The Boys stopped following the comic. Good.

The comic came out in 2006 and its whole argument was that superheroes would be awful if they were real. That was a fresh thing to say in 2006. It is not a fresh thing to say now, because we have spent twenty years watching what actually happens when a person is handed unlimited reach and no consequences, and none of them wear capes.

Garth Ennis was writing against a genre. The Boys is a sustained middle finger to the idea that a man in tights would be noble. It is very funny and very mean and it works, but the target is other comics. Take away the shelf of Superman issues sitting next to it and a lot of the joke stops landing.

The show cannot do that. Nobody walks into Amazon's most expensive series needing a rebuttal to a Justice League issue from 1996.

So it changed targets. Homelander on the show is not a parody of Superman. He is a study of a man who has been told he is loved by three hundred million people and has correctly worked out that not one of them knows him. The show is about the machinery around that: the PR team, the shareholders, the polling, the merch table, the rally.

That is a different question, and it is the one that turned out to matter.

Stormfront is the clearest case. On the page, a Nazi supe is a shock beat. On the show, she is a communications strategy. She does not goose-step, she posts. She works out that a movement is cheaper to build online than in a stadium, and Vought's marketing department cannot tell the difference between that and good engagement numbers.

That is not an adaptation of a plot point. It is a completely different thesis, and the comic never had it.

I am not going to pretend nothing was lost. The show has a bloat problem the comic did not, because a comic can spend four pages on a bit and a season has to spend an hour. There are stretches where it clearly wants the shock of the source without having earned the same room to be nasty.

But the trade is worth it. Fidelity would have given us a very expensive 2006 argument. What we got instead keeps being about the month it airs in, which almost nothing adapted from a twenty year old comic manages.

Which is the same test as always. Not "did you follow it." Did you work out what it was for, and then check whether that thing is still true.