However, there’s no reason to expect that Vought-America stopped there. Homelander wasn’t the only superhuman created by Vought, just the strongest, with the original Seven all being products of their experimentation. Even Homelander – in The Boys #64 – states, “You’re growing the new me right now. Some camo-clothed tactical genius version that does exactly what it’s told.” While the epilogue miniseries Dear Becky – set ten years after the original series – doesn’t explicitly acknowledge this replacement, that only suggests that this time, the company is content to employ its unkillable muscle in secret following Homelander and Black Noir’s disastrous final confrontation.

However, the series actually hints at a candidate beyond Homelander’s hypothetical accusation. In The Boys #57 – from Garth Ennis and Russ Braun – Hughie investigates Queen Maeve’s secret file, kept by superhuman fixer Doctor Peculiar. Among many other details, Hughie learns that Queen Maeve once dated Stormfront (a man in the comics), and gave birth to a young son. The baby wasn’t actually his, with the father implied to be an unnamed other supe, and Stan Lee parody the Legend states that Peculiar “made that go away.” While it’s possible to infer that Peculiar had the child killed, this is unlikely. Fans know that Blarney Cock – a member of the team Teenage Kix – was secretly the son of Maeve and the Legend, establishing that there’s a history of Maeve’s children being raised as new superheroes. There’s also the fact that Queen Maeve is the only supe whose powers approach those of the Homelander, meaning that Vought would likely be very interested in her children’s potential.

This would especially be the case if the child’s father was another powerful supe, as this would theoretically combine both parents’ genetic changes and Compound V. After all, even Maeve’s child with the Legend was a superhuman. The Boys often engages with themes of eugenics, invoking explicit Nazi imagery in how supes consider themselves above normal humans, and it would actually be out of character for Vought not to have one eye on each new supe born into the world. In The Boys television show, Homelander has a sick plan to harvest Queen Maeve’s eggs, and this concept is also set up in the original series, with Doctor Peculiar’s work as an off-the-books medical practitioner allowing him multiple opportunities to do the same.

Dear Becky made it clear that the creators are prepared to return to the story for the right idea, and several plot threads from the original series would certainly serve the narrative of Queen Maeve’s son being stolen and raised as the next Homelander by Vought or some other organization, even if that wasn’t the original intent. A sardonic and often callous series, The Boys has little time for most of its characters’ suffering, but in shrugging away the fates of characters like Queen Maeve’s forgotten son, the series has left a trail of breadcrumbs which could see this minor character brought back as the next iteration of Homelander – one who would operate in a very different world to that his mother inhabited.