Amazon’s The Boys, Supernatural-creator Eric Kripke’s adaptation of Garth Ennis’s comic of the same name has proven to not only be one of the best superhero projects to not come from either DC or Marvel, but has proven to be one of the best comics adaptations ever.
Expanding that universe into animation—akin to the original medium it came from—in The Boys Presents: Diabolical seems like a no brainer. As with any project, however, there can be ups and downs. All eight episodes of The Boys Presents: Diabolical vary in quality while telling their sincere (and often very violent) superhero stories.
BFFs
As anyone who’s watched animation knows, the gross-out can always be funny. From Ren & Stimpy’s lovingly rendered boogers that have all the detail and glory of a National Geographic photo of a stalagmite to South Park having Mr. Hankie the Christmas Poo, toilet humor is a staple of modern animation.
However, that’s all “BFFs” has to offer. In the episode Sky (Awkafina), a loner girl trying to make friends, steals compound V from a drug dealer to become popular. All the episode ends up doing is allowing her to turn turds into little living beings leading to a slightly funny, but barely there confrontation with The Deep (Chace Crawford). Her own personal poop gets named Areola—based on the idea that a turd named for a nipple is funny because it sounds dirty.
It's the kind of episode that quickly wears out its welcome and begs the question of why it’s included. If this was the third or fourth anthology to come out of The Boys, “BFFs” might make sense, but with a property this fresh there’s no reason for a story that stinks this bad.
Nubian vs. Nubian
The next two episodes are just this side of being interchangeable in ranking, both in terms of being about toxic relationships and in terms of one doing one thing well and the other another. “Boyd in 3D” (as in an apartment number, not the visual effect) and “Nubian vs Nubian” are both very middle of the road in terms of overall impact.
“Nubian vs Nubian” has two Black heroes, Nubian Prince (Don Cheadle) and Nubia, Queen of Thunder (Aisha Tyler)—essentially Black Panther and Storm—meet up while battling Groundhawk (John DiMaggio) and fall in love. A great bit occurs where they both drop their faux-African accents and reveal they’re playing characters for Vought’s audience of racially-insensitive yahoos. A lousy marriage full of screaming and recriminations follows.
Their daughter, Maya (Somali Rose), tries to get them to not divorce by arranging for them to beat the snot out of Groundhawk again. Despite killing Groundhawk, battling side by side reawakens their lust, but not their love and they fight as usual after a night of passion. In the aftermath Maya makes them get divorced, seeing the benefits to less fighting and two households worth of guilt-tripped parents.
There’s some merit to the commentary on the African American characters having to put on straight-outta-Wakanda accents as part of their characters, but little beyond that. Audiences have seen unhappy marriages onscreen before and the heroes’ fight is a grounded squabble. If the episode had had the characters make use of their powers inside their home during their blowouts it might have had something, but it saves everything for the battle scenes, adding nothing special to a tired formula.
Boyd In 3D
In “Boyd in 3D”, Boyd Doone (Eliot Glazer) takes an experimental cream at a Vought lab and rubs it all over his body under the promise it will transform him into a better version of himself. He comes out the other end of it looking like a Hemsworth. His next door neighbor and crush, Cherry Sinclair (Nasim Pedrad), takes some and turns into the furry she’s always wanted to be (think Josie and the Pussycats meets Hermione from Chamber of Secrets).
Hot hijinks—and social media clout—ensue until things go south. The kicker turns out to be it’s all in Boyd’s head as the cream contains a bunch of Compound V and makes his noggin explode.
Both the relationship and the social media aspects end up feeling shortchanged because of the runtime—there’s not enough to get into a War of the Roses -style couple’s war, nor enough of how social media effects our lives and relationships, either. It’s a case of too big an idea to do in the runtime available. This just edges out "Nubian vs Nubian" for the sheer depth of ideas. Too much is always better than not enough.
John and Sun-Hee
A story that wants to be touching and sometimes is, “John and Sun-Hee” is about the titular couple, John (Randall Duk Kim) and his dying wife, Sun-Hee (Youn Yuh-jung), an elderly couple dealing with cancer tearing everything down. John is desperate to save his wife and is willing to try anything to help her—even Vought’s Compound V.
A janitor at Vought, John goes to work armed with a taser which he uses on security and gets a pass to the labs. Before she even knows what’s going on, Sun-Hee wakes to a jolt of V going into her IV. When Vought security arrive to deal with John, Sun-Hee’s cancer metastasizes into a kaiju-like monster and kills them, sucking their bodies into itself and growing bigger. John and Sun-Hee flee, but when they get to the outskirts of town, the cancer rips free of Sun-Hee’s body and begins wreaking havoc, a monstrous form of what was already destroying the couple quietly. It eats animals and gets bigger and bigger and although John wants to flee, Sun-Hee tells him they’re better than that and goes to battle what was once killing her, knowing she’ll die in the process.
The episode hits its most touching moment, ironically, right before the credits roll as Sun-Hee reminds John to feed himself and take care of himself and the episode gains specificity. Until then it’s been a generically sad premise, but has lacked the details needed that gives the characters depth and the story real weight. That said, while Colossal is a better “Kaiju as emotional methaphor” story, this is the anthology’s lone attempt at something tragic and it mostly succeeds.
