“A-Train, baby!”; “Can’t stop the A-Train!”; “Everybody loves the A-Train!” Even though we may have made up that last one, Jessie T. Usher’s character on Amazon’s The Boys has some incredibly cheesy catchphrases that he manages to pull off. At the start of Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s superhero commentary series, A-Train is one of The Seven’s newest members; but, by the series’ conclusion, nobody remembers him, and for good reason.
Even his colleagues detest A-Train since he is one of Vought’s most loathsome Supes and is so pitifully insecure. Even while it initially seems like his Amazon counterpart is the same, you will notice how superior Jessie Usher’s character is since everything he does is done for money and fame. The one similarity between the TV show and the comics is that A-Train acts as a spark to set everything in motion.
But who is A-Train, exactly? What inspires him to transform into a superhero? Does he really mean what he says, or is there something more to him than just bravado? And in light of what transpired in the Herogasm episode, is he still alive? This movie, titled “A-Origins Train’s – Explored,” will address all of those questions and more. Oh, and spoiler alert: watch out because there will be a LOT of them.
Can’t Stop the A-Train from violating everyone – Origins of the most-disgusting character from The Boys Comics
A-Train, much like every other Supe in the comics, gets his powers in the womb when he’s injected with Compound V. Once activated, they make him the latest speedster in a long list of super-speeding individuals. That’s right, the latest in a long list; because unlike powers like Homelander’s laser eyes and The Deep’s fish speak, there are certain sets of powers in the comics that aren’t exclusive to the Supes who use them.
For example, flight isn’t as rare as it is in the TV show, as Queen Maeve, Starlight and Jack From Jupiter can all fly in the comics. Similarly, super-speed isn’t exclusive to A-Train; he is just the newest kid on the block is all. Apart from this, not much is known about his comic book origins except for the fact that he somehow has a Japanese citizenship. Oh, and the fact that he used to be a member of Teenage Kix; Vought’s “rebellious” off-shoot of the conservative Young Americans which was populated by such heroes as Gunpowder, Blarney Cock and Popclaw.
Even amongst Supes the Teenage Kix had a bad rep, as Butcher explained to Hughie in issue #3 that because of their social outcasts image, their lives were more depraved than those who were in The Seven simply for the fact that it was their default presentation tactic.
A-Train only got called up to The Seven because they lost their residential speedster on the fateful day of 9/11. In Ennis and Robertson’s work, the destruction on that black day wasn’t all thanks to the terrorists; Vought’s Supes had a hand in it as well. The Seven were dispatched to take care of the problem before the hijackers managed to crash the planes into the Twin Towers.
Somehow, they ended up making things worse; the Homelander’s plan of action was so bafflingly stupid that it not only got every civilian killed, it also ended up taking the lives of 2 members of The Seven. Their speedster at this time was Mr. Marathon who died in the Homelander’s hands when the latter botched the timing of his eye lasers and ended up killing him in the process.
A-Train was brought into The Seven as his replacement, and so he became the new “fastest man alive”. Now, as we’d mentioned earlier, speedsters in the world of The Boys weren’t unique, and so A-Train had the added pressure of being not only a Supe-celebrity but also being a top-tier athlete in a community filled with super-powered opponents. The celeb-athlete lifestyle, the constant need to stay at the top, and the glitz and glamour of being a member of The Seven thoroughly debauched A-Train to the point that even The Seven were sometimes disgusted with the things he did.
The young recruit ended up becoming a hardcore drug addict, which naturally made him fast friends with Jack From Jupiter; or as we like to call him, Junkie Jack. The duo become fast friends, bonding over their mutual love for depravity and committing legally criminal acts against women and even ended up doing a line or few together at Herogasm. And we’ve said this in a separate video, but we can’t mention what they were doing. Suffice it to say, it would be nauseating for us normies.
So all of this sets up A-Train to be one of the worst people we could ever encounter in the universe of The Boys, and he proves as much in the opening pages of the entire series. In issue #1 of The Boys, A-Train ends up chucking a criminal through Hugh Campbell’s girlfriend Robin that kick starts the entire cycle of Butcher getting back on his path of revenge. Of course, he doesn’t apologize for it here, because he was actually chasing down a criminal on-camera and so Robin ended up being classified as collateral damage; and he even ends up being dismissive about it after a quick chat with The Seven.
In issue #3, he is one of the three Supes who assault Starlight during her “inauguration ceremony”, but unlike Homelander and Black Noir, A-Train doesn’t stop there. When an undead Lamplighter finally kicks the bucket, The Homelander asks Starlight and A-Train to clean up the mess. Instead of doing as he was told, A-Train tries to take Starlight against her will, and ends up getting temporarily blinded in one eye for his horrific attempt at trying to violate her.
