News culture Marvel has its own superhero team like “The Boys”. Created 5 years ago, no one knows it!
Published on 01/12/2025 at 5:20 p.m.
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As surprising as it may seem, the superheroes of the comics and the series The Boys are not the first to have damaged the image of the vigilantes of the Marvel stable. Years before Garth Ennis’s first comics, the Maison des Idées had already imagined and produced a group of superheroes who parodied the X-Men. And the worst part is that no one (or almost no one) remembers them!
Marvel decides to trust its anti-heroes for the end of phase 5 of the MCU
In recent years, Amazon Prime Video has dusted off the genre of superhero films and series by adapting the comics The Boys by Garth Ennis. More than a simple transposition of the comic strip, published by Dynamite Entertainment, the showrunner of the series, Eric Kripke (along with actor Seth Rogen and screenwriter Evan Goldberg) reshaped the story to result in four seasons and with the twists and turns that we all know. In short, it’s a masterstroke for Amazon, while the series, initially, could have been doomed by another project…
In reality, to get there and enjoy the series The Boyswe had to wait for a climax: the advent of the Marvel Cinematic Universe ! Before that, the adaptation of the universe of The Boys would have been more complicated… For its part, Marvel is beginning to realize what is happening and to take the opposite approach to its usual productions by giving carte blanche to anti-heroes. In a few months, MCU fans will be able to delight, after the film’s release Captain America : Brave New Worldof the arrival of the members of the Thunderbolts*. However, don’t think that it was the Amazon Prime series that influenced Marvel’s decision: the House of Ideas is more pioneering than one might think !
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Marvel was doing superhero satire long before The Boys!
Make no mistake, Marvel was much more avant-garde than it seems. Before other superheroes come to caricature and parody his vigilantes, Marvel had already considered in 2001 a team of mutants who use their powers for bad purposesespecially for fame and wealth, a bit like some superheroes do in The Boys. Given that they are a group of mutants, Marvel called them the X-Statix. Unfortunately for the Maison des Idées, the sauce did not take off… and the comics The Boyspublished from 2006, clearly took advantage of this to attract the spotlight!
Today, the X-Statix don’t compare to the characters from The Boys. Carried by the actors of the series and the quality of the show, The Boys is clearly above in terms of popularity. More extreme, more irreverent, more extravagant, The Boys clearly stood out where the X-Statix were above all a parody version of the X-Men. In itself, Marvel was self-criticizing where the competition had fun directly parodying them. If the X-Statix have fallen into oblivion, their adventures and characters still exerted a certain influence on The Boyslike Zeitgeist whose thirst for power and corruption is reminiscent of dear Homelander.
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