How did you find our channel if you have not watched The Boys on Amazon yet? With their Supe-centric comic book series, Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson spent well over half a decade giving life to what has to be the most visceral dissection of superhero and celebrity culture ever.
The “heroes” in their tale were not really the good guys; in fact, they were the complete reverse. Except for Starlight, all Supes are nothing more than a group of selfish, narcissistic, manic individuals whose actions should be considered acts of terrorism from a neutral standpoint.
Starlight, who at the end is one of the only Supers around, was the only character who managed to keep her innocence and her inherent sense of heroism out of the cavalcade of twisted, sick, and wicked people that Ennis and Robertson revealed to us.
Moreover, Erin Moriarty’s Starlight, who plays the function that was not assigned to her in the comics, is the real superhero of the Amazon series, making her character much more significant. So who is Starlight exactly?
Where did she originate? What are her goals and desires, and how did she survive on her own in the dangerous realm of Vought? All of those queries and more are addressed in this video. This is an exploration into Starlight’s origins.
Disillusionment was a part of her life from the beginning – Starlight’s comic book origins
If you’ve only seen the TV show, you might be thinking that this is BS because she starts out like the typical doe-eyed optimist that a superhero should be and has a mom that actually loves and cares for her. Well, that is something only Amazon’s Starlight has, because her comic book origins are much darker than anyone could’ve anticipated.
But you can’t really tell from the way she enters the story of The Boys in issue #3, because there, it seems like what you see is what you get. Starlight is a young Supe who was called up to The Seven from her previous teenage superhero team – Young Americans – to replace the recently “retired” Lamplighter.
She enters the base of The Seven and is literally speechless at the fact that Homelander himself is there to greet her into the team, but all that giddy enthusiasm dissipates once they get into the Hall of The Seven; because that’s where Starlight realizes the truth about her childhood idols. Turns out, everyone in The Seven are paragons of debauchery and Starlight is subjected to that first-hand when Homelander, Black Noir and A-Train force her to go through a rather uncomfortable “initiation ceremony”.
This blatant assault on not only her, but also her heroic ideals, makes Starlight sick – literally and metaphorically – and she realises that superheroes are nothing but a bunch of self-entitled good-for-nothings, whose egos are about as large as Jack From Jupiter’s fake planet of origin.
It isn’t until the Highland Laddie mini-series came out that we find out just how deep her issues with disillusionment and trust run, and to be fair to her, we can kind of understand where she’s coming from. Anne Rebecca January, much like every other Supe in the comics, was injected with Compound V in the womb, but her birth was very different to what most Supe moms and dads experienced; because as soon as she was born, Starlight’s powers activated and left her parents permanently blind.
Disgusted with the “freak” that they had given birth to, they end up cutting a deal with Vought, essentially selling her to them. Vought being Vought, ends up putting her in the “care” of a foster family that raises her up in a strict, Christian environment. Not to mention they drive her to the point of insanity by forcing her to take part in countless superhero pageants, and play to win. Most of her life was aimed at pleasing others at the cost of her own happiness and well-being; a character trait that has crossed over into her live-action depiction.
Starlight gets called up to The Seven – And lives to regret it every day
When she became old enough to join a Supe team, Vought assigned her to Young Americans, a right-leaning group of do-gooders who were the primary teenage superhero team contracted by Vought. That’s where she met Drummer Boy, her first boyfriend. Now, in the comics, Annie took her Christian upbringing very seriously. She makes it a point to tell Homelander that they had never even slept with each other, which makes the assault on her that much darker.
And as if to put a turd cherry on top of this crap cake, when she goes back to Des Moines to “heal”, she finds out Drummer Boy has moved on already when she catches him in the act with someone else. Annie is at her lowest point in life when she comes across Wee Hughie on that infamous park bench, and they do develop a relationship there, but it’s different from what Amazon shows you.
For starters, the idea of secret identities is much more integral to the plot of the comics, at least for Starlight and Hughie, because for a long time, they are unaware of each other’s line of work. Starlight tells Hughie she’s a sales exec, for Christ’s sake! But their relationship doesn’t factor into her becoming a double agent for The Boys until much later in the story.
