FORMAT: SINGLE ISSUE + DIGITAL (REVIEWED) | RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
Buoyed by the success of the television adaptation of his hit comic book series, Garth Ennis returns to the world of Wee Hughie and his off-brand capes for this half-sequel, half-prequel story. Dear Becky #1 picks up twelve years after the events of The Boys. An older, more cynical Wee Hughie is back in Scotland, soon to be married. The relative stability of his post-Boys life comes crashing down with a blast from the past courtesy of Billy Butcher, in the form of a letter from the big man himself, hidden inside his late wife’s diary. To get to that, however, readers must first sit through almost ten pages of the worst impulses of Garth Ennis.
The Boys was always among the least subtle of Garth Ennis’s work, a book in which his gross-out humour and cynicism was allowed to run rampant, overshadowing whatever smarts it did have. The TV show did a good job of dialling this back, focusing instead on brutal action and satire. Dear Becky is a reminder that, for better or worse, The Boys belongs to Garth Ennis. And so, before we get to its amusing but unsettling Shazam! takedown, readers are treated to nine pages of Garth Ennis’s views (via Wee Hughie) on everything from gender to Brexit and even the Coronavirus, including multiple uses of the word ‘woke’, transphobic slurs, and a character stereotype straight out of Little Britain. This is (mostly) well-intentioned but rambling nonsense, and only Ennis’s masterful writing of pub conversation and salty banter between chums makes this any different from one of your dad’s ranty Facebook posts.
As of Issue #1, Dear Becky is more of the same. Even the art, by Russ Braun, is near identical to that of original series artist and co-creator Darick Robertson. Fans of The Boys at its The Boys-iest will find plenty to enjoy here, while others will be turned off by its immaturity and bad-taste diatribes. Business as usual, then. The Boys are back in town and, with them, Garth Ennis, at peak edgelord Garth Ennis.