He tells Jack From Jupiter that he wants to kill her for what she did, which just goes to show how low his bar for morality is, when Jack suggests something even darker. See, Starlight was just a transitional hire. The Seven picked her specifically so they could screw with her till they got a stronger member on-board. Jack reckoned that’d be in a year or so, and he told A-Train that all he needs to do is wait.
The implication is not something we want to address directly, but feel free to speculate in the comments. Suffice it to say, Jack From Jupiter is no saint, but it looks like A-Train and him have at least got each other’s backs, right? Well, you’re not paying attention then, because all A-Train cares about is A-Train. When Jack From Jupiter’s reputation is destroyed because he allegedly slept with transsexual prostitutes, A-Train immediately shuns his “best friend” in favor of his image. Everything he does is to protect his image, and nowhere is it clearer than what he does when the Homelander finally snaps.
Instead of joining his plan to stage a coup and take over The White House, A-Train plans to sneak off to a luxury hotel and wait till it all blows over, but he doesn’t get the chance to do that because Billy Butcher kidnaps him before he can do anything and beats him senseless, tying him up and serving him to Wee Hughie as his gift of vengeance. This is where we see who the real A-Train is, and it is even more reviling than you might imagine.
See, you’d think that a man who had been so swept up in his own crap sandwich would go out with some sort of dignity. But as soon as he realized his fate lied in Hughie’s decision, he started to cry and beg for his life. Hughie was hesitant at first. He’s a good lad, a Highland Laddie who got swept up in affairs that are none of his business. He’s not a killer. But Butcher knows just which buttons to push to get him there.
He shows him footage of A-Train mocking Robin’s death and that doesn’t get it done; so he shows him footage of A-Train and The Seven discussing why they brought Starlight on board in the first place, and that does the trick. Listening to A-Train talk about how his girlfriend was just there to gratify The Seven’s urges pushes Hughie over the edge and he kicks A-Train’s head clean off his shoulders.
Until his last breath, A-Train kept pleading for his own life, blatantly unaware of the concept of consequences apparently. And so ends the story of A-Train in the comic books. He was a character that, alongside Black Noir, felt truly irredeemable. Because everything he did was in service of his own self-interests, which is nothing like his TV show counterpart; at least, not in season 3, anyway.
His real name is Reggie Franklin – A-Train’s Surprising Redemption Arc from Amazon’s The Boys
Eric Kripke and his team have put in a lot of thought into their adaptation of Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s work, and it really shows. I mean, they recently got Jessie T. Usher’s face all over the real-life A-Train in New York City, so that is all you need to know about how serious Kripke & Co. take the show. While the overall premise of Amazon’s The Boys remains the same, it comes with a lot of welcome twists and turns from a story-telling perspective; and nowhere does it ring truer than in A-Train’s story.
The Boys begins pretty much the same way that the comics do, except for a couple of crucial adjustments; A-Train was not catching a criminal the day he killed Robin, that was the cover story Vought came up with for him, and he was also high off his nuts, which is why he didn’t notice her in the first place.
A-Train starts off with as much sympathy as his comic book counterpart- which is to say 0- and for a long time, it looks like he’s going to be just like him as well. When Butcher takes Hughie to a Supe club to show him just how meaningless Robin’s death was to A-Train, we see the latter pass off accidentally swallowing one of Robin’s molars as a joke. This ticks off Hughie proper and he decides to take it to Vought, The Seven and A-Train in particular.
And so he joins up with The Boys to help take him down. But where the twists begin is in the drugs he’s taking and who he considers to be expendable or not. See, while A-Train does do drugs like his comic book counterpart, his poison of choice is much more lethal. Remember how we said that A-Train is a celeb-Supe-athlete and unlike other members of The Seven, he has a superpower that isn’t unique and requires him to stay at the top of his game lest he be dismissed?
Well, the writer’s room of The Boys decided to merge those two into a sobering drug metaphor by making A-Train become an addict of Compound V. Now, in the show, V works differently. Instead of injecting it into prospective mothers’ wombs, Vought injects it into infants because apparently, that is how the formula delivers its best results. Now, Compound V is what gives Supes their superpowers, we know that.
Vought was also working on a formula that they could administer to adults without risking killing them, or worse. But essentially, if a Supe uses it beyond their natural capacity, it essentially turns into a performance enhancer. That’s how A-Train has been keeping his body at top speed beyond his physical prime. He is 32 years old. Even by the laws of physics that Supes go by, he should not be able to run at the speeds he does during his show down with Shockwave. But that’s exactly why he abuses the V; because it helps keep him in the game.
