The Boys: Vought Rising Creator Promises to Take an L.A. Confidential Approach to WWII

Superheroes would not exist without World War II. Sure, Superman debuted three years before the bombing of Pearl Harbor prompted the U.S. to join the battle, and was influenced more by economic and immigration concerns than any desire for international combat. But superhero comics became a favorite of G.I.s, so much that the industry suffered a near-fatal collapse when soldiers returned home, and left Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman behind.

That fact alone is enough to justify the series Vought Rising, a prequel to The Boys that looks at the early adventures of Soldier Boy and other heroes from the era. However, The Boys creator Eric Kripke added an additional wrinkle in his conversation with EW when he compared the show to a beloved neo-noir. “I would define [Vought Rising] as L.A. Confidential with superheroes,” he said. “It’s a murder-mystery, and it’s got that noir-ish — not Black Noir, but actual noir — movin’ through the streets and femme fatales and detectives, but also heroin dens and gay bars and pill-popping and famous people.”

L. A. Confidential, of course, is the 1997 Best Picture nominee directed by Curtis Hanson, based on the novel by James Ellroy. Set in the early 1950s, L.A. Confidential follows a group of LAPD officers dealing with crimes related to Hollywood. Guy Pierce and Russell Crowe play Edmund Exley and Bud White, respectively, the former an upright son of a legendary detective and the latter a brute who fancies himself a protector of women. The two investigate crimes related to a business that surgically modifies sex workers to resemble Hollywood actresses (including one played by Kim Basinger, who won Best Supporting Actress for her part), which reveals corruption in the department. Some of that corruption involves Hollywood Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey), a well-known detective who serves as consultant on the hit procedural Badge of Honor.

As the summary above suggests, L.A. Confidential addresses pop culture’s role in mythologizing police work, a phenomenon we today call “Copaganda.” Badge of Honor is a loose stand-in for Dragnet, the radio show turned hit television series that popularized the police procedural and changed the public’s perception of police as corrupt and fallible (see Keystone Cop comedies, Charlie Chaplin silent shorts, or characters such as Sergeant Heath from S. S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance series for a better reflection of the police’s reputation at the time).

Nowhere is that more clear than in the scene that opens the movie, in which a group of cops, drunk during their holiday party, realize that a group of Latino men are being held in lock-up. Angered by the fact that a Latino man injured a fellow officer, the cops make their way downstairs and bully their way past the objecting Exeter to brutalize the captives.

That scene directly adapts an instance from history, the 1951 Bloody Christmas affair that left seven people with severe injuries. Bloody Christmas happened under the watch of Chief of Police William H. Parker, who, like his predecessor August Vollmer, crusaded against those who would criticize police in the media. To improve the public’s opinion of law enforcement, Parker worked with radio producer and actor Jack Webb to create Dragnet, providing case files for Webb’s stories and, of course, “consulting” on the production.

The connection between Badge of Honor and Dragnet, and the seamy tale of corruption in both the police department and Hollywood allows L.A. Confidential to show how our heroes fall short of their squeaky-clean image. Which is exactly what makes it a good model for The Boys.

The Boys began life as a mean-spirited satire of superheroes by writer Garth Ennis and illustrator Darick Robertson. Kripke’s adaptation managed to find something humane and smart in the material, but that satirical edge remained. In fact, Kripke managed to make the take-down of superheroes into a jaundiced look at American politics, particularly the Right’s obsession with power in its most absurd and grotesque forms.

That obsession did not spring from nowhere. We can trace its roots all through American history, including the World War II era that saw the dawn of superheroes. While it is true that Superman started out a social crusader who took on exploitative landlords and saved people from death row, and it is true that Wonder Woman was created by William Moulton Marston to advocate for men to lovingly submit to women’s rule, all superheroes remain power fantasies, and most stories from the era were about powerful people exerting their will against anyone who would disrupt the status quo.

In short, Kripke will find plenty to work with by looking back at the early days of Soldier Boy and Stormfront (played by a returning Jensen Ackles and Aya Cash). We already know that the series will follow a murder mystery structure and, as Kripke’s comments above reveal, it will play with the tropes of hard-boiled fiction and film noir.

In doing so, Vought Rising can do for Golden Age comics what L.A. Confidential did for early Copaganda, uncovering the unsavory assumptions that go into our moral mythologies, assumptions that continue to this day.

Vought Rising comes to Prime Video in 2027.