Thanks to Amazon's The Boys, the seedier side of superheroes is in the spotlight in a big way However, that show and the Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson comic that inspired it are hardly the first stories to interrogate superheroes with a darker tone. In 1986, Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins' Watchmen famously explored superheroes with real, everyday problems in a psychologically complex tale, as did many other works that followed it. Although they're not as famous as Watchmen or The Boys, another two series explored the darkest side of superheroism, Rick Veitch's Brat Pack and Maximortal, with a ferocity unlike anything that came before or after.

By the time these books were published in the early 1990s, Rick Veitch had a long career in comic books and has worked on mainstream, underground, and alternative comics, famously including a collaboration with Alan Moore on Swamp Thing for DC. But in Bratpack, he turned his attention to the dark underbelly kinds of sidekicks who populate the DC Universe. The five-issue series dealt with commercialism, the sexualization of superheroes, violence, and the genre's inherent fascist tendencies in a way that made the book a difficult and uneasy read that's decidedly for adults only.

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In echoes of DC's phone poll to kill Jason Todd's Robin, Brat Pack begins with the evil Dr. Blasphemy calling a radio show and telling the DJ that he is holding a poll. He wants listeners to call in and vote on whether he should murder some popular superheroes' sidekicks or not. If the listeners vote "yes," then he will kill all the sidekicks of various heroes. From here, the five-issue series explores the cruel relationship between hero and sidekick, and the terrible lengths heroes will go in order to maintain their public image as they sell out and merchandise themselves.

In 1992, Veitch followed this up with the seven-issue Maximortal which, again, dove into the darker side of superheroes. Maximortal uses the universally known origin of Superman in creates a cynical, violent series that explores both behind the myth and the unlucky people who come in contact with such a being. At the end of the day, Maximortal is the story of the rise to global dominance by a stranger from another world who becomes omnipresent on Earth. The series begins in 1908 when an alien impregnates herself and tosses the growing baby into space. The metallic womb crashes back to Earth decades later and is retrieved by an elderly couple who raise the child as their own. So far, it sounds vaguely familiar, doesn't it?

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The story quickly goes off the rails as the young child brutally torments the elderly couple and grows to become a violent sadist who cares little for human life or Earth itself. Veitch shows how the concept of "Superman" can become twisted and exploited as he takes readers through a hundred years of True-Man's life.

Veitch also painstakingly shows the ugly side of the comic book industry in Maximortal. He shows how the comic book business can chew up and spit out the very talented artists and writers responsible for creating its most popular characters. Veitch shows two young friends Jerry Spiegal and Joe Schumacher (thinly veiled versions of real-life Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster), who created the Superman-analogue True-Man, get screwed in excruciating detail. The publisher, in this case, a Walt Disney-like figure Sidney Wallace, gets rich as the creators live in poverty their entire lives.

While The Boys isn't exactly meant for those with delicate sensibilities, Brat Pack and Maximortal are even more unflinching looks at the more human side of superheroes. While Veitch has since returned to mainstream comics with runs on titles like Aquaman and The Question, the world of Brat Pack and Maximortal lives on in Boy Maximortal, which began exploring the youth of True-Man in 2017.

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