Prime Video’s The Boys is quickly coming to an end, and viewers looking ahead to the final couple of episodes are now reading the comic books for clues. One of the clearest warning signs comes from the page history of Billy Butcher, whose path in the source material turns far darker than anything the series has shown so far. In the comics, Butcher does not simply go after supes. He goes after everyone with Compound V in their system.
That is the kind of ending that leaves little room for mercy. In the final volume of the main series, The Bloody Doors Off, Butcher kills M.M. with a grenade and then suffocates him, then uses a bomb to kill Frenchie and the Female, leaving Hughie as the only one alive. Earlier, in volume 11, Over the Hill With the Swords of a Thousand Men, Butcher gets revenge for Becky and learns that Black Noir is a clone of Homelander. The comic also makes clear that Homelander was not the man who assaulted Butcher’s wife or the one in the photos doing horrific things, a twist that changes the meaning of Butcher’s rage even as it sharpens it.
Those details matter because the television series has been using the comics as a reference point while also moving away from them when it wants to. Showrunner Eric Kripke has already said he would not use the brutal Black Noir storyline, which means the show is not locked into the exact same endgame. But the comic still offers a map of the kind of chaos that could greet the final episodes, especially if Butcher’s anger keeps building and the story keeps circling the same question: what happens when the man hunting supes decides no one with Compound V is safe?
That is why Colin McCormick’s recent look at the characters most likely to die has drawn attention. It fits the mood of the series as it heads for its endgame, and it matches the logic of a story that has always treated revenge as a poison that spreads. Butcher’s comic-book collapse is not just a body count. It is a warning about what happens when grief becomes policy and the target list stops at nobody.
If the series borrows even part of that arc, the final couple of episodes will not be about whether Butcher gets what he wants. They will be about who is left after he tries to get it. And the comics make the answer brutally simple: almost nobody.
