Twenty years ago, this would have been the best news a fanboy or fangirl could have ever dreamed of: In the year 2023, it seems like a week doesn’t pass without some sort of new superhero-related content, whether it be film or television.
On Friday, November 3rd, Prime Video dropped both the season finale of its The Boys spinoff Gen V, along with the Season 2 premiere of the animated series Invincible. A week later, the newest Marvel Studios film, funnily enough called The Marvels, arrives in theaters, along with the Season 2 finale of tie-in Disney+ series, Loki. And there’s another tentpole coming in time for Christmas, as the Snyder era of the DC Universe comes to a close with Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.
It’s all a lot, and also increasingly a status quo we’ve become accustomed to. The prevalence of superheroes in pop culture means we’ve seen an incredible amount of diverse stories by diverse people being told; that said, the saturation point was definitely reached a while ago, leading to an unexpected degree of fatigue.
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A natural reaction to the all-consuming popularity of superheroes is the kind of satire that Prime Video has been nurturing with The Boys, which takes a great deal of pleasure in tearing down the most sacred elements of the genre. The world of comic books went through a similar cycle beginning in the 1980s, when the colorfully costumed heroes of old became darker and grittier thanks to writers like Frank Miller and Alan Moore. Many of those stories are still serving as the inspiration for projects like The Boys, which echo that same anti-establishment spirit.
A fascinating undercurrent of The Boys is that it’s a world rich with wild and varied superpowers, but no one really worked to attain them — one of the show’s slow-to-reveal mysteries is that powers come courtesy of a drug called Compound-V, administered during childhood ideally. Power sits differently, when it’s handed to you.
This matters because, yes, superhero stories start from a very simple place: What if someone had superpowers? (Not necessarily literal powers, as Bruce Wayne or Clint Barton would point out, but enhanced abilities nonetheless.) However, those powers are only one part of the most powerful origin stories: Did a character receive their powers via some sort of horrible accident, one that took as much as it gave? Did a character hone their abilities after some sort of personal crisis? Or are their powers a consequence of a more shocking truth about their identity?
