Los muchachos en Trumplandia

The rise to the presidency of Donald J. Trump in the United States turned the world upside down. He exposed the racism, sexism and political credibility crisis that we had been trying to sweep under the rug for decades. And in the same media that he used to propagate his dangerous speech, The Boys emerged as a perfect mirror for Trumpist sleaze. Inspired by the cult comic written by Garth Ennis and illustrated by Darick Robertson, the television adaptation conceived by Eric Kripke in 2019 became a global pop phenomenon. The Boys is a ruthless critic of the media and social networks, of increasingly hypervigilant governments, of drug use... And it found in the ravings of Trumpism the ideal way to anchor itself to the most pressing news. If superheroes were born to save Americans from the evils of the world, in The Boys they become their main enemies. Dainerys Machado Vento, PhD in Literary, Linguistic and Cultural Studies and selected by Granta magazine as one of the twenty-five best young writers in Spanish of the last decade, explores in these Comic Notes the fundamental reasons for this radical paradigm shift in superhero representation.