A-Train is so obsessed with his spot in the Seven that he even risks killing himself, because at the end of the day, Compound V is a drug like any other; but more on that in a bit. As for the people that A-Train truly cares for, there seems to be only two: Charlotte aka Popclaw, his below-the-radar girlfriend from his Teenage Kix days, and Nathan Franklin, his brother and coach.
Now, initially, A-Train’s attitude towards both of them is as self-serving as it is towards others, though perhaps shrouded with a layer of affection. A-Train genuinely seems to care for Popclaw, but he doesn’t openly acknowledge their relationship and passes himself off as single and available because she is a D-list Supe who has also made adult movies in her time; basically, she’s bad for his image.
When A-Train learns that his V abuse has caused his heart to enlarge and made his bones as brittle as rusty iron, he forgoes Nate’s advice to go back to the basics and uses V again to heal his broken leg- thanks Kimiko- and try to stay at the top of the speedster food chain. These self-serving choices bring out the worst in A-Train because, no matter how hard he tries, any good he does is washed away by his own ego.
He ends up killing Popclaw when he finds out she leaked intel about Compound V to The Boys by jabbing her arms with 4 heroin-filled needles just to save his spot on The Seven. He tells off his brother when he starts chastising him, and rightfully so, just to save his spot on The Seven. Heck, he fights Starlight- and loses, might we add- just so he could keep his spot on The Seven. But that fight is the beginning of a turning point in A-Train’s journey in the TV show. So far, he had deflected everything that had happened onto other people.
He deflected Popclaw’s death onto Hughie because he blamed his interference for “forcing his hand”. He blamed Vought for his drug abuse because of the pressure they put on him as a speedster; A-Train was constantly told he’d be replaced in The Seven if he didn’t win all of his races, and so that pushed him into the cycle of abuse in the first place. And most importantly, A-Train always viewed himself as the ultimate victim of any circumstance; even one where he was the perpetrator of the criminal act, not the other way around.
But when he faces off against Starlight & Hughie, he admits that he killed Popclaw, and his mask starts slipping ever so slightly. And after he’s dismissed from The Seven, we see the beginning of an internal struggle for A-Train. Yes, he wants to preserve his status as a Supe. He’s one of the biggest names on the planet for Christ’s sake, and in his own words, if he doesn’t remain the fastest man alive, he might just become a “freak show like Ben Johnson”.
But then Homelander benches him anyway because he finds out about his heart condition and deems him as not even being in the Top 20 Strongest Supes list anymore. So A-Train is at a crossroads in his life, and this is where three things happen that change the way he perceives his role as a Supe and how we perceive him as a character. First, A-Train ends up temporarily joining the Church of the Collective.
Unlike The Deep, he resists their eerie mind-control tactics and manages to use the Church to get back into The Seven, which is a selfish goal admittedly, but he does it to take out a bigger evil. Because, number 2, Stormfront enters The Seven as his replacement and it is immediately clear that this white girl does NOT think all men are made equal. She makes it evident when talking to him, too, and earlier in the same season, he gets racially-profiled by a store cop who didn’t know who he was just because he wasn’t wearing his uniform.
For the first time in his life, perhaps, A-Train felt what it was truly like being a black man in America and it resonated with him on a spiritual level almost, because number 3, he starts doing things that are actually in the service of the greater good. A-Train is the person who brings Starlight and Hughie all the information they needed to expose Stormfront by breaking into The Church’s archives because, in his words, “eff that Nazi”.
Though he did it to get back into The Seven, he did do a great service for his community. Up until that point, we had seen Stormfront ruthlessly kill a black man just for driving his own car as Liberty back in the 70’s, and then we saw her take apart an entire apartment building filled with black folks while she was chasing down an oriental super villain in the first place.
If that sentence sounded hella racist to you, then that’s good, because that’s presumably what A-Train thought as well. And thanks to him, the psycho homicidal Nazi would no longer be killing white people under the guise of a superhero. But where his true redemption comes is when he starts reconnecting with his family. So, remember we said that A-Train had a heart attack earlier? Well, that was him OD’ing off of Compound V abuse, and really, he’s lucky to even be alive.
Why? Because according to Vought’s doctors, if he used his powers or V ever again, then his life effectively becomes a game of Russian Roulette; they can’t tell which use will kill him or when, but they guarantee that it will happen, eventually. And so A-Train decides to re-brand himself as a Supe who is trying to get back into touch with his roots. He gets an objectively ridiculous costume upgrade and commissions an entire line of original content that would feature him “reconnecting with his roots”.
