The BEat’s Heidi MacDonald has an in-depth interview with Garth Ennis that focuses primarily on the whole “The Boys” controversy that’s taken over the internet the last few weeks. It’s a solid interview, with Ennis being very forthcoming and open about the issues DC had with the title, his and Robertson’s reasons for taking the property to Dynamite, and more.

ENNIS: I think if I were to sum it up in one line, it would be that you can have comics where people do awful things to each other, like Preacher, but you can’t have a comic where super people do awful things to each other, like The Boys, and I think that rather than any specific instances—panels or pages or lines in the story—that was really the problem in a nutshell. When you have comics that—even superficially—look a bit too much like the company’s regular output, and the characters in them are doing the most ghastly things and behaving in the most awful way, and blaspheming and swearing and so on, that creates a real problem. That just will not fly. And that, more than anything else, was what brought an end to The Boys time at DC.

THE BEAT: So it wasn’t like, what people have been speculating, a big wig at DC specifically opening up the book and seeing a hamster crawling out of a dead man’s ass and saying, we can’t publish this.

ENNIS: That’s in issue 6. I think once they had a chance to read the whole thing, the damage was done long before issue 6. If I could just guess at a couple of things, there’s an orgy sequence in issue 4, there’s a sequence in issue 3 where a girl has to effectively blow her way onto a superteam. Things like that did the real damage long before any hamsters appeared.


Full piece here.

Comics