Billy Butcher

• 1. Introduction

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  Billy Butcher hunts gods, and he does it with no superpowers of his own. He is a fictional character, one of the two main protagonists of the comic series The Boys, created by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. He leads a group of CIA-sponsored black ops agents who observe, record and sometimes eliminate superheroes. Those heroes are artificial creations of the mega-conglomerate Vought. His sworn archenemy is the Homelander, the strongest of them all. In the comics, Butcher begins as an anti-hero, but the story slowly turns him into something far darker. The Amazon Prime Video series gives the role to Karl Urban and bends the plot in new directions. What shaped a man who came to hate every superhuman being? Was the Homelander really the enemy he believed him to be? And how does the hero of a story become its final antagonist?

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• 2. Making of a Vendetta

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  Butcher grew up in London's East End, watching his father beat his mother day after day. That hatred came close to turning him into a murderer. Once, he was ready to kill his father, and his younger brother Lenny talked him out of it by pointing to what it would do to their mother. Butcher then served in the Royal Marines and fought in the Falklands War. There he was wounded, and there he also learned the vicarious pleasure of killing. Back in England he drank heavily and attacked friends and strangers for little reason. At one point he was court-martialed.

  The day he met Becky Saunders changed that. With her guidance, no further assaults or misdoings were recorded. Col. Mallory believed that her presence had a calming effect on him.

  Then a strange emotional distance opened between husband and wife. One day Butcher woke to find Becky dead on their bed. Her prematurely born, superpowered child was floating above her. The newborn attacked him with its heat vision, and Butcher beat it to death with a lampstand. In custody, he read Becky's diary, which Mallory provided. It suggested that Homelander, the world's premier superhero, had raped her. A U.K. government official threatened Butcher with jail unless he went along with a cover story. Butcher blinded him. Mallory then recruited Butcher into the enterprise that would evolve into the Boys. His grief woke his old demons, and he began a campaign to wipe every last supe from the Earth. The diary's version of events would later prove wrong.

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• 3. Leading the Boys

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  Some months after the events of 9/11, when the Boys first disbanded, Butcher said he had worked for Mallory for 15 years. That points to a start around 1986. For several years the two operated as a pair. An operation against Web-Weaver, hinted at as the Boys' version of Spider-Man, brought the team more support. Mallory later told Wee Hughie that Butcher recruited Mother's Milk, then the Frenchman and the Female, most likely for their willingness to commit violence. Slowly Butcher took control of the group. He raised the level of violence used against supes, often steering events until lethal force was the only option.

  In the comics' present day, Butcher is a teetotaler who drinks club soda. He checks in now and then with his sponsor and former drinking buddy, Proinsias. He will also take a severe beating for a friend. After one such beating, while helping Mother's Milk rescue his daughter, he said: "It only hurts when I laugh... Hahahahaha". Mother's Milk noted that Butcher never raised it again, leaving the debt hanging over him as motivation.

  His feelings toward Hughie are harder to read. He seems genuinely fond of him, yet he deliberately pushes him into situations that demand violence. Hughie eventually worked out that this was meant to toughen him up. The mind games also reflected Butcher's awareness of Hughie's intuition and skill as an amateur detective. Butcher calls the Frenchman and the Female insane, but he will take a job alone rather than risk the team. He takes on Payback by himself so the others can escape. At the White House, he orders the Marines to shoot Hughie through the leg if Hughie tries to follow him.

  Butcher's loyal companion is a bulldog named Terror, whom he trained to perform a crude act on command. In issue #20, Homelander moves to attack Terror for urinating on his leg. Butcher threatens to break their truce. Homelander checks Butcher's pulse and heartbeat and concludes that the war on superheroes is all Butcher has to live for. He adds that Butcher does not expect to survive it. Mallory reaches a similar view. What she gave Butcher at his recruitment, she sees, was a never-ending war that let the violent part of him keep working. Homelander's reading was about to be tested in Washington.

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• 4. The Final Plan

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  In Over the Hill with the Swords of a Thousand Men, the final clash in Washington overturned what Butcher believed. He learned that Black Noir, not Homelander, had killed his wife. While Homelander and Noir fought in the Oval Office, Butcher escaped the wreckage. Later he took his revenge by finishing off the badly wounded Noir with his crowbar.

  Issue #68 revealed a secret. Butcher had been making more of the modified Compound V from issues #11-14, which can be triggered to kill superhumans. The battle for Washington was won because he knew how to guide missiles toward the neurons in superhuman brains. Mother's Milk suspected that Butcher had faked Vogelbaum's death and was using him to make more of the compound.

