In its way, Herogasm is pretty clever. See, it starts off with the concept that big superhero crossover events are all faked, and while the various teams are off “fighting off the alien menace” (or whatever it is this year), they’ve really taken a week or two off at an orgy resort, to recharge their batteries. And since the biggest conceit of the Boys series is how superheroes are basically all horrible people who make the world a consistently worse place, I can appreciate what Ennis is doing here.

Of course, then he and his artist take this premise as a challenge to draw and write the filthiest scenes they can come up with, and they keep throwing it at you nonstop, and at some point even my prurience threshold was overcome. I like to hope this was the point, but I imagine I’m fooling myself there.

But then (and here’s the clever bit), suddenly there’s all kinds of deep politics, both in the present-day and flashback portions of the story, bubbling up around the non-stop porn, and before you know it really big events have occurred and you were still trying to figure out if you were tired of the nipple parade and you almost missed it. I’m definitely not saying that Ennis was trying to slide some mocking social commentary over on his readers here; like I said, I’m not even sure he was trying to make the point that I should have been getting tired of it in the first place. But I am saying that it was an artful job of playing to his strengths.