"The Boys": Superheroes, Homophobia, and the Girl of His Dreams

The Boys, on Amazon Prime, has been promoted and double-promoted a theatrical experience far superior to anything you have ever experienced before, the best tv series of all time -- no, the greatest work of art ever created in the entire history of humankind.

After all that, if it's just the best thing I've ever seen, it will be a letdown.

But it's free with your Prime membership, and maybe some of the Boys are hot, so...

It starts off promising, with two teenage boys discussing penises, then grabbing at each other when they are nearly killed by a runaway truck and taken hostage, saved by superheroes.

But then we get down to the main plot, about electronics-store nebbish Hughie (Jack Quaid, left) and The Girl of His Dreams, who is killed to provide character motivation.

Yawn.  Haven't I heard this a thousand times before? Action heroes ALWAYS have dead wives, or else estranged wives to reconcile with.  It's disgustingly heterosexist.

Since a superhero killed The Girl, Hughie becomes an anti-superhero vigilante, teaming up with Billie Butcher (Karl Urban, left), whose  -- you guessed it --was also killed by supes.

Wait -- two dead Girls of Their Dreams?  That's two too many.  I give up and read the plot synopsis instead.

 They start a vigilante band, The Boys.

1. Hughie
2. Butcher

3. Mother's Milk (Laz Alonzo, left)
4. Frenchie (Tomer Capon)
5. The Female (Karen Fukuhara), the only Boy who has super powers.  The others get by with paralyzing gas and computer bugs.

The superheroes, created by an evil corporation when they were babies, are all arrogant, self-serving, and corrupt, not above causing the disasters they save people from.  The main group is called The Seven for merchandising purposes:

1. Homelander (Antony Starr, left)
2. Starlight (Erin Moriarty)
3. Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott), who is a lesbian ("The first canonical gay superhero!").

Note: I am told that she's not a lesbian at all.  Apparently the Wikipedia article naming another character as her ex-girlfriend was in error.

4. A-Train (Jesse T. Usher, left)
5. The Deep (Chace Crawford)
6. Black Noir (Nathan Miller)

7. Translucent (Alex Hassel, left).

Well, at least the show is equipped in the hunkoid department

Other superheroes of interest are:

8. Mesmer (Haley Joel Osment, who often plays gay characters).

9. The evil Ezekial (Shaun Benson), "a closeted homosexual."  Is this the 1950s?  When did we go back to the term "homosexual" to describe a gay person?  Are we going to start using old, offensive terms for racial minorities, too?

The episode plot summaries are extremely complex, but there seems to be a lot of sex and violence.  Both the Boys and the Supes are morally suspect; not a "truth and justice" type among them.

I'm not willing to find out.  The origin story about the death of not one but two Girls of Their Dreams turned me off, and the  homophobic "closeted homosexual" slur sealed the deal.

If only they had stuck to the gay-subtext buddy-bonding boys in the first scene.

Costume Quest: Frederator Has Done Better

Costume Quest is an Amazon cartoon series based on the children's video game and graphic novel.  Just before Halloween, four 12 year old friends go out to test their homemade costumes.  They discover that a mysterious group  called the Repusians have transformed most of the townsfolk into monsters (secret monsters wearing human suits).  They must draw on their costumes' special powers (and their own inner strength) to discover the monsters' secret agenda and save the day.

The four friends are (from left to right):
1. Lucy (Allie Urrutia), the mystical one.
2. Wren (Gabriella Graves), the fighter.
3. Her brother Reynold (Sloane Letourneau), who lacks superpowers
4. Everett (Issac Ryan Brown), the responsible one.

They are voiced by actual children (top photo), which makes their attempt to pronounce complicated dialogue reminiscent of classic Peanuts.

Their main ally is Norm (Fred Tasciore), who provides the costumes, and has secrets of his own.

The tv series is produced by Will McRobb, known for the gay-subtext (and text) children's classics Doug, The Adventures of Pete and Pete, and Sanjay and Craig.  and Frederator Studios (Fairly Oddparents, Adventure Time), so expect a fully-realized world, a complex mythology, an endless amount of adult beefcake, and some gay subtexts (or texts).

1. Full-Realized World: Yep.  Auburn Hollow is known for its nougat and superhero Abraham Lincoln, Jr., so those products appear in a variety of guises.