  The suspicion was justified. In The Bloody Doors Off, Butcher reveals his plan to use the compound against all potential superhumans, an act of genocide numbering billions of people. To cover it up, he murders his ally Vas, known as Love Sausage. Then he kills the Legend so that no information reaches Hughie. He announces a three-month leave for the team and says he will make Hughie his second-in-command, which would damage communication inside the group. He also kills Mother's Milk's ex-wife in front of her daughter, to stop Milk from travelling to Los Angeles. When Milk refuses to join the plan, Butcher apologizes to him and kills him. A timed bomb in their former headquarters then kills Frenchie and the Female.

  Hughie and 'Monkey' Kessler uncover the plan. They confront Butcher atop the Empire State Building. After a brief fight, both men fall to a lower platform, where Butcher breaks his neck and is paralyzed from the neck down. He admits to killing Mother's Milk, Frenchie and the Female, and the two talk calmly until a police helicopter arrives. Unwilling to live as a quadriplegic, Butcher lies to Hughie, claiming he murdered Hughie's parents. Hughie drives a metal spike into his chest, and Butcher dies. His story kept going in print, though.

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• 5. Echoes and Origins

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  A handful of later stories keep circling Butcher. Highland Laddie, set between The Innocents and The Big Ride, uses him in cameos and silent flashbacks. They show why Hughie took a break from the Boys and what Hughie thinks of him.

  In Butcher, Baker, Candlestickmaker, Butcher attends his father's funeral and talks to the corpse. He recounts the Royal Marines, the Falklands War, meeting and marrying Becky, and joining the CIA and the Boys after her death. He admits how much he always hated his father, whom he had not seen in twenty years. Then he urinates on the body.

  Dear Becky is set twelve years after Butcher's death. An unknown sender mails Butcher's diary to Hughie, forcing him to face his past and the killing. The diary spells out Butcher's moral justifications. It records his torture and murder of renegade supes, children among them, and how his plan for a supe genocide took shape. Rayner turns out to be the sender, hoping to scare Hughie so she can restart her political campaign. Hughie answers that Butcher held proof of her war crimes and kept it to himself. Butcher chose instead to ruin her career after his death with a sex scandal.

  The character's roots lie in another vigilante. Butcher seems to have been designed as a parody of The Punisher, whom Garth Ennis wrote for nine years before creating The Boys. Both are family men who become violent, unhinged avengers, consumed by revenge. The character was originally owned by DC Comics for the first volume, until the rights reverted to Dynamite Entertainment. After the Homelander and the Seven fall, the comic makes Butcher its final antagonist. In his last moments he praises Hughie and dies smiling. Hughie later tells Annie that Butcher is probably fighting in Hell. Television would start him from a very different place.

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• 6. Karl Urban's Butcher

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  In the 2019 first season, Karl Urban's Butcher wears a beard, unlike his comic counterpart. He was clean-shaven until his wife disappeared and was presumed dead. He first appears in the episode "The Name of the Game", where he approaches Hughie Campbell while posing as an FBI agent. Hughie's girlfriend has been accidentally killed by the Supe A-Train. Butcher offers him vengeance on Vought International. Hughie is reluctant but finally accepts.

  Butcher takes him to Vought headquarters, saying he wants an apology from A-Train. His real aim is to plant a listening device in the conference room of The Seven. The Supe Translucent catches Hughie and follows him back, but Butcher saves him and kidnaps Translucent. He turns to his old friend Frenchie, and the two work out how to kill Translucent. Hughie pulls the trigger. Butcher then wins back Mother's Milk, who refuses at first. In "The Female of the Species", the group finds the Female in a basement, long subjected to Compound V injections. Butcher thinks she may be dangerous, but she joins anyway.

  His hatred of Supes feeds on his personal hatred of Homelander, leader of The Seven, whom he blames for the rape and alleged death of his wife, here called Becca. Soon after she vanished, Grace Mallory showed him CCTV footage of Becca with Homelander at Seven Tower. That began a vendetta lasting eight years. In truth, Vought had placed Becca in witness protection after she gave birth to Homelander's child, who had enhanced abilities including heat vision. In "You Found Me", Homelander takes Butcher to see her for the first time since she disappeared.

  In the 2020 second season, Mallory tells Butcher about a recurring dream. She is onstage at Carnegie Hall, and everyone killed by a Supe is in the audience, staring at her. She hands over Becca's location and apologizes. Her own pressure, she says, had pushed him to replace the search for Becca with a vendetta against Homelander. When Butcher finds Becca, she tells him she knows his true nature. In her view, he was broken before she ever met him. He suggests handing her son, Ryan, over to Vought so the two of them can hide. She refuses and drives away.

  Later Butcher makes a secret deal with Stan Edgar, Vought's chief, to hand over Ryan in exchange for a life with Becca. Stormfront attacks them, and Ryan's laser vision wounds her, but Becca is mortally hurt. Dying, she makes Butcher promise to keep Ryan safe and tell him it was not his fault. When Homelander arrives, Butcher refuses to surrender the boy. He passes Ryan to Mallory and the CIA, who will hide him somewhere safe. The promise made to a dying woman would shape everything that followed.

