Soldier Boy’s Death in ‘The Boys’ Comics Is So Brutal It Makes Jensen Ackles’ Version Look Like a Boy Scout

With Soldier Boy storming back into the spotlight in ‘The Boys’ Season 5, comic readers have been smirking knowingly at every newcomer asking the same question. Just how does the so-called Strongest Man Alive actually meet his end on the page.

The short answer is that Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson never let America’s mascot supe walk away clean. The longer answer involves three different men wearing the same costume, a pair of very busy hands belonging to Billy Butcher, and a fate so grim it makes the Prime Video version look almost wholesome.

The Legacy Title And The Three Soldier Boys In The Comics

The first thing to understand is that Soldier Boy is the name of three superhero characters in the comic book series Herogasm and The Boys, created by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. The original iteration, often referred to as Soldier Boy I, is killed by Greg Mallory after causing so many deaths during World War II. His incompetence is the reason an entire team of supes gets butchered before they ever prove themselves.

Soldier Boy was put in charge of The Avenging Squad, and during the Battle of the Bulge, he made the unauthorized decision to send the flyers of the Avenging Squad to scout for Germans, which led the Waffen-SS to a US Army camp, causing a massacre of both the Avenging Squad and the American soldiers they were supposed to assist. Soldier Boy was still left crippled by the gunfire of the Germans and was later killed by Mallory’s grenade.

The second Soldier Boy is more of a footnote in the wider lore. By 1950, Mallory learned that new versions of Soldier Boy and his brethren had been created by Vought to replace them, fighting elsewhere as Crimefighters Incorporated and making propaganda films for the United States government, and this second Soldier Boy would eventually later die in unknown circumstances. By the time the main story kicks off, the public has no idea they are watching their third stand-in.

How Billy Butcher Brutally Kills The Payback Leader

The Soldier Boy fans actually spend time with is the third one, the cowardly Payback frontman desperate to be promoted to the Seven. His downfall begins during a Payback ambush gone catastrophically wrong. As Screen Rant breaks it down, in The Boys #33, Soldier Boy leads the Payback team into battle against The Boys as he hopes to prove the squad is worthy of being the ultimate superteam, but Butcher mercilessly kills the Supes before torturing Soldier Boy.

What follows is one of the most disturbing torture sequences in the entire run. His nose is bitten off by Butcher in issue #32, he is captured alive but badly beaten by Butcher in issue #33, and is tortured for information in #34. Butcher tells The Boys he has something he needs to take care of, and then it is revealed he has Soldier Boy tied up to a chair, with his nose bitten off, as he gets out a butcher’s knife and tortures him for information about Homelander.

There are several Soldier Boys throughout time in the comic, but the one in story is killed by Billy Butcher in issue #34. The actual killing happens off panel in true Ennis fashion, leaving the reader to fill in the worst possible blanks. At the beginning of issue #39, the cover of a newspaper shows there is a funeral being held for Soldier Boy, sealing the legacy in print just like Vought always wanted.

Why The Comic Book Fate Is So Different From The Show

Anyone going in expecting Jensen Ackles’ grizzled war hero is in for a tonal shock. Unlike the horrendously confident version of the character depicted in The Boys show, Soldier Boy’s comic book counterpart is a far more cowardly figure who is elected as leader of Payback but has ambitions to join the Seven. Soldier Boy is so incredibly naïve and desperate to join The Seven that Homelander successfully tricks him into sex once every year by claiming it is the test to join The Seven, which Soldier Boy invariably fails.

The familial reveal that drives the show also does not exist on the page. He is not even the biological father of Homelander in the comics, which means the entire emotional spine of his Season 3 arc is a Prime Video invention.

He is a particularly mean-spirited parody of Marvel’s Captain America, of which Boys writer and co-creator Garth Ennis has a particularly intense contempt toward the character, and Ennis hammers that contempt home through every humiliating beat.

The show, by contrast, has been planting seeds for an entirely different kind of exit. On January 24, 1986, Russian scientists performed an experiment on Soldier Boy that included inserting radioactive material into his body, giving the live-action Ben a power set the comic version never had. Fans have pointed out that in the show, Soldier Boy can emit high-intensity radioactive blasts that permanently remove Compound V from a supe’s system, turning them into regular humans, which sets up endgame possibilities Garth Ennis never bothered to write.

What This Means For Soldier Boy’s Final Fate In Season 5

Season 5 is already playing fast and loose with comic precedent. There is a big shocking death in The Boys Season 5 Episode 2, Teenage Kix, but it seems to be immediately reversed by the end of the episode, with Soldier Boy sitting up in his body bag. In Gen V Season 2, a lot of the plot revolves around the healing and return of Thomas Godolkin, and as Godolkin explains, while regular Compound V gives you strength, superpowers, durability, and other abilities, V1 makes you functionally immortal, which may be the in universe excuse for why Ben keeps getting back up.

Showrunner Eric Kripke has earned a reputation for cherry picking the comic’s nastiest beats only when they serve his own vision of the story. The series may take a cue from the way the third Soldier Boy was murdered and integrate that into The Boys Season 5, however, it is more likely that the fate of Soldier Boy would be something completely different in the series.

Fan theories are already running wild as the final season unfolds. One fan wrote, “I’m hoping Soldier Boy and Ryan get a good ending through this and Soldier boy just becomes Grandpa Ben or something. Or, Soldier Boy dies saving Ryan from Homelander and Ryan joins the boys against Homelander”. Whether Kripke serves up a Butcher style execution, a sacrificial play for Ryan, or something nobody saw coming, the comic blueprint guarantees Ben does not get to ride into the sunset.

If ‘The Boys’ really does send Ben out the way Garth Ennis did, would you rather see Butcher finish the job with a butcher’s knife in a basement somewhere, or watch Homelander be the one to put down dear old dad on live television.