Last month, the animated anthology series, The Boys Presents: Diabolical was released. You can read our review of the entire first season. It served as a nice appetizer to The Boys Universe until the main show comes back in the summer. At WonderCon this year, the show also hosted a panel providing an in-depth behind the scenes look. Before showrunner, Simon Racioppa, and supervising director, Giancarlo Volpe, took the stage, we had the opportunity to speak with them. Below are five takeaways from the conversation.
Making the Right Team
The Boys Presents: Diabolical drew inspiration from The Animatrix creating an anthology with different stories and animation styles. There was a method in pairing the celebrity writer’s script with the correct animation studio and director. Volpe described the process:
“That was interesting. The writers came with a sort of short description of how they saw their short. Some of them were extra specific, you know I think Awkwafina wanted hers to look like Pokémon. Others were a little bit like, I dunno. Whatever. Do what you feel is right”
“It was almost like a spreadsheet in a way. We have an anime one. We have a Justin Roiland aesthetic. We have this one that looks like the comics, trying not to repeat ourselves. Sometimes that’s hard to do. Then once we were all in agreement. This is the style we want. Then we hired directors who could accomplish that and animation studios that could accomplish that.”
“For example, ‘Laser Baby’ was directed by Crystal and Derek Thompson and they are sort of old school Looney Tunes animators. I think they’re about my age or just a little bit younger. Huge fans of Daffy. I think Derek worked on the original Space Jam and stuff like that. So, they were a perfect fit for that one which Seth and Evan had requested would feel like a classic Looney Tune short.”
We worked with Snipple, in, I believe they are in the Philippines, which had most recently worked on Green Eggs and Ham, which also has a kind of throwback like Loony Tunes sort of aesthetic to it. A sort of Chuck Jones aesthetic to it. It was a lot of that. Finding the right director. Finding the right studio and making sure it matched what the writers were requesting.”
Capturing the Comic
Amongst the various styles of The Boys Presents: Diabolical, you’ll notice that the third episode entitled “I’m Your Pusher” is the one that mirrors the source material the most. There was a real effort to make it look like the comic and Garth Ennis even wrote the script. Volpe explained what went into the episode.
“What was cool about that one was that Garth Ennis was willing and able to write that one. So that gives it such an authenticity. It’s almost like a lost issue. That was part of the reason why we opened on the shot of the comic coming out of the long box. I wanted it to feel like, oh, did I miss this one? Which one was this? That was really cool, because it was just getting him to, almost like, and I love the series. I adore it. Just a little more, bring it back to what the comic was in simple ways. Obviously, Simon Pegg being Wee Huey and stuff like that.”
“I think what was hard about it though was, we wanted it to look like the comics and one of the things Darick Robertson, who is the original artist on The Boys, does is a lot of etching on his drawings. There’s a lot of wrinkles and all that. It makes it look really illustrative but that’s normally super hard to pull off in animation. It was tricky to remove all that detail and still make it look like his drawings. I remember being really worried about that at one point but I haven’t seen anyone complain so I guess I got something right.”
The Might-Have-Beens
With only eight episodes for The Boys Presents: Diabolical, there were only so many studios and directors that could contribute to the series. Racioppa discussed some of their collaborators and who he would have liked to work with. There’s still no word on whether it will receive a second season, but if it does, maybe some of the people and studios mentioned could show up there. I don’t know about you, but I would be down for The Boys with a Samurai Jack look.
“We did the main show with Titmouse, who is a Los Angeles based animation studio. They do Vox Machina and Fairfax and a million other shows and they’re awesome. Then we did most of the episodes out with other animation studios overseas. We were very lucky to work with about five or six different studios.”
“I’ve always loved Madhouse’s work. They are out in Japan and they did Trigun, which is an anime. It’s more about very specific directors who I would have liked to work with. Robert Valley…Genndy Tartakovsky. It would be great to work with them.”
Finding a Link
Though The Boys Presents: Diabolical takes place in the same universe as the main series, there aren’t many direct links and some of the stories could very well be separate animated shorts. Volpe touched upon this but also described why he liked their approach.
“The original concept was do whatever you want. Reaching out to celebrity writers and saying what story would you tell. It’s interesting because probably the more canonical ones like episode eight, ‘One Plus One [Equals Two],’ is definitely harder to not please the hardcore fans because it’s giving you insight and backstory.”
“It made me understand why Warner Bros. keeps pumping out Batman/Superman animated straight to video movies because there is clearly an audience for this. If you zoom in on a janitor in the Hall of Justice whose wife has cancer, does anyone care? That’s harder to pull off. I welcome it because I think it’s fun to tell different stories and explore and have fun.”
The Wild Card
Speaking of the final episode of The Boys Presents: Diabolical, it could have had a different story entirely. That’s because Racioppa was in charge of writing the last episode. As showrunner, he was aware of what the other episodes would entail and liked the flexibility of evening out the season depending on the other topics covered. He shared how that Homelander-centric tale came to be.
“Part of what I was trying to do was actually do something none of the other episodes had done. I waited until the very end almost to write my episode because I wanted to know what the other seven were going to be before we got to mine so I didn’t duplicate anybody else and maybe I could find an area that no one else had done. No one else had done an origin story episode so I wanted to do that.”
“I started talking with Eric Kripke about it and he was like, yeah, it would be great to do a first mission, like Homelander’s first mission back in the day. I was like that’s a great idea. I would love to do that. I was talking with him to get the backstory correct to make sure I wasn’t doing anything that wasn’t canonical with his universe and then yeah, I wrote the episode, got his feedback and we produced it.”
Watch the entire season of The Boys Presents: Diabolical on Prime Video.
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