a much lower budget is simply better *directed*.