Mother's Milk (character)

• 1. Introduction

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  Mother's Milk, known to his teammates as M.M., is a character in the comic series The Boys, created by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. His name sounds like a crude joke. It is closer to a medical record. Cut off from one particular supply, his body begins to fail, and the supply comes from the person who raised him. This is a series about hunting corrupt superpowered people, and M.M. is the character who makes its violence cost something. Why does a man like this need such a thing to stay alive? What did his family lose to make him? And why does the television version of the same man look so different from the one on the page?

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• 2. The Milk

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  Issue 35 of The Boys delivers the revelation that explains M.M. He is the only member of his team who has been exposed to Compound V since the moment he was conceived. Compound V is the drug that gives people superpowers. His mother worked in a factory that had once been a Vought-American laboratory. Nobody had properly cleaned it, and she absorbed the drug while pregnant.

  His brother Michael was born with a severe mental disability. M.M. was born needing regular doses of his mother's breast milk to survive. That need is the real origin of his nickname, even though the team seems to believe it comes from his being the purest and most goodhearted of them.

  Issue 17 shows what the dependence costs him. He throws up, disturbed by the constant need. The milk is also strongly energizing, and it has grown into a breast fetish that only adds to his discomfort.

  The drug gives with one hand and takes with the other. It makes him strong enough to injure and kill both ordinary people and other superpowered ones. If he goes without the milk, his powers weaken and his body starts to break down. It also ages him too fast. He looks to be in his 40s while still in his late 20s, and his daughter Janine, only 12, looks like a young adult.

  The factory was only the beginning of what Vought-American's carelessness would cost the family.

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• 3. Lawsuit and Ring

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  M.M.'s father spent years trying to hold Vought-American to account for what had been done to his children. He worked tirelessly and eventually won his suit. The fight took a heavy mental and physical toll on him. M.M. learned that the company's lawyers were simply shrugging off the loss. He never told his father.

  Michael died soon after, killed by the manifestation of his own superpowers. His father kept suing Vought-American over and over, and the stress of it killed him too. M.M.'s mother was left broken and unwilling to fight any longer. She became morbidly obese, and her own powers surfaced out of overwhelming despair. She now lives in M.M.'s basement, unaware of her surroundings.

  M.M. had a new wife and a daughter to support, alongside his mother. He joined the United States Army and volunteered for the Rangers. There he became an army heavyweight boxer. In one championship match, his powers suddenly manifested, and he accidentally killed his opponent by punching his head off.

  The army released him. Billy Butcher and Colonel Mallory then recruited him for the first incarnation of The Boys, and Butcher was about to become the most important person in his life.

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• 4. Loyalties

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  Issue 2 is where readers first meet M.M., a big, imposing man with a methodical patience. His father taught him to check every angle and every possible means of attack in any situation. The habit leaves him particular and a little compulsive. He gets annoyed when someone skips the coaster under a glass or fails to sort the trash properly. Apart from the retired Greg Mallory, he is the only member of the team who is an American citizen by birth.

  After a year with the group, Butcher went with him to rescue his infant daughter Janine. Her mother was a drug addict who could not raise her. The child was in a drug house where the addicts smoked crack cut with Compound V. Butcher took a savage beating from them during the rescue.

  The destruction of the Brooklyn Bridge, caused by the Seven's attempt to prevent 9/11, left a deeper mark. M.M. tried to help a woman trapped in a falling car. He held on, but she could not free herself from her seat belt. She was torn in half and died in his arms. The memory kept driving his fight against Vought-American.

  After the unit disbanded, he did community work and tried to raise a rebellious Janine. She treated him with disrespect but regarded Butcher fondly, calling him Uncle Billy. M.M. eventually agreed to return, and he became Butcher's second-in-command. Part of the reason may have been to restrain Butcher from going off the rails. Butcher is pathologically rude to nearly everyone, yet he gives M.M. a steady civility and thinks very highly of him.

  Issue 6 shows M.M. holding a view shared only with Hughie, the new recruit. He believes at least a few superheroes might be decent people acting from real altruism. He feels a great deal of affection for Hughie, and in issue 43 that affection set him against Butcher. He had discovered that Butcher was manipulating Hughie into dangerous situations without telling the rest of the team. After Hughie's sabbatical, M.M. put him in touch with Mallory, the one person from the old days he still kept in contact with.

  A story called The Bloody Doors Off then brought him a family problem that patience could not solve.

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• 5. The Last Meeting

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  In The Bloody Doors Off, M.M. learns that his abusive ex-wife had forced their daughter into appearing in a pornographic film. He wrecks the Boys' headquarters in a fury and leaves to deal with the matter. He tells his mother, who screams in her locked basement. Then Janine calls. She says she was not in her right mind and has run away from her mother, and she asks to be left alone until she is well.

  He finds her easily. She tells him that Butcher murdered the film's producers and cast. He killed her mother too, brutally and in front of her. Butcher's last words to Janine were both a warning and a threat. She was to leave M.M. alone.

