The Boys Volume 1: The Name Of The Game Limited Edition HC This instant

Some say The Boys is strictly for mature readers. More accurately, The Boys is strictly for extremely immature readers, just not kids. You know that in-between age where boys have seen their first pair of boobies in their first dirty magazine? That mean age where snuffing out frogs and anthills with firecrackers and magnifying glasses is the height of hilarity? That disillusioned age where "antihero" may not have entered their vocabulary, but all the same they decided they like Vegeta better than Goku, Wolverine better than Superman, Lobo better than Wolverine? That's the maturity level best-suited to appreciate The Boys.

I rank Garth Ennis' Preacher as a masterpiece of the medium, thus it's disappointing that as years pass, Ennis has become content to lazily snipe at the low-hanging fruit. This series presents the misadventures of a covert team of operatives that police the superhero community, and while Ennis and his fans preen The Boys as a testosterone-fueled polemic with a bold lack of inhibitions, the execution is actually rather like a baby-in-a-microwave joke: a fourteen-year-old kid might be delighted by its "shocking" cruelty and "twisted" humor, but grown-ups just find it stupid in its one-note crudeness.

The Boys sticks to the basic formula one has come to expect of the "British Comics Invasion". We get iconic superheroes depicted as sociopathic sexual deviants. We get a sophomoric straw-manning of the evil conspiracy known as the American government. And we get lots of swearing, bodily-function humor, and exploding flesh, all of which serves as a substitute for compelling storytelling or engaging characters. It's a dusty well that's been drained relentlessly by the likes of Wanted, The Authority, Top 10, The Ultimates, and many derivative works penned by authors who claim to hate the complacency of the supehero genre, but themselves can't seem to defy the inexorable gravity of cranking out yet another by-the-numbers Superman or Batman pastiche.

Perhaps that's the one true insight that The Boys has to offer amidst its unremittingly mean-spirited uglyness: the hypocrasy of it all. For all the hatred that the British Billy Butcher and his crew have for the spandex-donning degenerate yanks of Ennis' lampooniverse, they're every bit as unlikable and deserving of contempt. There's nobody worth rooting for, nothing worthwhile at the heart of all of the nastiness.

If you're still on the fence, if the weight of all the five-star rave reviews are tempting you to doubt my words, then use Look Inside feature to check out the very first line of dialogue in The Boys. It sums up the crass, ugly, and unclever nature of the entire series. Then when you're done, get your hands on Pat Mills' trade paperback, Marshall Law: Fear and Loathing. Based on a comic series published twenty years before The Boys, you'll have a firm grip on exactly how little Ennis' ups the ante.

One final nail in the coffin: 168 pages book does not warrant a hardcover edition.Get more detail about The Boys Volume 1: The Name Of The Game Limited Edition HC.