The third season of The Boys has begun to fill in the blanks left by Seven member Black Noir, yet these disclosures still beg the question of Black Noir’s age in The Boys. Black Noir, who is completely covered in black body armor and who never speaks, is by far the most enigmatic member of the superhero squad. But now that Black Noir has been revealed, it is now simpler to determine The Boys’ quiet supe’s age.
In The Boys, the titular group of helpless people battles Vought International and its gang of vicious superheroes. The Seven is the primary superhuman team for Vought, and its members are continuously changing due to death or controversy. The Deep, Translucent, Lamplighter, and other characters have appeared briefly on The Seven, but only a few cast members have remained constant over the course of The Boys’ three seasons: Homelander, Starlight, Queen Maeve, A-Train, and Black Noir. Each of these villains is a dark parody of a well-known DC or Marvel figure that has committed crimes, giving the Boys good reason to eliminate them.
The identity of Black Noir was completely unknown until The Boys season 3. Noir is used by Vought for secret ops missions and has a high damage tolerance, but little more is known about the super. But “Barbary Coast,” the third episode of season three of The Boys, eventually sheds light on Black Noir’s past. In reality, Noir was a part of the Soldier Boy’s Payback unit, which helped the Contras in Nicaragua in the early 1980s. Noir donned his black body armor even back then, but not because he chose to; rather, Vought made him do it to hide his identity. Noir finally made the decision to operate without a mask during the same 1984 mission that resulted in the kidnapping of Soldier Boy. This led to him suffering severe burns, which is why he now always wears a mask. Actor Fritzy Klevans Destine, a relatively fresh talent who appears to be in his 20s, plays the role of Maskless Noir. While there is no clear indication of Black Noir’s age in The Boys, this scene does provide some cues. He was probably born between the late 1950s and early 1960s if he was in his mid-20s in 1984. It might not be that easy, though.
Black Noir’s identity is first made known in the “Barbary Coast” 1984 flashback, despite the fact that Noir had regularly appeared in costume in the present. Black Noir possesses a healing factor, a power that frequently slows aging in other superhero comics, thus it’s plausible that he ages properly despite this. Supers don’t get their abilities from birth in The Boys. Instead, after ingesting a dose of Compound V, they gain them. When Noir acquired Compound V, his healing factor may have caused him to stop aging, making it practically difficult to estimate his age. The Boys’ most recent information on Noir is his stint with Payback, thus he may have been active for many years prior. Noir would have been born in the 1910s or 1920s because Nazi Frederick Vought first began working with Compound V during World War II, making the earliest time Noir could have received a dose of it the early 1940s.
The Boys comics depict Black Noir as a botched Homelander ripoff, but this is obviously not the direction the Prime Video series is going in. This makes determining Black Noir’s age in The Boys difficult, as does the absence of information about Noir’s healing power. Noir, on the other hand, was either born in the 1960s or, at the earliest, in the 1910s. His birth year can at least be put in a 50-year gap with the information the show has so far given, but The Boys season 3 has hinted that more Black Noir information is to follow.
