So Long, Boys

Boys has been cancelled by WildStorm/DC. Immediately. As in "there will be no more issues, no trade paperback--we're done here."

I suspect there's a story behind this. Like many others, I suspect that the story involved creators Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson pushing the edges of acceptability until they pushed too far. I have no inside knowledge to this effect, mind you, and the truth could well be something very different--but considering the deliberately iconoclastic, irreverent, crude nature of the book, I find that wholly believable.

I neither applaud DC nor excoriate them for this action, since I'm not privy to the whys and wherefores. I know, though, that there are a lot of people who will be upset by this; it seems that Boys had a devoted following. I'll simply say that it never clicked for me. The book tried too hard to offend; it was the comic book equivalent of the little kid who kept saying bad words to see if he could shock everyone else.

I have no doubts the book will find a new home, since DC has released it to the creators to shop around elsewhere. That's a very professional action on DC's part, which is just what I'd expect from a first-class operation. And I'm sure that we'll carry the book, since we carry lots of other books that I don't enjoy (it's not a prerequisite that I like the book for us to carry it).

But I don't mind that it's not continuing from DC or one of its imprints. It always seemed odd to me that a company whose foremost product was a line of books that ennobles the superhero concept would also give a home to a book that continually denigrated the same idea, and in the most vulgar of terms.