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If you’ve ever been curious about Awkwafina’s fanfic for Amazon’s gory anti-superhero series The Boys, your moment has come — or at least, it’s on the way.
Prime Video announced on Dec. 5 that the live-action series will be getting a spinoff in 2022, featuring eight “deliciously unique, twisted animated episodes set in the world of The Boys.” The initial video announcement, featuring series star Karl Urban, who plays anti-superhero activist Billy Butcher, says each episode will be written by a different person or team.
Garth Ennis, who wrote the original comic book version of The Boys, is one of those credited writers. The others include musical artist and movie star Awkwafina (recently seen in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), Lonely Island’s Andy Samberg, longtime writing partners Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, Spliced creator and Invincible screenwriter Simon Racioppa, Archer’s Aisha Tyler, Rick and Morty’s Justin Roiland and Ben Bayouth, and sibling duo Ilana Glazer (co-creator of Broad City) and Eliot Glazer (producer of New Girl).
The announcement offered few other details about Diabolical, though the emphasis on eight different writers or writing teams suggests an anthology of unlinked shorts in the vein of The Animatrix or Netflix’s Love, Death & Robots. The video, which prominently features Billy’s bulldog Terror energetically licking his own genitals, certainly suggests the animated series will continue to express The Boys’ love of all things transgressive. The series, about a world full of superheroes who abuse their powers and anti-heroes who hunt and punish them, has certainly left plenty of room for side stories — the sprawling cast and the scope of the world suggests a lot of unmined potential that could be taken up by creative minds.
Diabolical seems to be unrelated to the previously announced Boys spinoff, a college-set series designed to explore what education looks like for young superpowered people in the Boys world.
Diabolical will arrive on Prime Video in 2022.
