I am talking about the TV series. I couldn't tell you about the graphic novel. I am just not into reading comic books that are basically for people that hate comic books. But on the great 3 by 5 media, I can take the subgenre of dysfunctional super-powered heroes and misunderstood villains. That is only an episode at a time, if they are as great as this show. Maybe it's my Catholic upbringing turned into an Atheist that needs to feel guilty about sex and liking fantasy, just a degree less than the protestant world just wanting to hate everyone else... I digress.
Now I don't go around composing anti-superhero themes when doing superhero themes. I instead sit around and come up with the why and how of superhero worlds that aren't based on bad interpretations of Greek mythology and mediocre art (looking at you 90s comic fanboys). So I am not saying the show ripped me off about that. Now when Giancorlo Esposito, loved his work since The Usual Subjects, as Stan Edgar talks about the founder of Vought Industries, I ran downstairs to my blue filing cabinet and found my three-key lock had been broken into. Rifled through was my files from the Scrap Pile superhero RPG world.
In my fictitious world, around 1890, an Austrian mad scientist came up with the formula of MUT-8. This Professor Johann Von Rohung was the inventor. His formula would at first be closely guarded as he'd try and enable all the wrong side of history with super-powered edges over the forces of goodness, freedom, and the North American way. By the middle of WWII, Doctor Wrong, as he liked to be called, realized that the totalitarians were just not as capable as the democrats. So he started selling his product with a select few, mostly autocrats. Those dictators would of course be indebted to gangsters so they'd share the secret sauce as well.
Now the developed nations of my world noticed what was going on as early as the 20s. Their law enforcement agencies, as well as their military complexes, needed to get a handle on these super-creeps and monstrosities wrecking havoc on their hometowns, so they started their own "super serum" usually derived from obtained samples of MUT-8. Unfortunately though like most of Wrong's victims, most people undergoing the infection could not overcome their basest and petty instincts once they had "super powers" making them at best uncontrollable but more often diabolical. Still once in a while a hero or two would emerge.
Ironically it was when, in my game universe, MUT-8 made its way into the more indigenous population of areas, there would be an increase of people being able to resist becoming selfish-degenerates. Many becoming what would could be called superheroes to fight the super-villains around them. These capable individuals would have a normal person's distrust of other people's authority and be resistant to organizations trying to control them. This would be the rise of the vigilante super-powers from the 40s onward. Most recently, the Scrap Pile groups from the Lake Mohawk cities (namely Beta City up to Tripod City), have arisen as super groups that utilize both deputized supers and the vigilante elements to combat super-criminals.
So you might not see the connections immediately but trust me they are there. Still the show is awesome. The Boys talks about the compound being spread throughout the world. I just take my frame a little further back and the situational "Superhero" starts to fall into place, given a generational shift every time.
It works.
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