This includes a hilariously tone-deaf pitch about a slavery game, and a documentary series comically titled “The A-Train to Africa”. It’s clear what A-Train is trying to do, and everyone sees it, from Ashley at Vought to his own brother Nathan. But something about his recent experience with Stormfront must have changed him because when he asks what he could truly be doing for the community, Nathan points him in the direction of a problem that he could actually help solve.
Ever since Homelander’s dangerously far-right rantings went live on national TV, radical elements were becoming increasingly violent in America. And this wasn’t restricted to the general population; ever since Stormfront and Homelander helped make white supremacy an ok thing in the universe of The Boys, more bigoted Supes was coming out in the open as well.
One of these Supes was Blue Hawk, whose name is just a walking red flag in our personal opinion. Nate tells Reggie a story about how Blue Hawk violently murdered an unarmed black man in the neighborhood his kids live in, and this genuinely stirs A-Train into action. In an earlier scene from the series, A-Train is sitting with a Vought reporter in the build to his PPV showdown with Shockwave.
He’s asked about how he feels about his powers and he starts telling a story about his childhood. It’s a real story, too. Reggie grew up in Chicago, a city with one of the highest crime rates in America. His neighborhood was particularly combustible, and one night when he was 3 years old, he family came into trouble. That’s when his powers activated and he managed to help save them.
He gleefully recalls that he was fast enough to outrun a bullet, but he is told to nix the violence and stick to the script. A-Train always had heroic tendencies; he just suppressed them to get into Vought’s good books. But now, he had a bigger purpose to fulfill, and so he goes to Ashley to try to set up a face-to-face with Blue Hawk and get him held accountable because that would be an actual step in the right direction.
But as always, he forgets about consequences, and this time, it’s not just his actions that end up informing his decisions. Homelander’s speech might have been as incendiary as a certain former US President’s but it also saw an uptick in his approval ratings, making any action against Blue Hawk “inadvisable” as The Deep put it. But A-Train pushes for some modicum of justice anyway and gets Vought to agree to have Blue Hawk make a public apology to his brother’s community.
It seems as if things are going his way for once, and also the right way, which is a little weird considering, but as is the norm when it comes to Supes, shit will always hit the fan eventually. Blue Hawk starts off okay with his apology, but when he fails to come off as sincere, the community starts to verbally protest him. He blurts out that All Lives Matter, as the crowd picks up pro-BLM chants, and has an absolute meltdown when he feels overwhelmed, violently attacking the people present; including A-Train’s brother Nate.
The doctors reveal to A-Train that he will never walk again because of the literally paralysing damage that Blue Hawk did to his spine, and this is where things change a drastic shift in A-Train’s life. So far, he had been fighting for himself, and as long as he kept his reputation on the up and up, that’s all he cared about. Now, when he almost lost a family member because of his actions, he realizes just how serious consequences can be.
And he decides to make Blue Hawk pay. He goes to Ashley in a rage and basically asks for Blue Hawk’s head, but as always, the corporate spiel comes spilling out of her. “We’re sorry about what happened to Nathan”, “Blue Hawk felt threatened”, yada yada yada, until she’s finally had enough and she lays into A-Train, saying, “I have spent over 100 hours in crisis management meetings specifically figuring out how to cover up your bullshit… including all three of your straight-up murders… while you were out in the club with your crew, or getting your toe sucked by Popclaw, who, let’s not forget, you also murdered. Yeah, that’s right. I know about that.
You did not give a crap about all the collateral you caused then. Now, all of a sudden, you care because it happened to you?” This is a sobering reminder for A-Train that he isn’t the only victim of Supe violence; in fact, he has often been the perpetrator. And so he decides to do the one thing he can do. A-Train shows up at Herogasm looking for Blue Hawk, but runs into Hughie, and this is where he has his big moment of redemption. So far in the series, A-Train has not apologized for his actions; at least not sincerely.
But when Hughie asks him to apologize for what he did to Robin, he does so, unequivocally. A-Train tells Hughie that he now knows what it feels like to see someone he loves in a state close to death, and says that it’s effed up. He gives Hughie a heartfelt apology, and still gets rightfully decked in the face, but for the first time in his life, he owns up to his mistake. And then he goes on to carry out what many are assuming is his final act in life, because in all the commotion of Soldier Boy blowing up the TNT twins’ mansion and Homelander showing up to fight him, he corners the white supremacist Supe and decides to deliver justice himself.
