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.

If it looks like I’m reading slowly, it’s because I’ve been hyper-focused on old Marvel stuff, both the ongoing acquisition and consumption thereof. But I finally read the fourth volume in Garth Ennis’ The Boys series, so that’s nice at least. It occurs to me that this is an incredibly aptly named team, insofar as its one female member (cleverly named “The Female”) never speaks and has yet to actually do anything that was her own event on the side, unlike all the other team members. I pretend to myself, each new book, that we’ll suddenly learn something about her. Maybe a name of some kind. (I will say that she’s not also sexualized, so that’s… something?)

But anyway, though, the ongoing war between Butcher and his team versus the supes continues on, this time extending to Ennis’ X-Men parody, with its vast number of teams and splinter groups. Which made a fine, albeit occasionally horrific, story. But I’m really ready for the meat of this series. Our main character, Hughie, who I probably mentioned is based on actor Simon Pegg? He and his girlfriend have been carefully concealing themselves from each other this whole time, and it’s a ticking time bomb, and I really want to see what happens when the truth gets revealed. Downside: probably that will start the roller-coaster ride toward a series climax, and Ennis probably isn’t done poking fun at superhero comic tropes and standards just yet.

So, okay, but at least give me some character development on the Female and the Frenchman. ‘Cause seriously, especially that Female thing I mentioned back at the start? It looks bad. (It probably is bad instead of just appearing that way, and probably having the whole plot laid out in front of me would not change that, but since it isn’t yet, it feels premature to judge. He tricked me on the homophobia. Sort of.)