Compound V Won’t save you

There's a moment in the final season of The Boys where Homelander — stripped of context, stripped of the worship, stripped of everything the world handed him — is just a person. And that person has nothing. No warmth. No code. No reason anyone would follow him into a burning building unless they were afraid of what he'd do if they didn't.

That's the whole tragedy of Compound V, isn't it? It doesn't build you. It just makes more of whatever you already are.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, standing in front of LK-023.

Not because the painting is about superheroes. It's not. But because of what it takes to actually make something. The piece I’m working on right now — the iron ore tones, the texture built up in layers, the fire underneath that only reveals itself when you scrape back the surface — none of that came from talent. It came from hours. From decisions. From being willing to push paste onto a canvas at 11pm when no one is watching and nothing is guaranteed.

I've worked alongside a lot of talented people in my career. Genuinely gifted — the kind of people who make things look easy in ways that used to intimidate me. And I've watched a surprising number of them collapse the moment things got hard. Because talent was always their answer. Their Compound V. It got them in the room, got them the title, got them the reputation — and then the moment real pressure hit, there was nothing underneath it. No work ethic. No humility. No hunger.

Talent without character is just a head start that runs out.

We're living in a strange moment in America right now. Power is being worn loudly by people who inherited it, who were handed it, who never had to become anything to get it. And like Homelander without the adoration — when you strip away the inheritance, the title, the noise — you start to see what's actually there. Or what isn't.

I'm not interested in that version of things.

What I care about is Captain America. Not because of the serum. Steve Rogers before the serum — small, sick, rejected from service, standing in an alley refusing to back down — that's the whole point. The serum didn't make him who he was. It just let the world finally see what was already there. Character first. Everything else second.

LK-023 isn't finished yet. It's still becoming. The iron ore hasn't fully claimed the surface, the fire is still being revealed layer by layer. But that process — the unglamorous, patient, physical work of building something real — is the thing I keep coming back to.

You can't Compound V your way to meaning.

You have to earn it.