Meh, Readers?

A look at Garth Ennis’ The Boys: Dear Becky #1–5

It’s both a good and bad time to be Garth Ennis. His comic strip series The Boys is being adapted to a TV series on Amazon. That hopefully means money for him and co-creator Darick Robertson. On the other hand, most people who first knew it as a comic agree it’s watered down. I haven’t seen it yet, but given the content of the comic series (including the rape and cannibalization of infants), how could it not be? This recently caused people on my Twitter feed to revisit the original stories, and they weren’t being remembered fondly. On top of that, The Boys is published by Dynamite, a comic book company found that got involved with the trolls behind the Comicsgate movement. Now Ennis’ return to the property with the limited series The Boys: Dear Becky is getting panned online. Though it was never going to be a great idea to go back, the anger towards this series may be a little overblown, thought not entirely unfair.

For all the online rage, there isn’t any outright call to cancel Garth Ennis the writer. And, barring any unearthed stories of even the Warren Ellis variety, why would there be? First of all, cancel culture doesn’t really work. In the case of Comicsgate, all it does in inspire people to crowdfund tons of future landfills. Second, and most importantly, Ennis can still turn out decent work. His…