Homelander has always been the biggest villain in The Boys, but season 2 also introduced a woman named Clara Vought (Aya Cash) who rivalled even the Seven’s antagonistic leader. A terrifying white supremacist who seemed to have already gotten away with murder for decades, Clara Vought was eventually revealed to have been there from the very beginning of Vought’s nefarious dealings.
But although the show has dished out some of her insidious history, there is still much we don’t know about the Supe who was once Liberty, then became Stormfront, but who began life as Klara Risinger. However, thanks to an upcoming prequel show that will put Clara front and center again alongside Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles) she’ll be back on our screens in no time.
Let’s look at what we know (and don’t know) about the life of Clara Vought.
Clara Vought’s History
Born in Berlin in 1919, Klara Risinger was documented to be socializing with the National Socialist German Workers Party during the 1930s. During that time, she met and married Frederick Vought, the inventor of Compound V and an established member of the Nazi Party, where he was considered a respected geneticist. At one point, he was appointed chief physician of the Dachau concentration camp by Hitler himself, where he would have access to a range of human test subjects.
Klara became the original Vought superhero after taking a successful first dose of Compound V. She gained powers such as electrokinesis and superhuman strength. But she would not remain in Germany for too long. In 1944, she and her husband were brought to America during an Operation Paperclip WWII effort to bring German scientists into U.S. employ.
Klara’s husband would go on to become the founder of the company Vought-American, which later became Vought International, and Klara changed her name to Adele Vought (after her overbearing mother) possibly to avoid anti-German sentiment.
Liberty and Stormfront
During the 1950s, Clara (her name gets Anglicized) started operating as a Supe under the moniker Liberty, and met Soldier Boy, who had successfully adapted to a dose of V1, along with Private Angel, Bombsight, and Torpedo. She and Soldier Boy founded the annual superhero orgy Herogasm together, and apparently began a decades-long romance.
Clara was operating as Liberty up until the late 1970s, when she was linked to racially motivated murders. But between 1979 and 2020, her whereabouts and activities were unknown. She did not seem to be around when Vought sold Soldier Boy out to the Russians in 1984. Around 2020, Clara reemerged from the shadows, adopted the moniker Stormfront, and pretended to be a social media-savvy Supe from Portland, answering to Vought International CEO Stan Edgar as a new member of the Seven.
During the second season of The Boys, we saw her romance Homelander and try to spur him on to insidious greatness. She revealed her white supremacist agenda and that she and her husband once had a daughter called Chloe, who apparently never took Compound V because she aged and died like everyone else, while Clara barely aged a day.
The Boys, along with Queen Maeve, tried to kill Stormfront when they discovered what she’d been up to. Yet, it was Ryan who took her out of the picture as he tried to prevent harm to his mother, Becca. Using his heat vision, he severely burned her and turned three of her four limbs into stumps. Clara tried to maintain her relationship with Homelander following this brutal encounter with Ryan, but she eventually lost faith in him. She took her own life by biting off her tongue.
But after Soldier Boy entered the picture, he questioned Clara’s fate. He didn’t think she would ever kill herself and asked Homelander point-blank if he saw her body. It seemed like The Boys was teasing the possibility that Clara might still be alive somehow.
Vought Rising and the Missing Puzzle Pieces
There are still plenty of missing pieces in Clara’s history. Not much is known about her life during WWII, nor about what happened after she and Frederick moved to America. The building blocks of Vought-American are also mysterious. How involved was she in shaping the company that would become Vought International? And what was her relationship with Frederick really like as his public image turned him into an American icon?
We also know that Clara and Soldier Boy were heavily linked during that time, but their relationship hasn’t yet been explored on screen. That’s all set to change with The Boys‘ upcoming prequel series, Vought Rising, which takes place in the 1950s and has been described as “L.A. Confidential with superheroes” by The Boys creator Eric Kripke. It will explore Soldier Boy’s early Supe activity alongside Clara, but was Soldier Boy’s true relationship with Clara as important as he claims, or is he an unreliable narrator of their time together?
We also don’t know the extent of Clara’s influence over those early superhero exploits. She proved to be such a diabolical antagonist in The Boys, but we could get to witness some truly uncontrolled villainy from Clara Vought in Vought Rising during a time when depraved superhero shenanigans were still in their infancy.