What does is the fact that Annie has to play the game not just with Hughie but with Vought as well, which leads her on a path that is fraught with troubles, to say the least. She starts drinking and lashing out way more than she used to, with good reason, of course.
After all, A-Train does try to take advantage of her again, and she leaves him temporarily blinded for his trouble. Starlight also vehemently cusses out the marketing guys from Vought when they try to tell her that her backstory has been adjusted to make her “more appealing”; when really they just wanted her to look like a swimsuit model and sell more comics with her new, sexualized origin story.
It’s only when Black Noir ends up threatening her with the skimpy outfit that she realizes just how real the threat to her life is, and after thanking Queen Maeve for intervening, she gets to work on trying to dismantle Vought and The Seven from within. But she faces an unexpected hurdle in the form of Billy Butcher himself, who is a much more diabolical character in the comics if you can believe it.
An unexpected happily ever after – How Starlight’s story ends in the comics
Butcher’s hatred for Supes runs much deeper in the comics, and almost as if to prove just how much, he actively sabotages Starlight and Hughie’s relationship. After Starlight comes clean to Hughie about her secret identity, the wee lad runs off to Scotland to get away from all of it. She has to travel to his hometown and reveal her true backstory to him to get him to come back with her, but her brave origin story trip was for nothing because Butcher simply shows Hughie footage of what Homelander, A-Train and Black Noir did to her and spins it to make it look like it was all consensual.
Starlight gets dumped by Hughie and their relationship remains tumultuous to say the least, but it’s not like they don’t move past it. Eventually, Hughie admits to Annie that he is a part of a CIA black ops team that specifically targets Supes, and they both realise that no matter how much they lie to each other and use each other, they are in love with each other at the end of the day.
So they get to work together and try to scoop out incriminating evidence from The Seven so they can clear their own names the right way. But disaster strikes when Homelander finds out what Starlight is doing, and goes after her and Queen Maeve personally. Homie engages his former lover in battle and Starlight manages to escape the vicinity. She finds out the result of the battle when her childhood idol’s head goes zipping past her as she escapes from the watchtower. From that point onward, Annie goes underground basically.
She is not involved in the Supe Coup, as we like to call it, witnessing it from the sidelines, and ends up leaving town after it, disgusted with her own community and Hughie as well, for the monster that he had chosen to become. It wasn’t until the end of the story, when Hughie realises what Butcher’s true plans have always been, that he is able to keep aside his resentment for Starlight being a Supe and finally embrace his love for her with no inhibitions. The couple end up getting married and have children too, decades after Wee Hughie puts down the very man who got him started on his own path of vengeance.
She is the real hero of this story – Annie January aka Starlight from Amazon’s The Boys
As you can see, Starlight doesn’t exactly play a huge role in the comics. She is a pivotal character, no doubt about it, but her actions and characterization always seem to scream damsel in distress more than superhero in crisis. Garth Ennis even admitted that he was planning to make her just as cynical as Queen Maeve potentially, but ended up treating her more responsibly when he realised what a waste that would be.
He said, straight up, that “Annie started out as a joke, and was actually going to degenerate further in terms of the stuff she’d put up with, the degradations she’d suffer just to be in the world’s premier super team. But I found myself writing Hughie moping in Central Park, and then to my great surprise I saw Annie coming walking down the path. That was when I realized I wanted to take her in a different direction, make her stronger and more rounded…”
The whole idea behind Garth and Darick’s work is that all their characters have shades of grey, and they needed an emotional anchor to the story to keep the readers invested in more than simply well-designed torture-porn. As a result, they crafted Starlight and Hughie’s relationship to become that anchor. But as we just mentioned, all their characters have shades of grey, and Starlight was no different.
What does make her different now is how she’s being portrayed in Amazon’s The Boys, because there, Starlight might just be the only true superhero in existence. Season 1 Episode 1 opens with a training montage that shows us Annie January training in her mother’s backyard. We find out her hopes, aspirations, and dreams in quick succession. She is a Supe who surprisingly believes in her own strength and wants to actually use it for the purpose she believes she was bestowed with by God since birth.
Annie January is a Supe who genuinely behaves like a Superhero. For years, she spent time b her little hometown in Iowa; in fact, before joining The Seven, her nickname was the Defender of Des Moines. She takes her job seriously, patrols the streets herself, and was part of the teenage superhero team called Young Americans for a while, where she met her ex, Drummer Boy.
