the Boys #38 - Dynamite Entertainment

As with the previous few issues, this issue was entirely devoted to giving us the origin story of one of it's characters. This time . . the Female is up. Since we're up to issue #38 and we've never seen her speak, this story is told to Hughie by the Frenchman. So, we don't know if he may have elaborated a bit, but . . he does seem to be the one closest to her. So if anyone knows her story I guess it would be him. Since the Female is Japanese everyone seems to assume that her powers come from some kind of fall-out from Hiroshima. Yes she was born there, and lived there, but . . neither her or her family suffer any ill effects from that tragic incident. No, her origin is much more mundane. It seems that her mother was a secretary for a Tokyo corporation the equivalent to Vought-American. There was nothing spectacular about her. She was just cheap and rather than pay for day-care kept her daughter hidden under her desk while she was working. So of course she wanders out and gets into trouble. Some scientist was doing some type of experiment with a compound similar to Compound-V. His residue from that project . . toxic-waste, if you will . . he kept in a bucket in the lab. Anyways, the Female crawls in there and eats everything out of the bucket. Somehow this raised her aggression level and now, basically, she's a killing machine. So she was basically a lab-rat of this corporation. They tried to keep her contained, but she would break out and they'd have to go and recapture her. I'm sure they went through a lot of men doing that. Finally, on one of her extracurricular excursions, Butcher and the Boys show up because Butcher decides that they need a killing machine in their group. The Frenchman takes to her immediately. I think he sees her as a daughter . . kind of. Anyways, this pretty much wraps up the origins of the group members . . except for Butcher. But, I don't think Hughie's going to get to much information about him. Butcher seems to like to keep things pretty close to the vest. I thought this was a decent issue by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. Everything has been pretty much non-stop since the beginning of this series. So it was nice for things to slow down a bit the last couple of issues. But now the question is . . what Hughie has learned . . is it the truth? And more importantly . . what doesn't he know? By the way, that was a great cover. It reminded me of the movie poster for Aliens. I'm still enjoying this series, and it's still one of my favorites every month.