Knowing full well that this run might be his last, A-Train grabs Blue Hawk’s leg and literally drags him to death, running across several blocks with his corpse just to make sure the job is finished. He only stops because his heart gives up on him, and the last we see of A-Train is him collapsing next to Blue Hawk’s ravaged corpse, presumably having bitten the bullet on that Russian roulette once and for all.
Now, whether this is actually the case or not remains to be seen. After all, we have heard from Queen Maeve yet, and we think she might still be alive. So whether A-Train is dead or not remains to be seen. However, one thing is for sure; he has certainly managed to redeem himself to an extent, infinitely more so than his comic book counterpart who was revealed to be nothing but a pathetic coward in the end. Jessie T. Usher’s A-Train might just be the only character on The Boys to execute a successful and well-received face turn; it’s just a damn shame that it came at the cost of so many lives.
How Powerful is A-Train?
Well, given that he is basically The Boys’ version of Flash, we’d have to say pretty effing strong, but there are a few key differences in the way their powers work. See, every speedster from The Flash Family shares a connection to a cosmic power called the Speed Force which is responsible for their ungodly feats of athleticism. Now, the Speed Force is essentially the cosmic concept of motion in time, which makes it a complex thing to understand.
Barry Allen ended up creating an entirely new timeline because his connection to the Speed Force allowed him to travel to the past and change what Marvel likes to call a “nexus event”; that being the death of his mother. So the Speed Force is tied to the idea of time as well. None of these complications exist in the case of A-Train because his speed is actually more like Quicksilver’s if we’re being more accurate.
A-Train can run at speeds faster than the speed of sound. During his race with Shockwave, he ran so fast that his total time meant he had effectively broken the sound barrier thrice over. Though that was when he was juiced up on V, it is still a pretty impressive feat of agility.
A-Train’s speed also gives him a unique perception of the world. When he runs, it’s as if the world becomes stationary, and he can perceive this time lag clearly. But unfortunately for him, unlike The Flash or Quicksilver, he can’t use his powers to move people out of the line of gunfire or carry them around without hurting them. The Boys prides itself on being more realistic than your regular superhero comics, and a part of that involves how their Supes’ powers work.
Realistically, you wouldn’t be able to survive traveling at Mach speed if you weren’t inside a specially-designed aircraft; your body would explode just by the sheer pressure. This is why A-Train doesn’t transport people or try to save them while he’s moving because one wrong move could end their lives.
And besides, he couldn’t do that even if he wanted to because once he starts running, he has to maintain form. One hand is out of place and it could spell disaster. But having said that, there is no doubt that A-Train is one of the fastest men on the planet. He once claimed that he could search every corner of New York City in 3 hours; anyone who’s been to the Big Apple will tell you just how impossible that is, making it damn impressive that A-Train can even do that in the first place.
His speed does allow him to counter Supes without worrying about blowing them apart because all Supes have enhanced baseline durability; this is evident in his fight with Starlight, which he only lost because he had a heart attack in the middle of it. A-Train can also use his powers to increase the speed of his attacks, and thereby their efficiency. We point you to that time he went bat crap crazy on Kimiko’s skull.
If that had been Frenchie or M.M., they’d have a bright red hole splattered with brain fragments by the time A-Train let her go; and even Kimiko wasn’t entirely okay after his barrage of head-bashing. Overall, A-Train’s speed and his mastery over using them does give him a place in The Seven, but as we’ve already mentioned multiple times in this video, speedsters are expendable in this world, and so A-Train has to resort to means less than savoury to stay at the top. Still, there is no denying that he is one of the strongest Supes in existence; and you can take that claim to the A-Train, baby.
Marvelous Verdict
A-Train is one of the many characters from Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s work that has been translated in a much better fashion on-screen. Seriously, Jessie T. Usher’s performance as this debauched Supe-celeb-athlete has won us over. If you look at A-Train from the comics and A-Train from the show, it’s night and day, and yes that metaphor was flipped on purpose.
In the comics, A-Train is someone no one even misses after he’s dead, and that’s a testament to his own depravity and the depths he was willing to sink to. Fans of the TV show showed genuine concern in some instances for A-Train’s fate following Herogasm, which goes to show you just how much his story has progressed.
We don’t think he’s ever going to get an ending like his comic book counterpart because, well, Hughie already punched him once, and it doesn’t look like his physical strength will be enough to take A-Train’s head off his shoulders. But if Herogasm was his end, then it was a fitting one. And if it wasn’t, then we can’t wait to see what Eric Kripke and Co. have in store for us.