To whet the appetites of The Boys fans eagerly waiting for the third season the satirical superhero show in June, Amazon has gathered together artists and writers of all stripes for The Boys Presents: Diabolical, an anthological cartoon spinoff available now for your streaming pleasure.
So, is it pleasurable? Do superheroes enjoy heroin enemas? Let’s get into it.
Not in that way though. Don’t be gross.
From the episodes I’ve seen so far, I’ve found this collection of shorts incredibly enjoyable. Each episode of Diabolical is overseen by a different creative, and when you take a bunch of talented people, give them an established universe as a playground and let them go wild for 12 minutes, the end product is guaranteed to be fun at the very least.
You get a lot of variety in each episode. Some are comedies that parody different animation styles; some are more serious and have that cynical edge we’ve come to associate with the base series. Whatever the style, nearly all of them are bloody and gory. As an extension of The Boys, how could they not be?
Where The Boys Presents: Diabolical falls short
That said, one criticism I have is that there aren’t that many surprises. If you look at the credits just before each short (some of which feature big names like Seth Rogan, Rick and Morty creator Justin Rolland, or the creator of The Boys comic book Garth Ennis), you can anticipate what you’ll get. Rogan’s short is a loving parody of ’40s cartoons, playing on the classic trope where a guardian tries to protect a baby. Rolland’s is basically Rick and Morty with a gang of misfit loser heroes.
This isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy these cartoons, because I really did. But I don’t get the sense that they were truly given free rein here. I mean, can you really say that the creators of each episode had full creative freedom when the credits have a whopping 17 executive producers?
Nevertheless, Diabolical is a fun collection of shorts and an interesting expansion of the source material. It’s always a good exercise to let new people into an established world and see what they do. I think general audiences like that type of variety. You can see it in the popularity of similar, smaller projects, like when animators take a famous cartoon and reanimate six seconds of it in their own style, or the masterpiece that is the Shrek Retold project. The Boys Presents: Diabolical doesn’t quite hit that level of off-the-wall uniqueness, but it is still a lot of fun.
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