Following on the heels of their upcoming AMC show Preacher, which adapts Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s violently supernatural graphic novel into wholesome basic cable fare, executive producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg are preparing to bring another one of Ennis’ over-the-top worlds to life. Deadline is reporting that the pair (along with Supernatural creator Eric Kripke) have just sold a series to Cinemax based on Ennis’ The Boys, the story of a clandestine group of CIA operatives who work to assassinate and exterminate so-called superheroes whenever they step out of line.
Darker, grosser, and more violent than Preacher—a comic series, we remind you, which prominently features a failed suicide victim named Arseface, whose father is forced to sodomize himself with his own severed member by the end of issue four—The Boys is Ennis and artist Darick Robertson’s take on 9/11 and the military-industrial complex, as viewed through a world where superpowers can be handed out at the drop of a hat. It’s bleak, juvenile, and occasionally pretty funny, as the title characters—including a protagonist who, for some reason, is intentionally drawn to look like Simon Pegg—mow their way through deranged and debauched copies of Batman, Superman, and a hundred different X-Men clones.
Rogen and Goldberg are set to direct the pilot, with Kripke handling writing duties. Meanwhile, we can only hope that this sudden interest in Ennis’ work reaches its natural conclusion and we’ll eventually get a Rogen-directed version of the author’s magnum opus, Hitman #13, “Zombie Night At The Gotham Aquarium,” in which a bunch of hard-talking tough guys have to fight their way through an entire aquarium’s worth of zombified squid, penguins, and seals.