The story kicks off with Starlight auditioning for a place in The Seven, the premier team of superheroes in the reality of the Amazon show. She talks candidly about her humble, wholesome and clean upbringing and her bright-eyed optimism actually ends up getting her the dream job she’s always wanted; Annie January gets selected to become a part of The Seven.
She enters Vought Tower with her mom and is stunned by the bright lights that greet her. Her handler, Ashley, even tells her that all the people present at the inauguration were there for her, but she’d quickly realize that that, and everything else about Vought, was nothing but a steaming pile of horse crap. When Annie gets to the 99th floor of Vought Tower – where The Seven reside and operate – she is greeted by The Deep.
She is giddy with excitement at first, and even admits to having a small crush on him as a teen, but is horrified when she turns around to see his, let’s call it Deep Eel, out in the breeze. Annie tries to leave and when she feels threatened by him, she even charges up her powers but Deep manipulates her into giving him a bit of “pole-smoking” by saying that her membership in The Seven depended on it.
The rest of the scene plays out pretty much the same way it does in the comics, but her interaction with Queen Maeve is slightly better here. Instead of asking Starlight to eff off, she gives her advice on how to deal with Vought, which is the start of her own path to redemption. You can catch up on that in our Queen Maeve Origins video, which should be on our channel.
Within a couple of episodes, Starlight realizes just how shallow the world of Supes is and she contemplates just running away from all of it when she meets Hughie on a park bench. The two strangers open up to each other and inspire each other to pursue their dreams no matter what stood in their way. Hughie reminds Annie that, at her core, she is still a superhero, and so she goes back to Vought determined to tough it out and change the system from within, because that’s how she was raised.
She doesn’t know that Hughie is working with The Boys yet, and genuinely falls for the guy, despite him clearly having used her for her proximity to The Seven. Hughie planted a bug on her phone, used her to blackmail Ezekiel and even installed a bug in Vought Tower after having spoken with Annie that fateful day. After he runs into her at the Believe EXPO, he opens up to her and they start a proper relationship.
But that comes crashing down the very next episode when Homelander reveals that Hughie is a part of Butcher’s team of Supe-killing Boys, and when she confronts him with this, he drops another bomb on her. Hughie reveals to Annie that her powers weren’t a “gift from God”, they came from Compound V and this effectively shatters her entire worldview. For a long time, Annie had believed that her purpose was divine because her mom told her it was.
She endured gruelling pageant training and practically indoctrinated herself into Capes for Christ, because she believed Jesus was the source of powers. Finding out that it was all a lie broke Annie, and she decided that enough was enough and she needed to stand for herself. The fact that Butcher lodged a couple of .50 calibre rounds in her chest probably helped her make that decision, but we’re not here to judge. Either way, Annie decides that despite Hughie’s many transgressions of trust against her, she needs to save him when A-Train threatens his family because, as he once told her, “She’s an effing superhero”.
And so, she fights her despicable teammate in what is the first proper heroic showdown between two characters, and even manages to take him out with an assist from his bloated heart. Starlight embraces her “true destiny” to become a superhero and starts leveraging her position to hold Vought accountable.
Madelyn Stillwell forced her to wear a skimpy outfit that exposed way more skin than she was comfortable with showing, so she ended up reverting to her old outfit after the whole “Homelander dated a Nazi” debacle, because she knew they needed someone with a squeaky-clean image to help bolster their goodwill with the public. She leverages the fact that A-Train is alive, thanks to her to get the dirt on her in the first place, so we already know that she isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty.
Starlight also maintains her status as a double agent for a very long time, and that too in the presence of Homelander, who can tell if someone is lying simply by reading their heartbeat. She uses the fact that Hughie lied to her to defend herself from Homelander when he corners her for not killing him during their mission against The Boys.
She isn’t lying when she says that she doesn’t want to see Hughie again and that he broke her heart because, well, that is true. Hughie did lie to her about Translucent and Ezekiel and a bunch of other things that got her involved in this mess in the first place. Now, she was going to use the hardened cynic mentality that she had acquired, thanks to Vought feeding her jagged pills like it’s the only thing on her diet to break them completely and reform the world like a real superhero.
