I guess the hamster was a bit too much.
Just found out last night that The Boys is being dropped by DC’s Wildstorm. (See ICv2’s take on the matter and a related story with comment by Ennis by Heidi MacDonald for The Beat.) For me personally, I’m not terribly surprised.
What I think is just sad as hell is that everyone is talking about how it “Outpreaches Preacher”. To me, they are so totally different in focus and scope, but I guess since that’s what Ennis decided to say to get people interested, he must know more than me, being the creator, right? I was originally very interested in the direction The Boys was going to take, and was quickly disappointed. But you can read about that in my reviews, so I’m not going to get into it here. The short form is: I’m with many when I say I expected better. And I’m not talking about having issues with the hard core stuff. I just think they had a great possibility for a story line, and just started down a dumb path with it, which I don’t think they’ll ever recover from.
I do agree with what a lot of folks are saying that extreme violence and sexuality seems to be ok for “mature” comics, so long as the homoerotic world isn’t touched upon, which I do feel is hypocritical, or at the very least, stupid logic. Then, it’s time to get a polite “Thank you, but no,” and you get the joy of keeping your own content on the way out the door with it. It could honestly be that DC’s oversight committee had been wiping their brow all along with nervousness, and only now did it just happen to be the time to say enough is enough. Unless DC owns up, we’ll never know.
But they must be thrilled. They had the backing of a major like DC, albeit under the Wildstorm name, and so now, if they play it right, they can ride the storm and hope to make The Boys a nice, cushy, long-term cult classic. Time will tell.