THE BOYS.

• Author: Suderman, Peter

The Boys, an Amazon original series based on the comic book written by Garth Ennis, asks a simple question: What if the superheroes everyone loved and looked up to were actually awful people?

Ennis' original work was an inside-baseball satire of the comic industry, with characters meant to stand in for both fictional heroes and figures from the real-life world of comics. The series' target is the better-known world of culturally dominant superhero movies--and contemporary politics as well.

The series centers on a corporate-owned superhero team, The Seven, a sort of ripoff Justice League made up of familiar super-types--including the Superman-like Home lander, the Flash manque A-Train, the Wonder Woman-esque Queen Maeve, and the Aquaman-ish The Deep.

Publicly, The Seven are well-loved American icons who appear in commercials, sponsor running shoes, and play sanitized versions of themselves on corporate-branded reality TV. Occasionally they even save innocent people from harm. But behind the scenes, these heroes are petty narcissists...