Because that’s the biggest difference between Starlight from the show and the comics; it’s that she is taking way more agency over herself and her own actions in the former. Showrunner Eric Kripke told Entertainment Weekly that he had very quickly decided to make Starlight his primary superhero character, precisely because Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s source material didn’t have a clear-cut “good guy”.
If you think Billy Butcher is a good guy, just wait till the series comes to an end; you’re in for a rude awakening, to say the very least. So, he needed someone to fill in that void and that’s where Starlight comes into the picture. Everything about her is centred on the idea that she is the only real superhero of the story. When she joins The Seven, she is taken aback by the fact that they are handing her all the details of the criminal she needs to apprehend and how she needs to do it because she prefers doing her own patrols.
She fights A-Train and Black Noir because she knows where their allegiances lie and she is looking at the bigger picture in that moment; though saying that she “fought” Noir isn’t technically right, but you get our point. Her off-the-script speech at Believe is well-received by the general public, and she even gets The Deep kicked off the team after gaining enough political power to make such a play.
Starlight’s theme in the series is bringing reform through recourse and saving the Supe community by showing them what a real hero should be, and she is tested a lot in her quest, both internally and externally. Apart from the numerous fights that she gets into with Supes much stronger than her, Annie is also divided by the person she was becoming. When she realizes that Hughie had lied to her about everything, she gets drunk at a Vought party and almost hooks up with someone before Queen Maeve steps in and asks her to not lose herself to their corporate BS.
When Hughie gets impaled in the attack on Sage Grove, Annie has to contend with the fact that she attacked a civilian and went overboard with her discharge, potentially killing the guy. Annie contends with the fact that she is becoming something she isn’t meant to be and accepts her mistakes as part of her journey. She has never shied away from accepting consequences for her actions and has always made it a point to ensure the safety of others before her own.
Yes, she has made choices along the way that she really shouldn’t have, and they do end up rewarding her in the short term. Thanks to her PR blitz following the Stormfront debacle, Stan Edgar makes her co-captain of The Seven and tells her that real power isn’t in raw strength; it’s in controlling people from the shadows.
We see that she is very conflicted by this decision and immediately rejects it at first because 1) Homelander was right there and he would’ve probably killed her if she said yes and 2) this was Vought! She had actively worked towards taking them down alongside Butcher’s Boys for months and was the only reason that the Stormfront thing even broke to the public in the first place. But then we see her contemplate the fact that she would become the first female leader of any super-team in history, and she thinks about what that would mean to girls all over the world.
Because as much as she hates them, she has to admit that Vought’s PR team does create inspiration out of thin air. Their Supes had practically become global icons, and Starlight could use her platform to make some real changes to the way things functioned if she accepted the position.
And so she did, thinking that being co-captain with Edgar’s backing practically made her immune; but she didn’t count on the fact that Homelander had finally lost his marbles and was staging an imminent usurpation. At first, she thinks everything is fine. Even when Homelander randomly springs the whole relationship thing on her in the middle of filming for a reality TV show, she doubles down on using her platform for good and plays into it, thinking that being co-captain gave her a level playing ground with him and she needed to show him that.
All that caution and guilt would evaporate into pure desperation when Homelander would take her to the sight of Supersonic’s dead body and threaten to do the same to Hughie if she didn’t comply. You see, Starlight got ahead of herself and spilled the beans on her plans to her ex, who signed up to help her out because he recognized how dominos work. But then, he tried to get A-Train in on the thing without knowing his past with Annie; for that he got his skull caved in in one of the gorier death scenes from the TV show.
This proved to Annie beyond the shadow of a doubt that she was marked for death either way, and she decided to embrace the only person she could believe in – herself. Annie teams up with M.M. to go after Soldier Boy and Butcher because she knows what they’re about to do is wrong.
She is already very perturbed by the fact that Hughie not only let Soldier Boy escape, but that he shot up V24 and her feelings towards him start to unravel. This only gets worse when Soldier Boy kills Crimson Countess because she sees that he has chosen this path knowing M.M. would never go for it. And she finally breaks it off with him when he shows up at Herogasm with Soldier Boy in tow.
