Seemingly on a mission to bring comics writer Garth Ennis to as wide a new audience as possible, Seth Rogen is already neck deep in his TV series of the controversial Preacher. Now it transpires that he's also trying to mount a TV version of Ennis' even stronger The Boys. Rogen and his regular partner-in-crime Evan Goldberg are currently shopping the project to cable networks. Supernatural's Eric Kripke is also involved.
Plot-wise The Boys is about a world where superheroes are a widely-mistrusted annoyance - "absolute scum" in Ennis' own words - leading to the creation of the only marginally preferable anti-cape vigilante group of the title. Membership includes murderous black-ops marine Billie Butcher; Gallic madman The Frenchman; super-strong psychopath mute The Female (Of The Species); and the incongruously decent - but psychologically scarred - Wee Hughie.
Preacher is somehow happening on the relatively mainstream AMC network, but cable would appear to be the only possible way to go for The Boys. An example of the volatile Ennis letting himself complete off the leash, it's a truly savage satire on the superhero genre, replete with sex, violence, sexual violence and violent sex. And jokes. The brutal humour arguably disguises a more subversive agenda than cheap shockery, but it can sometimes be tough to see below that surface. Adam McKay was, a few years ago, talking to Sony about a film version, but we'd imagine it never got anywhere for just those reasons.
In short, it's a "challenging" sell and a difficult property to adapt. We've yet to see what Rogen and Co. have made of Preacher, so we don't yet know whether filing down some of Ennis' sharper teeth is part of the modus operandi. The Boys, as we said, doesn't have a home yet, but Preacher, starring Dominic Cooper, Ruth Negga and Joe Gilgun, is due on AMC in the middle of next year.