One Plus One Equals Two
The origin story of Homelander (Antony Starr) and featuring all the actors from the regular series reprising their characters, “One Plus One Equals Two” is a decent enough story to tie into proper The Boys canon, but it really does feel as simple as the title goes in terms of the depth of the story.
Homelander meets public, Homelander kills public, the end—in a nutshell. We’re taken to Homelander’s first introduction to the general public, where he gets led on by Madelyn Stillwell (Elizabeth Shue) into ignoring following Black Noir’s lead and striking out on his own. Trying to stop what he thinks are terrorists holding hostages in a chemical plant, in predictable fashion Homelander uses too much force and ends up killing everyone in a haze of horrific flashbacks to his Vought upbringing. He then goes on to fight Black Noir in a very Batman v Superman-style fight until Noir makes him realize they’re not enemies and give Homelander the spin he needs on the night’s events to butter up the press.
It's par for the course as the audience already knows Homelander is a monster. The only new wrinkle is in realizing that he essentially never fell from grace, he was totally messed up from the get go. The animation is pretty, the acting top-notch, the execution of a simple idea done well, never forgetting that doing something simple, but doing it well aren’t easy to pull off.
I’m Your Pusher
“I’m Your Pusher” is the Diabolical episode that most clearly goes back to Garth Ennis’s original premise, a nasty, sex-and-drug fueled romp through superhero pastiches and the monsters they really would be under the skin. Featuring a beardless Billy Butcher (Jason Isaacs) and Wee Hughie (played by and made to look like Simon Pegg per the OG comics), this hews the closest to his original vision but with way better-looking art.
Featuring a drug pusher to the supes having a meeting with Billy and Hughie where the man is forced to give Vought’s latest monster, the Great Wide Wonder (Michael Cera), a dose of their own concoction, he does and things go badly. At a Vought introduction of the new superhero, the guy overtaxes his superspeed and flight and ends up dying by crushing all his bones after he flies through Ironcast (Kevin Michael Richardson) a sort of Colossus-type character.
Funny, startling, just the right amount of cynical nastiness, this was The Boys comics at their best tacked onto Kripke’s well-fashioned adaptation in a slightly haphazard manner. That's really the only criticism. Can’t beat up too much on Ennis for wanting to see his complete original vision on the screen, but using Antony Starr as Homelander and Dominique McElligott as Queen Maeve from the series just confuses this comics adaptation squeezed into an anthology based on the TV series.
An Animated Short Where Pissed-Off Supes Kill Their Parents
A Justin Roiland joint, this gross-out episode, “An Animated Short Where Pissed-Off Supes Kill Their Parents,” about pissed off reject heroes (the ones where the Compound V turned them into freaks) whose parents abandoned them at a Vought facility for said rejects, this episode keeps stacking on the absurdity like the best “Interdimensional Cable” episodes from Rick and Morty.
Viewers are introduced to a bevy of wild mistakes from Aqua Agua (a Hispanic water puddle that has the colors of the Mexican flag voiced by Xolo Maridueña), to Boobie Face (Kevin Smith) to the lead, Ghost (Ashja Cooper). Together they do exactly what the title says: they team up, break out, and hunt down the parents who not only mutated them but then abandoned them afterward when they didn’t turn out to be the Maeves and Homelanders the greedy folks wanted. It’s a wild ride from start to finish and done in the inimitable Rick and Morty/Solar Opposites style that’s become a staple of Roiland.
While it’s a violent, nasty piece of work, it’s also the flat out most hilarious episode of the entire season doing everything that an episode like “BFFs” wishes it could. It’s got a weird sense of heart, and the absurdity and disgusting bits are in service to the greater story of people who’ve been turned away by their families for not turning out as their parents gambled they might, getting some of their own back in a world that’s taken so much. And it introduces Ghost, an incorporeal hero who would make a fascinating addition to the live-action world.
Laser Baby's Day Out
Completing the premise that The Boys Presents: Diabolical's very best episodes were the ones aired first, "Laser Baby's Day Out," by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (and based on the little tyke used as a human gun by Billy Butcher in season 1 to get past Vought's guards after Butcher and his boys break into their labs to steal some Compound V and figure out where supes really come from), it's done in a classic Looney Tunes art style that underscores the sheer brutality of it all. The cartoony style even opens with a classic style title card declaring the production a Voughtoon to complete the effect.
The premise is simple: Simon (Ben Schwartz), a Vought scientist, is tasked with testing out one of their numerous babies to see fi they have the potential to be marketed. The little girl (Jennifer Yokobori) just wants to play so he's forced to mark her final test a failure. Shortly after, she sneezes and reveals her laser vision. When Simon finds the child is marked for termination, he latches onto his hope of adopting her and together through a series of false starts and gags they escape Vought Tower and go on the run.
Over the course of the episode they continue to flee Vought's soldiers and the baby keeps killing said soldiers by comically sneezing at exactly the right moment. Eventually she learns to control the powers and kills their lead pursuer, Superbrain (Fred Tatasciore) and a whole army of Vought soldiers. Together, she and Simon walk off into the sunset.
This is the best simply by taking a one off gag from the show and turning it into something at turns hilarious, touching, violent, and doing it all with minimal dialogue (every character talks in sighs and grunts or baby burbles) and in a classic style. If it wasn't about Vought getting their butts handed to them, it would be believable as the type of thing that company would produce.