2. Complicated Mythology: Yep.  Monsters often cross over into our world and live among us.  Most just want to start a new life, but some are evil, and need a maguffin to give them enough power to take over the universe.  There are back stories, dark secrets, hidden agendas, game changing revelations, and so on, not as complex as Adventure Time, but enough for ashort series aimed and preteens.

3. Adult Beefcake:  Not much.  An occasional muscle man in the background, an occasional monster with 6-pack abs.


4.Gay subtexts:  Not a lot of romantic pairings of any sort, but some inclusivity: 

Teen idol Rooty Tootz (Robbie Daymond), who is heavily gay coded, has male and female fans.

When Norm is lonely, he looks for friends, not a girlfriend.

 Everett wants to get closer to his teenage brother Benjy, not a girl.  And Benjy's teenage friends consist of a boy and a girl.

I'll give it a B.

Jim Elliot, Through Gates of Spendor, and Amazonian Beefcake

When I was growing up in the ultra-fundamentalist Nazarene church, we had no saints, no folk heroes.  We couldn't name a single famous person who was Nazarene -- of course not, Sunday school teachers said.  When you spend all your time trying to win souls, the way God wants you to, how will you have time to become famous?

But boys need heroes, so Sunday school teachers and youth ministers became creative, scouring the ranks of closely related denominations -- the Wesleyans, the Pentecostals, the Salvation Army.  And they found Jim Elliot (1927-1956), a young missionary from the Plymouth Brethren who moved to Ecuador to try to win the Quechua for Christ.

Eventually he changed his mind: he would make first contact with the savage Auca Indians (actually called Huaorani), who lived in the Amazonian region of southern Ecuador, in order to win them for Christ.

After all, the Quechua were already Catholic -- not Christian, of course, but the Bible, or at least the Gospels, were available to them.  They at least knew who Jesus was.  The Auca were completely untouched -- they had never heard of Jesus at all.

"Operation Auca" began in September 1955, with the standard "first contact" tactic of exchanging gifts.  On January 3rd, 1956, Jim and his companions established a base and had friendly encounters with some of the Auca men.  Things seemed to be going smoothly.  But on January 8th, 1956, ten Auca warriors approached and speared Jim, three other missionaries, and their pilot Nate Saint to death.



Martyred for the cause of Christ.

Nazarenes had very few martyrs -- the church only began in 1909.  So Jim Elliot and the other missionaries were a big deal.

"Would you die for Christ, if He asked you to?" our youth minister asked.

In 1957, Jim's widow Elisabeth published an account of "Operation Auca," Through Gates of Splendour.  It was adapted into a Spire Christian comic in 1974.

Later, Elisabeth, Saint's sister, and other missionaries successfully contacted the Huaorani, and won many of them for Christ, including Mincaye, one of the murderers.

Mincaye and Saint's son Steve (only five years old at the time of the murder) later became close friends, and often traveled together on missionary expeditions.

There are about 4,000 Huaorani today, mostly living in permanent settlements, their culture all but destroyed.

You're probably wondering, what's the gay connection?

1. I rather liked the idea of five men all together, with no women around.
2. Who didn't wear shirts.
3. The Huaorani were mostly naked.
4. That friendship between Mincaye and Steve.  Best friends with your father's murderer.  How romantic is that?

10 Things You Should Know About "The Tick"

1. The spoof superhero first appeared in 1986 as the mascot of the New England Comic Book Stores.

2. His costume looks like this.  The muscles are latex, but the bulge isn't.

3. He has appeared in three tv series, animated (voiced by Townsend Coleman), live in 2001 (starring Patrick Warburton), and most recently in 2016 (with Peter Serafinowicz).

4. Peter Serafinowicz is a British actor known for Shaun of the Dead and Guardians of the Galaxy.

5. The Tick has a sidekick, Arthur, who actually wants nothing to do with him and keeps trying to get out of sidekicking.

6. Their interactions sometimes involve homophobic "real men must never touch!", and sometimes glimmers of homoerotic affection.

7. Arthur was voiced by Micky Dolenz and Rob Paulsen in the animated series, and he has been played by David Burke and most recently Griffin Newman.

8.  This is Arthur in costume.  His bulge must enter a room three seconds before the rest of him.

9. The Tick also features a full roster of beefcake actors playing superheroes and villains, such as Brendan Hines as Superion.

10. And Scott Spieser as Overkill.