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• 7. Borrowed Time

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  By the 2022 third season, a year has passed since Becca's death. Butcher has been sober for that whole year and acts as a surrogate father to Ryan. He leads the Boys under the sponsorship of the Federal Bureau of Superhuman Affairs, now based at the Flatiron Building. Hughie works as a liaison with the bureau, and Mother's Milk has stepped back to spend time with his daughter, Janine. Butcher chafes at being allowed to arrest only low-tier Supes for minor offences.

  Queen Maeve, working as an informant, tells him about a weapon called B.C.L. Red. It allegedly killed the legendary Supe Soldier Boy in 1984 and could kill Homelander. She also gives him vials of V24, an experimental Compound V variant that grants powers for 24 hours. After taking V24, Butcher gains super strength, speed, durability, stamina and gold-colored heat vision. The cost is several tumors that slowly drain his health. Armed with it, he interrogates Gunpowder, Soldier Boy's former sidekick, and beats him to death. He then blackmails Mallory, who was Payback's case officer, into explaining what she knew. She says he is his father's son. Butcher storms out and snaps at Ryan, blaming him for Becca's death.

  B.C.L. Red turns out to be Soldier Boy himself, now able to emit radioactive blasts after Russian experiments. Butcher recruits him with food, whiskey and Benzedrine, and by calling Homelander "the new Soldier Boy". At the 70th anniversary of "Herogasm", Butcher keeps Mother's Milk from fighting Soldier Boy. Later, another former Payback member, Mindstorm, traps Butcher in a trance and forces him to relive his worst memories. He sees his father's abuse, which he took to protect Lenny. He sees himself hitting Lenny by accident after assaulting a headmaster. He hears Lenny beg him not to enlist, and he watches Lenny's suicide. Hughie rescues Mindstorm so that Butcher can be revived. Butcher briefly mistakes Hughie for Lenny.

  When the plan to kill Homelander falls apart, Butcher attacks Soldier Boy for striking Ryan. Afterward, he learns he is terminally ill from overusing Compound V, with a year to 18 months left. Season 3 ends with that diagnosis, and the 2024 fourth season picks up six months later.

  Now Butcher suffers headaches and a worm-shaped black mass that, Homelander says, has covered his brain. He sees violent hallucinations of Becca. He injects himself with Compound V hoping to cure the illness, but it speeds the decline. His friend Joe Kessler urges him toward darker choices, and Butcher kills Ezekiel in a blackout. Butcher then captures the scientist Sameer and uses him to strengthen a virus meant to kill Supes. He learns it would also kill Ryan, Annie and Kimiko. Kessler turns out to be a hallucination of his own dark side. The real Kessler was abandoned by Butcher during a mission and left to die. After Mallory is accidentally killed, Butcher gives in, accepts Kessler's powers, and kills Neuman with tendrils that burst from his tumors. He steals the virus and drives into the night, giving Kessler a quick smile.

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• 8. Beyond the Main Story

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  Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays Butcher's inner self in season 4, as Joe Kessler. Luca Villacis and Josh Zaharia play him as a youth in flashbacks in season 3. Jason Isaacs and Kay Eluvian voice him in animation. Karl Urban's performance has been widely praised. Critics have also singled out his relationships with Hughie, played by Jack Quaid, and with Mother's Milk, played by Laz Alonso.

  In the comics, Butcher has no powers unless injected with Compound V. The source puts each dose at 19 billion dollars, and it gives superhuman strength and durability. In the series, the Boys apart from Annie and Kimiko are not injected, so they have no powers. Instead, Butcher uses V24 in season 3. The crowbar remains his most common tool in the comics.

  He has also roamed across other stories. At the end of the first season of Gen V in 2023, a mid-credits scene shows Billy Butcher moving through the ruins of the "Woods" while investigating it. In the 2020 promotional episodes of Death Battle!, voiced by Kay Eluvian, he joins the Seven's battle royale. He wins at first with a laser baby, then is crushed by Homelander.

  The animated series The Boys Presents: Diabolical, which began in 2022, follows the comic continuity. In the episode "I'm Your Pusher", Isaacs voices Butcher as he blackmails a drug dealer named OD into tainting a hero's drugs. Afterward he tells Hughie he wants to make him OD's handler. Hughie's only answer is "define enjoy".

  Two short films fill gaps in the live-action timeline. Butcher, from 2020, is set between the first and second seasons. It follows him on the run after being framed for Stillwell's murder, and he beats his old friend Jock to death after Jock calls the police. Mr. Butcher, from 2022, has him visit an elementary school as a guest speaker. He teaches the children to fear Supes rather than admire them. In 2026, Gary Furlong played Billy Butcher in the video game The Boys: Trigger Warning.

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