Annie realizes that Hughie has an issue with her being the stronger one in the relationship, and he has always had it. She thought it was just the V talking, but as Butcher said earlier, the V only makes you more… you. She realised that Hughie’s inferiority complex was internalized on a deeper level than she had anticipated, and she saw the places he was willing to go to in order to “protect her”. This was a complete 180 from what he told her on their first date – that he has no problem with her being the stronger person of the two in the relationship.
She realizes that Hughie is just going to lie and do what he thinks is right as long as he thinks it’s in service of the greater good, and that’s a line she isn’t willing to cross. She attacks him when he tries to stop her from going back in to stop Soldier Boy and save the people he had already harmed.
At this moment, Annie January decides to cut off every controlling factor of her life and fight for what’s right, and that starts with her using her 193 million Instagram followers to expose Vought’s corruption, Homelander’s insanity and quit The Seven. The final shot of Herogasm is her saying that she is Annie January, and she effing quits, as her live chat goes berserk with comments cheering her own and questioning how the heck is Soldier Boy still alive.
We don’t know where the story goes from here. Before she went live, M.M. told her that this was a bad idea, and maybe it was. Maybe all she did was stoke the flames and invite Homelander to come kill her at his leisure. But she was going to stop compromising and trying to cause reform from within. She was going to take a more revolutionary path now, and we think that holds some real promise for the future of Amazon’s The Boys. As for what happens next, we’ll have to wait and see.
How Powerful is Starlight?
Starlight is one of the stronger Supes from the TV show. In the book, it’s made clear that her induction into The Seven is temporary. Jack From Jupiter basically says as much to A-Train. Starlight was only given a spot on The Seven because they needed a plaything, and that is something we don’t want to unpack yet again. Well, that and the fact that Lamplight was “retired”, but it wasn’t like there was something special about her. She could fly, but so could Homelander and Queen Maeve.
Starlight’s powers don’t even make that much of an appearance in the comics. But that doesn’t mean she isn’t powerful. From her training montage in the first episode of the series, we can see she possesses superhuman strength, being able to lift cars for weight training and punching craters into her mom’s bricked walls like it was nothing. Starlight also possesses inhuman physical endurance, as she is able to withstand Black Noir putting her through a wall and slamming her head on a table as hard as possible multiple times in a row.
She isn’t anywhere near the level of Homelander or Queen Maeve, but you’ll still need a diamond drill to cut through her skin because it’s just that tough. Starlight was only stunned after eating a couple of high calibre rounds square to her gut, and if that doesn’t tell you all you need to know about her, we don’t know what else will work. But perhaps her greatest power is her ability to use electricity to attack her enemies with beams of blinding light.
Her powers are contingent on the conductivity of electricity, and so an energy source is crucial for it to work. When Annie was imprisoned in a special cell built to contain Supes, she couldn’t channel her powers because its design prevented current from flowing into the room. But if she does have a sufficient source of power, then Starlight can discharge energy that can knock you flat on your back and kill you if you’re just a human being.
She can also use this power to sabotage electrical appliances, and it also fires off when she experiences… intense gratification, shall we say? But yes, the point is, Starlight’s most-important power is being able to channel light and use it as a projectile weapon, which will most certainly come in handy when she inevitably faces off against Homelander.
Marvelous Verdict
Starlight is an example of a character that isn’t given a huge role in the source material but becomes much more endearing and likable through the portrayal of her character in the live-action adaptation. It’s kind of how Mr. Zsasz is the breakout comedy character of Gotham, even though his comic book counterpart is just a deranged serial killer. Eric Kripke and Co. have done a great job of highlighting Starlight as being the true hero of The Boys whilst staying true to Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s “everyone is grey” character template as best as possible.
Starlight isn’t always prim, proper and perfect. She plays a dirty game against a house that always wins. But she does it anyway because she has bigger ideas for the world at large. And now that she has stopped compromising on her own ideals and quit Vought in the TV show, we think she will really come into her own as the only real superhero of this universe.
Starlight’s story isn’t finished yet, but we can tell you one thing already before it even comes to an end; she is going to be the inspiration of the people in the universe of Amazon’s The Boys through her actions alone. And if that isn’t what superheroes should be, then what is, really?