Language: English
“Drop the ‘the’. Just ‘Homelander’” goes a line in ‘One Plus One Equals Two’, the last episode of The Boys Presents: Diabolical, an animated anthology of shorts set in the universe of Amazon Prime Video’s anti-superhero show The Boys. I call it ‘anti-superhero’ because the show derives its narrative wickedness as much from its pointed opposition to superhero tropes as it does from the gleefully stylised bucketfuls of onscreen gore.
The line in question is addressed to the show’s Big Bad, a cruel, psychopathic, nigh-invincible superhero called Homelander (Antony Starr) who leads a corporate-owned lineup called The Seven — a largely shallow, narcissistic bunch more interested in PR than saving people. I loved the reference to The Social Network, of course, but it was more than that. The idea of corporations choosing profit over human lives has never been more visible in human history, arguably, and this line was a powerful reminder of the same. It’s just one example of Diabolical’s whip-smart writing and why it works so well within the framework of The Boys’ internal mythology.
At least four of the eight animated shorts here (each about 12 minutes) are excellent while the others are pretty good, too and they cover a wide range of animation styles.
The Vought Corporation, the fictional behemoth that ‘manufactures’ superheroes by injecting babies with ‘Compound V’, is the narrative catalyst behind most of them. Like in my personal favourite episode ‘John and Sun-hee’ (written by Brooklyn Nine Nine’s Andy Samberg), we meet John the Korean janitor at Vought, whose wife Sun-hee is terminally ill, a cancer patient. Unable to let her go, John steals Compound V from his workplace and injects his wife with it, only to unleash a monstrous, homicidal alien creature that feeds off organic life and grows more massive by the minute.
It’s remarkable, really, how well ‘John and Sun-hee’ works as a straightforward, sincere love story, nestled within one of the most ultra-violent shows in recent memory. I was not expecting to tear up over “Don’t forget to have your meals on time when I’m gone” less than a minute after witnessing dozens of soldiers being summarily disemboweled by a murderous alien. But making wildly different tonalities work in unison has been part of The Boys’ charm so far, and Diabolical raises the bar on this aspect.
The episode ‘Laser Baby’s Day Out’, written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, has been written and animated a la Looney Tunes, sans dialogue, with a similar slapstick orchestral score. It’s just that the adorable baby at the heart of the story has high-powered lasers for eyes (like a similar baby weaponised by Billy Butcher in Season One’s famous hospital scene), and so there’s a hilariously high body count to go with the Looney Tunes wholesomeness, with the deaths becoming, well, cartoonishly over-the-top. I’m deliberately not telling you more about the plot because for a 12-minute story, that’d be divulging too much but it really is quite beautiful.
‘BFFS’, written by Awkwafina and animated in the shoujo anime style, is one of two brilliant absurdist takes on the Compound V situation; the other is Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland’s episode ‘An Animated Short Where Pissed-Off Supes Kill Their Parents’ (it’s exactly what it sounds like and it’s delightful and blood-soaked and loads of fun). In ‘BFFS’, a socially awkward youngster called Sky (Awkwafina) takes Compound V only to discover that her superpower is the ability to summon and control….shit. Or to put it more accurately, sentient turds that attack on command and overwhelm their opponents with sheer volume and general shittiness. Should Diabolical receive a second-season order, this is one story I would like to see more of.
Broad City co-creator Ilana Glazer delivers a searing cautionary tale about influencer culture in the episode ‘Boyd in 3D’, while Garth Ennis (writer of the eponymous comics series The Boys) sticks to his noir guns with the sardonic ‘I’m Your Pusher’. Aisha Tyler’s ‘Nubian vs Nubian’ is, as the name suggests, a twisted version of Kramer vs Kramer, where both parties in a marriage-on-the-rocks are superheroes. The writing and animation are uniformly brilliant in all of these episodes.
The live-action third season of The Boys will be released later this year but for now, fans of the show have more than enough to be thankful for. Diabolical is great fun throughout, and so much more than a companion piece.
The Boys Presents: Diabolical is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.
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