THE BOYS volume 8: HIGHLAND LADDIE graphic novel
Collects #1-6 of the Highland Laddie mini series
Writer: Gath Ennis
Art: John McCrae and Keith Burns
Published by Dynamite Entertainment
Review by Stewart Loud
Women pooping out 17 foot tape worms and guys getting speared through the head by falling shafts of frozen piss. It's a Garth Ennis book all right! In the latest volume of his tremendous series The Boys, Hughie takes a trip to his home town of Auchterladle in Scotland for some time to himself after his break up with Annie since he discovered the details of her secret identity as a member of The Seven and how many cocks she had to juggle to gain membership.
Hughie returns home to the idyllic seaside town where he grew up and his foster parents for some time to himself to contemplate the violent and troubling events of his recent life since he joined the Boys in the US. He quickly catches up with his childhood friends, one so smelly he now wears a gas mask and the other a 6 foot plus bruiser in a dress and they reminisce about past adventures spent solving spooky mysteries and grassing up local criminals to the police like the famous five or something.
As you might expect, his attempt at finding some peace and quiet doesn't quite pan out the way he planned. Local drug dealers are buying coke laced with compound-V from the Russians and Annie tracks him down to attempt to salvage their relationship.
This book is still much slower paced than the previous volumes though. Not so much people running around with their bollocks out getting their faces punched off and more, long conversations analysing Hugie's past. This isn't necessarily a bad thing though.
Like a Quentin Tarantino film, most of the dialogue is expertly put together and flows so well that it never becomes boring. There's also a lot of laugh out loud comical arguments, laden with Scottish slang and inventive use of swear words like something from an episode of Rab C Nesbit. I did think some of this side of the book started to grate a bit after a while though.
Even though this volume collects a mini series separate from the main Boys series, there are still some important plot developments involving Hughie's relationship with Annie and a seemingly ordinary English tourist who it would seem knows more about Hughie than he's letting on. I'd say that fans of the series will still definitely want to read this although it's not really as much fun to as any of the previous stories. Still very good though. Powerful ending too.
SCORE 7/10
Links to my other Boys reviews:
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