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Amazon Prime's award-winning show The Boys has been a refreshing detour in the world of superhero movies and TV shows, showing a much darker side to the lives of super-powered beings. Based on Garth Ennis' highly controversial comic of the same name, The Boys shows how the world might be like if flawed humans gained incredible powers and were hailed as living gods.
The show and comic have gained universal praise for their gory take on the superhero genre. Though similar in tone and theme, the show does take many detours from its source material, carving its path, focusing a lot more on the characters and their motivations, and straying further away from the more problematic aspects of the comic.
This article contains spoilers for 'The Boys' comics and its third season.
Temp V
Unlike other superhero origins, in the world of The Boys, superheroes aren't born but are made. The amoral corporate giant, Vought, who controls all the "supes," created a drug that could give regular humans incredible superpowers called Compound V. This super serum thus made dozens of super-powered beings and gave Vought incredible influence.
In the comics, the Boys use a less refined version of the V to gain superpowers to fight on an even playing field with the supes. In the show, it took three seasons to build up to Butcher and Hughie getting hooked on this stuff, but in the comics, Hughie is injected with the stuff on his first mission. Another difference is the side effects of Temp V, which in the show causes brain degradation and eventual death after 3-5 doses.
Ryan and Becca
Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) is the de facto leader of the Boys who hates all supes and seeks to rid the world of them, especially the golden boy himself, Homelander (Antony Starr). Both in the comics and in the show, Butcher has a great disdain for Homelander and seeks revenge against him for the rape and murder of his wife, Becca.
Unlike the comics, Butcher discovers that Becca is still alive and raising a child, Homelander's child, Ryan. Luckily, unlike his father, Ryan grows up with a loving mother but still has the same incredible and dangerous powers as his father. While in the comics, Ryan was never born and killed Becca in the womb with his laser vision.
Lenny Butcher
Butcher has always been a cold-hearted bastard throughout the show who only cares about killing supes. But what caused Butcher to become the supe-killing, c-bomb-dropping madman he is today? Well, like many people in the show, it came from a pretty messed up childhood.
Both in the comics and show, Billy and his younger brother, Lenny, were physically and mentally abused by their drunken father. Lenny's death is a bit random in the comics as he is accidentally hit by a bus. While the show takes a darker and much more personal route for Lenny's death with Butcher's younger brother killing himself due to Billy leaving him alone with their abusive father. This creates a deep self-hatred within Butcher and also creates a closer connection Butcher has with Hughie, who he sees as a sort of little brother.
Victoria Newman/Vic the Veep
The Boys has been known to switch things up from its source material regarding gender-swapping characters. One example is Madelyn Stillwell (Elisabeth Shue), who is much different from her comic book counterpart, James Stillwell. Like Stillwell, the nature of Vic the Veep, a simple-minded politician Vought controls, is turned into the much more intelligent and powerful Victoria Newman (Claudia Doumit).
The show's Newman is a more capable iteration with aspirations of her own and not just another Vought lapdog. She also has the terrifying ability to "pop" people's heads off whenever she wants, unlike her non-powered counterpart.
Black Noir
A lot of characters' backstories in the show have differed from the comic, but none more so than Black Noir. A bit of a mystery for the first two seasons, Black Noir was Vought's silent assassin that did what he was told and never got out of line. In Season 3, we finally see who Black Noir is under that mask and how widely different his character is in the comic.
Big spoiler alert here for the comic; towards the end of The Boys comic run, after Homelander's attempted coup over the world, it's finally time for Homelander to get his comeuppance with a showdown between him and his arch-nemesis, Billy Butcher. But in the end, it's not Butcher who takes down the out-of-control "superhero" but Black Noir, who is revealed to be a deranged clone of Homelander that was created to keep Homelander in check. Now, this is a much different route than the show is going, as Noir is not a Homelander clone and instead has a more fleshed-out and more tragic backstory filled with abuse at the hands of Soldier Boy.
Soldier Boy:
Jensen Ackles' Soldier Boy has been a fantastic addition to the cast in season 3. Soldier Boy was hailed as Vought's first hero, the strongest man alive, the Homelander before Homelander, until he was betrayed by his team and given to the Russians to be experimented on.
The show's Soldier Boy is vastly different from his comic counterpart, and thankfully so. In the comics, Soldier Boy is a title held by several super-powered men and passed down after the previous one died, with the latest being a sniveling coward that will do anything to get into the Seven... anything. Luckily, the show took a detour and gave a more nuanced perspective on Soldier Boy, making him a tough military man who gets the job done: he is also an unstable bully with PTSD and a fragile ego.
Homelander's Lineage
The all-powerful, deranged man-child, Homelander, has gone through a lot over the three seasons of The Boys. Having grown up in a lab, isolated from human contact, and forced to endure terrible experiments until he finally was thrust out into the world and hailed as the greatest superhero, Homelander has a bit of an ego problem, to say the least. But at the end of the day, all he wants is the love and attention of the people, to finally feel a part of a family.
Homelander finally gets his wish when he discovers that Soldier Boy is his biological father. This is quite the detour as Homelander and Soldier Boy's relationship is, let's say, very different in the comic. In the comic, Homelander was bred in a lab by Vought, who tested their Compound V on mentally disabled pregnant women. Once Vought perfected the procedure and bred the ultimate weapon, Homelander, they eradicated all evidence and killed the mother and all the doctors involved. Little Homelander was then studied and tested in a lab with an H-bomb chained to him until Vought was sure he could be trusted and let out into the limelight. No wonder Homelander is the way he is.