Amazon’s ‘The Boys’ Left Out 3 Disturbing Comic Book Stories
Amazon’s The Boys may be gritty, grotesque, and garish, but its vulgar depravity barely scratches the surface of the perverse comic book source material. The show’s superheroes are twisted — controlled by a corporation with governmental influence — and most “supes” are more amoral than conceivable.
Blood splatters across the screen in nearly every episode. Several character exchanges are downright ruthless and inhumane (and often predatorial). Yet, despite all that, the show can’t quite replicate the comics. It would be too much for TV, too much for the genre — even for mature audiences. So, what has the show left out from the comics? What did the showrunners decide to remove, presumably in service of viewers’ hearts and souls?
1. The plane crash and Queen Maeve’s subsequent downward spiral
Though season 1 of The Boys shows Maeve and Homelander attempting to save a plane that’s crashing to its doom, some of the facts were altered. In the comics, the plane is one of the hijacked planes on 9/11. Instead of crashing into the World Trade Center, the plane crashes into the Brooklyn Bridge, notes IGN. Following this incident, Maeve becomes an unstable alcoholic, which has been incorporated in the show but not yet to the same extent.
2. The story behind Marvin T. Milk’s nickname in ‘The Boys’
In Amazon’s The Boys, Billy Butcher and his crew hunt down the supes as mere mortals; in the comics, they all inject Compound V to compete with the unbeatable. Yet, Marvin T. Milk, who they affectionately call Mother’s Milk, was born with Compound V in his system.
Milk’s mother worked at a Vought factory where she became dependent. As a result, Mother’s Milk becomes addicted and must breastfeed well into his adulthood. The character, as actor Laz Alonso notes, is based on “crack babies” from the ‘80s, who were born drug-dependent. The writers behind Marvin T. Milk went in a different direction, and thus, his nickname will likely remain a mystery in the show.
3. Billy Butcher murdered his superhero son in ‘The Boys’ comics
In Amazon’s The Boys, Homelander’s son, whose mother is Billy Butcher’s greatest love, Becca, is alive and well. The son possesses superhuman abilities — in line with Homelander’s — but his mom does not raise him to use his abilities to control others. He doesn’t use them at all until his biological father, Homelander, arrives.
While the show leads viewers to believe that Becca died during childbirth, viewers later find out that she is alive. She is being kept at a home off the grid. In the comics, she dies during childbirth, and Billy Butcher murders her child, as his utter hatred for supes supersedes any sort of human decency.
