Warning! Spoilers ahead for The Boys!By the time The Boys ended, Billy Butcher managed to kill three entire generations of his most bitter enemy, Homelander. Butcher hates most Supes, but none more than the leader of the Seven. But the Boys’ leader more than gets his pound of flesh by chopping down Homelander’s entire family tree.
The first person in Homelander’s family line to die is the superpowered fetus that kills Butcher’s wife Becky (as seen in The Boys #4). Becky’s death is what inspires Butcher’s hate for Homelander, as he believed she was sexually assaulted by Homelander. The next person in Homelander’s family to die at Butcher’s hand was Stormfront (The Boys #34), the Supe whose DNA was used to create the Seven, including Homelander.
Butcher’s last act of revenge on Homelander’s family was dealing the killing blow to Black Noir, Homelander’s clone and the person who really assaulted Becky (The Boys #65). Ironically Homelander, the Supe Butcher truly despised, isn’t killed by him.
Butcher Killed Homelander’s Father, Brother and Nephew
The Boys is a subversive superhero story created by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson that is set in a world populated by powerful humans known as Supes. These Supes are actually the product of a powerful concoction known as Compound V, and mostly the products of the mega-conglomerate Vought-American. The Supes of this world are far from the stalwart figures presented in superhero comics and are either destructive nuisances or all-powerful psychopaths. The only people opposing them are Billy Butcher and his group of CIA-backed operatives, the Boys. No one sees Supes as a threat more than Butcher who does everything he can to take them all down.
Butcher spends most of The Boys hating Homelander for what he believes the Supe did to his wife. But while he was wrong about Becky’s actual perpetrator, he more than avenged her by killing Black Noir, his ancestor, and his progeny. From curb-stomping to bludgeoning, to prying open Noir’s head with a crowbar, each Supe that was related to Becky’s death died violently, Butcher no doubt spurred on by his pain and grief. Butcher wanted Homelander to suffer considerably for what Butcher assumed Homelander did to Becky. And though Butcher got the revenge he wanted by destroying an entire lineage of Supes, it didn’t give him the peace he needed.
Butcher’s Revenge For Becky Was Ultimately Meaningless
Butcher wanted to avenge his wife after Noir’s super-powered spawn killed her. And he did, by killing three generations of Noir’s family. But by the time Butcher realized he had more than avenged his wife, it meant nothing to him. He was too lost to find peace or live a normal life and had nothing left in his life other than a complete genocide of Supes. Butcher’s story of revenge is ultimately a cautionary one. He devotes his entire life to getting revenge, and by the time he gets it threefold, he has nothing left in his life. Out of all the violent tragedies in The Boys, Butcher’s revenge crusade on the three ‘Homelander’ generations is one of the bleakest.
