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A review by crookedtreehouse
The Boys Volume 9: The Big Ride by Garth Ennis
3.0
A frustrating to rate collection. There are three storylines collected in this book: "Proper Preparation And Planning", "Barbary Coast", and "The Big Ride".
"Proper Preparation And Planning" is a three star setup for the final portion of the series. It moves the story forwards by giving us the perspective of a new character, and setting up some new status quos for the regular characters and then sharply undermines all of the changes. While hardly flawless, it's an exciting read, and really has you guessing what will happen yet.
And then Ennis kills all the excitement with another waste-of-time expository story about what a character was like before joining The Boys. The half issue worth of storyline is spread out in the four issue yawning "Barbary Coast" storyline. It's a crime how boring this is. Ennis writes excellent war comics but this flashback is incredibly obvious and also undermines a chunk of the very next volume of the story, which also focuses on Butcher's backstory. It's bad storytelling, and an absolute pacing-killer. One star, and it's because the art is good.
"The Big Ride" puts us back in the present storyline, and ups the stakes for the new character, and then everyone else. There are a ton of incredibly telegraphed story beats. So many that you end up missing a couple, and I, personally, missed the really important and obvious one. I do appreciate when a writer is so transparent with a major plot point that you miss it. I just wish this story had immediately followed "Proper Preparation And Planning" so I could have better appreciated this collection.
There's also a character having a mild breakdown that harkens back to "Get Some". It's slightly clumsy, but it helps refocus Hughie as a sympathetic character out of his element, as opposed to the colossal wanker he's been in the last couple of volumes, regarding his relationship with Starlight.
"Proper Preparation And Planning" is a three star setup for the final portion of the series. It moves the story forwards by giving us the perspective of a new character, and setting up some new status quos for the regular characters and then sharply undermines all of the changes. While hardly flawless, it's an exciting read, and really has you guessing what will happen yet.
And then Ennis kills all the excitement with another waste-of-time expository story about what a character was like before joining The Boys. The half issue worth of storyline is spread out in the four issue yawning "Barbary Coast" storyline. It's a crime how boring this is. Ennis writes excellent war comics but this flashback is incredibly obvious and also undermines a chunk of the very next volume of the story, which also focuses on Butcher's backstory. It's bad storytelling, and an absolute pacing-killer. One star, and it's because the art is good.
"The Big Ride" puts us back in the present storyline, and ups the stakes for the new character, and then everyone else. There are a ton of incredibly telegraphed story beats. So many that you end up missing a couple, and I, personally, missed the really important and obvious one. I do appreciate when a writer is so transparent with a major plot point that you miss it. I just wish this story had immediately followed "Proper Preparation And Planning" so I could have better appreciated this collection.
There's also a character having a mild breakdown that harkens back to "Get Some". It's slightly clumsy, but it helps refocus Hughie as a sympathetic character out of his element, as opposed to the colossal wanker he's been in the last couple of volumes, regarding his relationship with Starlight.