If you’re a fan of dark, provocative adult animated series, then you’ve no doubt encountered the work of Simon Racioppa. The showrunner and executive producer of Amazon’s Invincible brought his signature brand of bloody mayhem to Amazon’s The Boys Presents: Diabolical. Racioppa was the executive producer and showrunner of the animation anthology, and he wrote the final short, “One Plus One Equals Two”. The episode works as a brutal origin story for Homelander (Antony Starr), the leader of the Seven.
We see Homelander’s public debut, where he is introduced to the world via a massive Vought press conference. For his first mission, Homelander is teamed up with Black Noir to handle a hostage situation at a chemical plant. But like most of Homelander’s missions, the results are horrific, revealing a sociopathic monster behind the world’s greatest superhero. Few superhero characters are more terrifying than Starr’s Homelander, and “One Plus One Equals Two” is as an effective and horrific introduction to the villain.
We sat down with Racioppa to discuss superheroes, corporations, and The Boys Presents: Diabolical.
The Mary Sue: “One Plus One Equals Two” is the short that is most directly tied to The Boys. What was the collaboration like with the series writers and producers in terms of building Homelander’s backstory?
Simon Racioppa: Eric Kripke (Supernatural) who is the showrunner on, we call it the Mothership, on the main The Boys series, was part of Diabolical from day one all the way through, so he was there for all of our pitch meetings for every episode, he saw all of the cuts. I talked to him about that script before I wrote it, we worked on it together, just making sure that it fit into his world so he was part of the entire run of the show, not just my episode but all the episodes.
TMS: Were you a fan of the series before you got involved?
SR: I was a huge fan of The Boys before I got started on the series, so it was a little terrifying writing an episode about Homelander for Eric Kripke you know, because that’s always intimidating as a writer. Like, he created the show, what do I have to say about this that he hasn’t already? But he was amazing to work with. I think he likes the final episode, I hope he does, I do, so that was how that came about.
TMS: Tell me about your involvement with the animation process and how you landed on the classic superhero style of the short?
SR: So obviously every episode has a different style across the series and for some of the episodes it was obvious very early on what style we would use. With Seth (Rogen) and Evan’s (Goldberg) short “Laser Baby’s Day Out”, we knew from day one that we wanted a classic Looney Tunes/Roger Rabbit style cartoon. And then it was just a matter of finding the right directors who could execute on that, who had experience, the right composers, the right designers, the right studio, and putting that team together to do that. For some of the other episodes the style came a little later, it was more about getting the script done, going through the script, talking to different directors and seeing what they could bring to it and what style they thought would be best. It was all a conversation between myself, Giancarlo Volpe who was our supervising director for the entire series, and then the directors of the episodes about finding the right style that we thought worked best for the narrative and the characters and the emotion of each specific piece.
TMS: Was there ever any discussion of having Homelander partner up with a different member of the Seven or was it always Black Noir?
SR: That’s a really good question, I think in that script it was always going to be Black Noir. I think that was very early on we talked about, because Black Noir has worked for Vought for quite a long time at that point, and I think Eric brought it up, he was like, “I’d love to see a story of Homelander and Noir partnering up before anyone else is there”, so I’m pretty sure that was probably our initial idea we didn’t talk to much about bringing in other heroes at that point.
TMS: Invincible and The Boys center on these Godlike, Superman-style heroes who are psychopaths. Do you feel like that moral disconnect is part of having those powers, that these characters are naturally lacking a value for humanity and life itself?
SR: Maybe, I think they both approach the idea of superpowers from a different position. I think obviously with Invincible, I would say that Mark is an optimistic view of superhero-dom you know, it’s a person who wants to do the right thing and is brought up with powers, and is just trying to navigate his way through that and just be a good person, and is pushed and pulled in many different directions by the stresses and the realities of that life. And his father Nolan, I would also argue is not really a psychopath, even though he acts in terrible ways, but he has a lot more reasoning for why he’s doing it, and from his perspective he is doing the right thing, even if his means and the people he kills are kind of extreme in that.
Whereas I think The Boys is a bit more of a cynical look at how power corrupts in a lot of ways, like there’s Starlight who is a good hero, but I think that obviously you’re seeing more of the corporate effect of, what do the human frailties, the things that so lead us to corporations doing terrible things like polluting our environment or Facebook stealing all of our data, what would that those effects have on people with superpowers? So I think its a slightly different angle on a similar question, if that makes sense.
The Boys Presents: Diabolical is currently streaming on Amazon Prime, as is the first season of Invincible.
(images: Amazon/Special Arrangement)
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