Comic Books and The New Literature
33
fiends’^ who abuse their powers and their social recognition to satisfy their most
primal instincts and literally get away with rape and murder. The Boys’ task
appears therefore more than justified for superheroes obviously constitute a
social menace and must be policed, punished, and even sometimes eliminated. It
is revealed by The Legend, a comic book store owner who provides The Boys
with data regarding “the supes,” that Victory Comics, the comic book publishing
company controlled by the powerful Vought-American corporation, has
manufactured and promoted false information about superheroes, hence forging
an artificial image of morally irreproachable saviors for public use; society has
been fooled in believing that it needed superheroes and even the CIA, the main
sponsor of the Boys, is reluctant to confront Vought-American directly for fear
it would unleash its super-powered maniacs against the agency and the country
itself, which is to say that in essence, any superhero is susceptible to be a
supervillain.
The Boys is not only a comic book narration with particularly welldeveloped characters and a definitely mature tone, it is also the story of a
struggle within the industry itself: assisted by a comic-book store owner, the
Boys defend the interest of society by fighting against superheroes manipulated
by a cold-blooded corporation which happens to have constructed the myth of
the superman through the publication of its very own brand of comic books. By
adding a meta-fictitious dimension to the narration. The Boys explicitly
denounces the corporate structure which has confined the genre to endless
repetitions of the same manichean conflict; it is a superhero comic book entirely
devoted to free the comic book medium from the domination of superheroes
through the systematic destruction of generic, morally viable albeit
unsustainable cliches.
When one considers the success, both public and critical of Watchmen and
of The Boys, as well as the increasing abundance of comic books and graphic
novels which altogether exclude superheroes from their narrative universes, it
appears that the comic book medium in the United States is in the process of
escaping its commercial and thematic limitations, hence becoming more
artistically and culturally significant than ever before. Its recipient has grown
older, more mature, and more demanding, and the over-extended, somewhat
contrived reign of superheroes upon an entire narrative medium is drawing to an
end, allowing for renewed artistic creativity, which should ease the
enthronization of a much too long disparaged narrative form into the already
generically confused canon of literary and cultural studies; after all, comic books
are no child’s play.
West Virginia University
Daniel Ferreras Savoye
Notes
‘ The disastrous effects of postmodern theory upon the definition and practice of our
discipline are further described in “The Birth of Counter Theory.”
^ Cultural and Popular Culture studies are easy preys for current critical trends