The Boys vol. 9: The Big Ride

It has been almost an entire year since we got a proper collection of this series, and the wait was worth it.  “Highland Laddie” was a mini-series that ran concurrent with the main title, and while it had a few things that were relevant to the overall story, I’ve been looking forward to finding out what happens next.  With the series set to wrap up around the end of next year this volume acts as the “calm before the storm” as writer Garth Ennis starts the build-up and gives us a whole lot of answers about longstanding questions in the process.  Most of these center around former “Boys” member and founder Greg Mallory in the first two arcs, “Proper Planning and Preparation” and “Barbary Coast” as we find out the specifics of why he left and then how he came to came to form the team, respectively.  The final story is where this volume takes its title from and it starts off as a kind of back-to-basics approach with Hughie and Butcher investigating the death of a transexual prostitute who had connections to Jack from Jupiter, a member of The Seven.  Everything seems to Jack being the culprit in this case, but it’s so convenient that Butcher can’t help but think that — like the title — they’re being taken for a ride on a collision course with The Seven.

Thankfully Ennis has reined in his sophomoric/scatalogical impulses here, because while there’s still plenty of nasty stuff here it doesn’t distract from the story like it did in previous volumes.  Plus, the bits involving Monkey were actually pretty funny.  That said, this volume is all about setting things up and getting everyone into place for the inevitable showdown between the The Boys and The Seven/Vought American.  While the series has up to this point been mostly about showing us what superheroes would really be like in real life, it appears that “The Boys” will ultimately be an indictment of the excesses of the military/industrial complex, which isn’t too far removed from what Ennis did on “Punisher MAX.”  However, the indicting won’t be done through the organizations themselves — Vought-American and the C.I.A. in this case — as their evil is more banal than anything else, but the monsters they’ve created.  Though the climax will certainly be the throwdown between the two teams, I’m betting that the falling action will be more interesting than that.  Someone in this world is going to have to account for all that has been done in the course of the series, and seeing how they do that should be something to watch.