YOU MIGHT think that, in the 81 years since the first “Superman” comic was released, every permutation of superhero plotline must have been thoroughly explored. But one set of story arcs remains surprisingly underdeveloped: that in which the superheroes are the bad guys. To be sure, stories in which the public mistakenly believe superheroes to be villains have been around since “The Green Hornet” (1936), and government restrictions on ultrahuman vigilantes form the backstory of the “Watchmen” and “Incredibles” franchises. Yet what remains rare are scenarios where the reverse is the case—in which the gullible masses sing the praises of powered individuals who they believe are protecting them, but who in fact exploit them and hold their puny lives in contempt.

This is the delightfully subversive premise of “The Boys”, an Amazon series based on the comic books by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. Its themes of arbitrary power, corruption and media manipulation deliver a Trump-era jolt to the seemingly played-out world of superhero drama. In the opening episode, the protagonist, an indecisive electronics salesman named Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid), sees his girlfriend accidentally annihilated by A-Train, a hyper-speedy member of an elite superhero team known as The Seven. The group’s management corporation, Vought (a reality-television studio that secretly scripts their crime-fighting adventures), tries to pay Hughie off as part of a non-disclosure agreement. Infuriated, he joins The Boys, a band of ex-CIA officers who know what the superheroes are up to, and have set out to kill them.

Part of the fun comes from the upside-down experience of rooting against caped crusaders. The show’s tongue-in-cheek violence is not new to the screen: a sequence in which the boys try to figure out how to off Translucent, a superhero with invisible and impenetrable skin whom they have trapped in an electrified cage, owes a clear debt to Quentin Tarantino and to “Breaking Bad”. But this brand of black comedy has never been applied so systematically to a superhero universe. More slapstick gags are assigned to an Aquaman knock-off called The Deep. (The superpower of communicating with fish begs to be ridiculed.)

Yet “The Boys” is not ultimately aiming for laughs. Its Superman figure is a flying, laser-eyed blond named Homelander (Antony Starr), who wears an American flag as his cape. At first the writers play the joke for pure corniness, but the true extent of Homelander’s lying and megalomania gradually reveals itself. A dark take on that post-September 11th staple, the hijacked-airliner rescue scene, makes for uncomfortable viewing. So does the spectacle of Homelander invoking divine sanction for xenophobic violence before a crowd of adoring evangelical Christians.

A sociopathic reality-television star, draping himself in the flag to justify his corruption: the political commentary here is not exactly hidden. But “The Boys” has an unusually subtle take on the interaction between superhero power and real-world institutions. Many previous superheroes have morally fraught relationships with their corporate or government handlers (see Iron Man), but Homelander is surely the first to have an unresolved Oedipal fixation on his boss, Vought’s female vice-president. What that metaphor implies about America’s relationship to big business is left to the viewer’s imagination.

For all its originality, “The Boys” needs a few clichés to make its story work. Hughie turns out to be a computer-hacking electronics genius. Starlight (Erin Moriarty), a young woman with energy-blasting eyes who joins The Seven in the first episode, is a good-hearted naïf like Hughie. This allows the writers to drop a traditional superhero into their universe for contrast. A final cliché is the boys’ leader Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), a grizzled rogue agent with a grudge against Homelander. Like The Seven—indeed, like all superheroes—Butcher and the rest of the well-meaning group are essentially vigilantes. This feels like a weakness in a series which seeks to question the rejection of procedural justice and governance that lies at the heart of the superhero mythos.

Yet it is hard to accuse “The Boys” of lacking nerve. The original strip, written in the thick of the war in Iraq, was terminated by its first publisher, an imprint of DC Comics, for its anti-superhero tone. (It continued with a new publisher.) As for the television series, Donald Trump has already vowed to retaliate against Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, for the way he has been portrayed in the Washington Post, which Mr Bezos owns. In the face of such threats, Amazon deserves credit for airing a series that clearly satirises the president’s political style.

The power of “The Boys” comes from its attack on the illiberal vigilantism embodied by The Seven, and on their fans’ eagerness to embrace their oppressors. There is a name for this longing for salvation by a cleansing, ultra-powerful agent of violence, free of institutional checks and balances, uniting nationalism and corporate power—it is called fascism. Viewers know what such forces look like when they are loosed upon the world. It was clear in the 1930s, even as superheroes first burst into the collective imagination. In real life, might superheroes actually be the enemy? Could they be the bad guys? Of course they could be. Of course they are.

“The Boys” is available on Amazon Prime Video now