The Self-Preservation Society After the Supe
Stormfront (a former
World War II-era
Nazi) grows sick of the Boys' blackmail attempts, he elects to take the
black ops team on, along with Supe team
Payback, including
Swatto,
Mind Droid,
the Crimson Countess,
Eagle the Archer, and
Soldier Boy III. After
the Female is beaten and electrocuted into a
coma by Stormfront, the Boys go on the offensive, blinding and eventually
curb stomping Stormfront (with the help of
Love Sausage), before the Female comes out of her coma. Meanwhile,
Starlight attempts to prevent Vought from
having her costume sexualised, only succeeding into doing so on the intervention of
Queen Maeve. In the aftermath of the conflict,
the Guy from Vought learns Vought CEO Mr. Wayne to have died of a
heart attack while attending a spa, and Butcher captures the innocent Soldier Boy III and tortures him to death for information on who had convinced Payback to stand against the Boys. The story arc is told across: 1. ''You Fuckin' Want Some, Then?!
, 2. And Then There Were Four
, 3. You're Next, Cunts
(What He Said
), and 4. Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mister Hitler…''.
Nothing Like It in the World Mother's Milk tells
Wee Hughie the story of his life to date: born in
Harlem as Baron Wallis, his mother being exposed to Compound V led to him being a natural-born Supe, his dependence on her
breast milk to remain alive (lest his body wither away) earning him the moniker "Mother's Milk", discovering his Supe strength years after joining the army when he accidentally decapitated his opponent in a boxing championship match. To avoid prison, Mother's Milk was then conscripted to the Boys by
Colonel Greg Mallory, meeting
Billy Butcher for the first time, gaining a life debt from him helping retrieve his daughter Janine from the
crack house his ex-wife Janine had left her in, and having been present by the
Brooklyn Bridge during
its destruction on
9/11. The story arc is told across: 1.
You Remember the Thing I Said About Superpowers? and 2.
Vale of Tears.
La Plume de Ma Tante est sur La Table Frenchie tells Wee Hughie a
French stereotype-laden allegorical tale on his origin as an insane former member of the
French Foreign Legion, involving his rivalry with childhood friend Black Pierre over the lovely Marie in the mountain village of Franglais, over the course of which it is heavily implied that Frenchie's "The Frenchman" nickame is derived from his actual name being "Frenchie", and that he may not actually be
French at all, the story ending with Frenchie's father dying during a friendly bicycle-riding
baguette jousting-duel with Black Pierre, Frenchie's mother dying of grief, and Frenchie stating himself to have killed Black Pierre before rejecting Marie, before eventually being recruited by Butcher at a bar to fight "to the bitter end". After Frenchie jumps out the window on completing his story, a half-asleep Butcher notes that only the last line of his story matters.
The Instant White-Hot Wild The Frenchman tells Wee Hughie of the normally-quiet origin of
the Female as previously recounted to him, word by word: noting how despite her ancestral home being
Hiroshima, and how numerous family members of hers had died in embarrassing ways unrelated to the
atomic bombings, for whom "It was not Hiroshima… never Hiroshima.", the Female's mother had thrived as a
secretary at the Japanese equivalent of
Vought-American "protected by the ancient, nameless force that weaves itself around the destinies of but a few [of] the truly, stultifying fuck-stupid". Too cheap to be willing to pay for daycare, the Female's mother had hidden her young daughter under her desk at work whilst reading her magazines and picking at her nose, leaving her oblivious to her daughter crawling around the corporation's halls. One day, the toddler came upon the offices of Doctor Uderzo, and crawled into a "great big bucket" of residue from the doctor's attempts at creating a synthetic version of Compound V, lured by the smell. After consuming the "sloppy blue baby food" in order not to drown in it, the now-Supe Female tore a bewildered Uderzo's face off. Since Uderzo had refused to share his knowledge with his lab assistants, the Female was kept by the company to run experiments on and having blood taken from her while her mother was paid off with a
Marie Claire subscription. The Female occasionally escaped after massacring the staff and exploring
Tokyo, trying to understand how the world worked before always being either recaptured or simply returning for continued experimentation. After learning she was set to be "enabled as a weapon" following continued failure to recreate the synthetic Compound V from her blood, the Female elected to escape one last time. The last attempt to recapture her ended with her slaughtering the
SpecOps team sent to recapture her, and she was then traded to the Boys as Butcher wanted a "killing machine". However, the Frenchman volunteered to help her become more of a "human being" and "find a new life with the Boys". After the Frenchman finishes recounting the Female's story, Hughie asks after Butcher's story, which the Frenchman insists the files for those are sealed, while the solemn Female proceeds to the New York subway system, thinking on her life. ==Reception==