  M.M. returns to New York for a meeting of the Boys, called to stop Butcher from using a weaponized form of the V compound. The target is the rest of the Supes and the innocents who had been affected. Butcher walks in and asks why M.M. is not mending things with his daughter, hoping it would take him out of the picture. When M.M. asks if the genocidal plan is real, Butcher says yes. He admits he never expected to survive the fight with Homelander and Black Noir.

  Butcher offers him a chance to walk away. M.M. tries to stop him instead. Butcher confesses that he considered killing M.M.'s mother as well and could not bring himself to do it. M.M., enraged, says he never wanted it to go down like this. Butcher answers that he knows, and that M.M. was the best mate he could have had and he did not deserve him.

  Then Butcher stuffs a grenade into M.M.'s mouth and holds it there with his left hand, which is destroyed in the blast. M.M.'s face is blown off. Critically wounded, he calls out for his mother in delirium while Butcher suffocates him, saying he has "no mates."

  Hughie, still unaware of what Butcher had done, would be the next person to meet M.M.'s mother.

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• 6. What the Mother Left

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  After M.M.'s death, Hughie visits the basement and finds the mother transformed into an enormous Cthulhu-like blob. Her breasts have stretched into tentacles. The comic uses this to explain why M.M. felt nauseated when a nature show described snakes in an earlier issue. She seems able to say only "MY BOY..."

  When she spots Hughie, she does not realize he is not her son. She grabs him with one tentacle and offers another, ending in a distended nipple. Hughie agrees to drink, possibly hoping the milk will strengthen him. He cannot keep it down.

  The milk does make him strong enough, and with the Compound V she provides he paralyses Butcher. Butcher then talks Hughie into killing him with a glass shard rather than imprisoning him, by tricking Hughie into believing he had murdered Hughie's parents. Butcher dies smiling and praising Hughie. Hughie tells Annie that Butcher is probably still fighting in Hell. He then toasts the fallen Boys: the Female, Frenchie and M.M.

  Dear Becky, published in 2020, is set twelve years after those deaths. An unknown sender mails Hughie Butcher's diary, forcing him to face what he did. The diary lays out Butcher's moral justifications and the darker work he did with the Boys before Hughie joined, M.M. included. In one entry, they tortured a child who parodies Billy Batson of Captain Marvel and cut out the child's tongue, so the child could never again turn back into a Supe. The comic never says who sent the diary.

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• 7. A Parody With Teeth

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  The comic run credited as The Boys and Herogasm covers 2006-2012, and M.M. was designed as a parody. His creators aimed at the way the scary black man was written in DC and Marvel comics during the 1980s and 1990s. They also reached for the 1980s fear of crack babies, children born physically addicted. In M.M.'s case, the addiction is to Compound V. The approach echoes Butcher, who began as a parody of The Punisher.

  The rights history is unusual. DC Comics owned the character for the first volume of the series, and the rights then reverted to Dynamite Entertainment.

  The ending that the creators gave the Boys is about as far from a heroic farewell as it gets. The series makes Butcher the final antagonist by having him betray and murder M.M. and his teammates to protect his plan. Hughie is the lone survivor.

  A television adaptation reached Amazon Prime Video in 2019, and it changed almost everything about the character.

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• 8. Marvin on Screen

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  Laz Alonso plays M.M. in the Amazon Prime Video series, and Elias Leon Leacock plays the young Marvin in the third season. This version is not a Supe at all. He is a regular human and a military veteran, and he is Episcopalian. His real name is Marvin T. Milk rather than Baron Wallis. The nickname comes from his surname and from the mothering way he acted as a battlefield medic.

  His hatred of Vought has a different root. When he was a child, Soldier Boy threw a Mercedes-Benz into the Milk family household, killing his grandfather. Vought covered it up by claiming Soldier Boy had been catching car thieves. His father then spent his life suing Vought and worked himself to death as a lawyer.

  In the first two seasons, M.M. joins Butcher and the reformed Boys to expose Compound V and bring down Stormfront. The third season is set two years later. He is now divorced and rejoins the Boys as they go after Victoria Neuman and Homelander. He clashes with Butcher over Butcher's use of V-24 and his partnership with Soldier Boy, who is still alive and is Homelander's father.

  The series moved the comic's oddest traits to other characters. The milk fixation goes to Homelander, played by Antony Starr. The title of first naturally born Supe goes to Ryan Butcher, played by Cameron Crovetti. His mother's tentacle attack on Hughie became a different assault in the second season, when Love Sausage attacks M.M. with a penis tentacle.

  Critics welcomed Alonso's work. They praised M.M.'s relationships with Butcher, played by Karl Urban, with Frenchie, played by Tomer Capone, and with Hughie, played by Jack Quaid.

  Alonso also gave the screen version obsessive-compulsive disorder, drawn from his own diagnosis. He has said it opens a conversation about untreated mental health and shows how everything happening in the world affects all of the Boys, who are all coping with trauma. In his words: "the very things that we hate, we can end up turning into them if we don't watch ourselves."

  That warning lands hard beside the comic's ending, where the man who treated M.M. as his best friend became the one who killed him.

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