Comic Vine Review

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The Boys #60 - Over the Hill with the Swords of a Thousand Men, Part 1

4

One of the Boys has fallen; clearly, there's hell to pay. Ennis manages to keep things serious with a healthy dose of madcap.

The Good

This issue was great because it illustrated a transition between two very important storylines: the death of a member of The Boys and the rise of a new president. In true Ennis fashion, it teased is with a rich, deep plot and then ripped it away with a madcap, out-of-the-blue sequence. Seeing the "wolverine" series of events was just a treat, and the resulting puns ("best there is at what I do") just made me laugh.

The story's almost diverged into three separate streams at the moment, as is common with a lot of other Ennis properties: we have the Vought people, the Seven (Six?) and the Boys. Each of them seems primed to deal with their own crap their own way, and the events that set them off (Mother's Milk's wife and daughter doing mother-daughter porn?) seem intriguing, if not a little off-point.

There was a great sequence at the beginning that made me think I missed an issue: the gravity of last month's death seemed all but eased. However, Ennis wrote a page that just brought it all back, and I can appreciate the skill that it takes to do that.

The Bad

Not much, to be honest; there seems a bit of a tonal shift between the plot-heavy previous chapters and the comedy of this issue, and I'm not sure if that's a good thing. I thought we would be getting into the meat of the story, but it turns out we might have to endure some filler before we get back to it. I'm all in favour of good pacing, but this just seems a bit off.

The Verdict

As always, The Boys seems to have this magical way of disguising amazingly good plot within some truly stupid sequencing; it's gotten to that point where I've accepted that everyone in the story's world is a complete and total douche, and unlikely to change.

Seeing the president's speech and concerns aired made me appreciate his sanity for the first time in the entire plot, and, well, he got his face mauled by a wolverine. I guess that shows what you get for showing sense in a Garth Ennis story.

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