The Boys Season 5 Parodies DC's Teen Titans With A Takedown Of Influencer Culture

This article contains spoilers for "The Boys" season 5, episode 2, "Teenage Kix."

When "The Boys" parodies Marvel and DC superheroes, it's often overt which characters are meant to poke fun at those familiar comic characters. Co-creators Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson first pitched "The Boys" comic as taking place in the DC Universe with the Seven as the actual Justice League, and you can still tell who the Seven are meant to be. Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) is like Captain America if he personified all the country's worst traits, not its best. The show also revamped the comic's Iron Man parody Tek Knight into a superhero detective lampooning Batman.

"The Boys" season 5 has now come for DC's Teen Titans with Teenage Kix. (The season's second episode is titled after the team.) But "The Boys" doesn't limit its parodies to superheroes; supes and their fandoms stand in for how celebrity culture works in the real world. The Seven are movie stars, while Gen Z supes like Teenage Kix embrace a more modern form of fame as social media influencers.

The season premiere, "Fifteen Inches of Sheer Dynamite," had the Teenage Kix Jetstreak (Dylan Colton) and Sheline (Emma Elle Paterson) making a pro-Homelander TikTok. In "Teenage Kix," they're shown filming more videos for products like "diet water" (zero calories!) and "Firecracker's Flaming Freedom Sticks," and their goth teammate Countess Crow (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) does live-streamed makeup tutorials.

Even their costumes are corporate shilling. Sheline's has her social media handle @realsheline emblazoned above her cleavage, while Jetstreak's costume is covered in endorsement stickers like a NASCAR driver suit. According to MM (Laz Alonso), all the corporate sponsorships net Teenage Kix "$50 grand a pulse."

"The Boys" always goes for the jugular when its comedy punches up, and real influencers that Teenage Kix represent aren't spared here.

"The Boys" comic was published from 2006 to 2012, so the show has innovated and often updated its satire for the social media age.

The first big example was back in season 2 with Stormfront (Aya Cash), who used social media to talk directly to her fans and boost her popularity among the world's supes. But she was also a Nazi using fun internet irony to hook audiences so she could then radicalize them with fear-mongering about illegal immigrants and "white genocide." If this sounds familiar, you're right — this has been well-documented.

In the spin-off series "Gen V," set at a college for superheroes, students are taught to build social media followings. (It appears Teenage Kix were all "A" students.) Even in the world of "The Boys," real power lies with corporations. Superheroes are just another product — one that creates loyal customers to whom you can sell other products. Influencers in the real world may not have superpowers, but the economic model is the same.

A criticism leveled at "The Boys" is that its satire can be surface level, merely recreating hot topics with a superhero coat of paint so viewers can point and laugh. I've heard the show's political comedy compared to a "Saturday Night Live" sketch, and making Teenage Kix Instagram/TikTok influencers is on that level.

But if the satire lacks insight, at least it offers contempt. Teenage Kix are largely vapid, greedy, and murderous. When the team goes out to arrest supposed anti-Homelander "dissidents," Sheline and Jetstreak film their "crimefighting" with product placement included. Sheline drags a crying woman out of her home, then pauses for Jetstreak's camera to promote an energy drink. The woman's son rushes out after his mom, and Jetstreak threatens him lest the kid's crying ruin the shot.

What about the superhero side of the parody in "Teenage Kix?"

Teenage Kix was the first superhero team the Boys took down in the comics. (The name likely derives from the popular '70s song "Teenage Kicks" by punk rock band the Undertones, who, like Garth Ennis, is from Northern Ireland.) While the comic team was still a Teen Titans parody, the show has taken some extra liberties and made some significant changes.

There were eight Teenage Kix in the comics, but only four in the show. Only Jetstreak is in both versions. The show gives him the power to take flight, turning him into a parody of Sam Guthrie/Cannonball from Marvel's New Mutants. 

Sheline is more a parody of a superhero/super-villain archetype, i.e. the sexy catgirl. Think Catwoman, Tigra, Black Cat, Cheetah, Cheshire, etc. The show stifles the sexiness by giving her some of the grosser habits of cats, including a human-sized litter box.

The Boys' target on Teenage Kix is Rock Hard (Andrew Iles), who has stone skin like Ben Grimm/The Thing from the Fantastic Four. Except he's grown morbidly obese, and so he's now an immobile human mountain in Teenage Kix's basement. 

What cements the Teen Titans parody is the show's creation of Countess Crow, a clear parody of the Titans' young sorceress, Raven. (Unlike Raven, Countess Crow can only control corvids, with no magical powers.) Created by Marv Wolfman and George Péréz for their 1980s run on "The New Teen Titans," Raven later became a favorite for a whole new generation thanks to her starring role in the 2003 "Teen Titans" cartoon (voiced by Tara Strong). Maitreyi Ramakrishnan has previously cosplayed Raven, and Countess Crow might be the closest she gets to actually playing her.

definitely doing a proper photoshoot of raven one day💜🐦‍⬛ pic.twitter.com/GGDW9WhS3u

— Maitreyi Ramakrishnan (@ramakrishnannn) June 1, 2024

"The Boys" is streaming on Prime Video.