Review: Suicide Squad #1

Written by Adam Glass
Illustrated by Federico Dallocchio and Ransom Getty

They’re a team of death-row super villains recruited by the government to take on missions so dangerous — they’re sheer suicide!

Harley Quinn! Deadshot! King Shark! Defeated and imprisoned, they’re being interrogated about their mission — and about who’s pulling the strings behind this illegal operation. Who will be the first to crack under the pressure?

As a special Sunday treat, we look at Suicide Squad #1 page-by-page. Well, I look at it. I wish it had been a “we.” You know what loves company.

So join me after the jump! Obviously, spoilers are discussed.

Things we lost in the relaunch fire: Amanda Waller’s weight, Harley Quinn’s pants, King Shark’s genus, Deadshot’s mustache, et al. I’ll spoil the rest of this review for you and say up top that while I don’t agree with some of these changes, they aren’t enough to prompt fire and brimstone from me. For the purposes of this review, I’m just going to treat them like new characters I’ve never seen before, because that seems to be what Suicide Squad wants. These relaunched books should be able to live or die by their own merits, so let’s see how that noble principle works in the real world of imaginary comics stuff.

Unfortunately, this is where Suicide Squad #1’s troubles begin.

We’re going to break this down, page by page, and see just how friendly this is to new readers, or new anyone.

Let’s start with the cover: three figures, one of which an extremely happy shark, floating/standing in a weird green haze and/or the Matmos from Barbarella. There are bullet-holes, but we’re not a hundred percent sure in what. The colorist has not made it exceedingly clear what this situation is, but the message carries through: these are violent people with guns, teeth, and greasepaint.

Page one: three panels of a man being tortured. He has metal stuck to his face in a weird array. The torturer calls him “Deadshot,” and black caption boxes with white text (and a little target icon) inform us of what he’s thinking. The torturer apparently wants him to confess to something, but he refuses.

Pages two and three: a group of men like the torturer from page one are torturing Deadshot and six other people. These people, we are told, are the Suicide Squad. Deadshot refers to them as being “worse than rats” in a carryover from page one.

Page four: the torturer continues to work over Deadshot. The torturer wants to know “who sent you,” although we are not told where he was sent or what he did. The torturer informs us that Deadshot’s family is dead, except for a “her” who, when brought up, provokes Deadshot to unprecedented internal rage. We are not told who this “her” is.

Page five: we flash back to Deadshot’s past. His face is totally enclosed in metal here, but we can recognize his big cyber-eye or whatever. He has totally moved on from the subject of “her,” instead talking about how he “settles his business” (“business” being a leitmotif of Deadshot’s thought-speech). “Settling his business” involves failing to assassinate a senator in Gotham City, and then shooting Batman in the shoulder. Presumably, Batman then defeats Deadshot and sends him to jail. None of this explains why the Squad is “worse than rats,” incidentally.

Page six: Deadshot tells us that the preceding incident is just one of his many crimes. It’s unclear whether he’s still being tortured. Across the room, a couple torturers are pouring salt on a guy they refer to as “El Diablo,” which characterizes them as fairly uncreative torturers that they’d literally resort to pouring salt on a guy’s wounds. Black caption boxes with red text (and a little flame icon) let us in on what El Diablo’s thinking. Unfortunately, these captions look extremely similar to Deadshot’s, and given that black is the dominant color of these pages, the captions also fail to stand out within the pages’ own geography. We are told El Diablo is “a hood rat,” and his captions imply some degree of religious faith. Sound effects indicate that he’s being beaten, or something, but the framing makes it hard to tell how.

Page seven: El Diablo, presumably in flashback, attacks a house that is presumably full of gang members, because he is screaming about gang members having stolen from him. El Diablo appears to be positioning himself as the king of the streets of wherever they are (it is literally impossible to tell, other than “the suburbs, somewhere”). He also appears to not realize that attacking what appears to be a family house might result in a family being killed. If we had known this was specifically a drug stash house or something, we might be provoked to sympathize when he accidentally kills some children, but because all we see is him going after “some guy’s house,” the natural conclusion is that he’s mentally handicapped. His running narration informs us that this comic is being written by a 30-year-old white guy.

Page eight: El Diablo is still being beaten. Apparently he passed out. He, like Deadshot, refuses to name his employers. We move over to another person being tortured, named as Harley Quinn. She isn’t scared of the torturers, and makes sort of lame wisecracks at them. The torturers electrocute her cheeks, and we then are given insight into her thoughts by caption boxes that are colored a red gradient with white text. Unlike Deadshot or El Diablo, this caption box has no icon.

Page nine: Harley Quinn misses the Joker. (A caption box tells us to read Detective Comics to find out where he is.) The details of their breakup are not explained, nor Harley’s activity, which appears to be “proving to the Joker that she deserves him, by slow-dancing with dead bodies of lawyers who helped put Joker in prison, which is by this evidence presumably where Joker is, over in Detective Comics.” A superhero, identified in the final caption of the page as Black Canary, arrests her — or at least, we’re told that Canary arrests her, since we don’t see it. This is all in flashback, by the way.

Page ten: Harley Quinn is nuts, as evidenced by how she seems to enjoy torture and how one of the torturers explicitly describes her as nuts. Another torturer calls out to Black Spider, who is apparently not important enough to receive a flashback or even an explanation. Another guy, Voltaic, receives the same treatment. He is apparently electric. I use the word “apparently” a lot because very little in this book is properly explained. It’s a bit like giving people just the scene in The Godfather when they kill Luca Brasi and attempting to determine the rest of the plotline of the movie from the minor context clues. King Shark is a big shark-man who’s been left to dry out under heat lamps and who is, presumably, amphibious. He bites a torturer’s arm open when one gets too close, thus establishing his characterization (“bitey”).

Page eleven: King Shark receives further character-building dialogue (“MEAT! MEAT! MEAT!”). Another guy in a mask (later identified as being Savant) is being tortured by having bugs placed all over him. Despite being covered in bugs and apparently bothered by it, for whatever reason it’s a member of his own team grievously wounding one of their captors that provokes him to squeal. This makes the codename of “Savant” fairly ironic, because I’m fairly sure that he’s meant to be a complete idiot.

Page twelve: Savant explains the Suicide Squad, in that he has no clue what the deal is with the Suicide Squad. The team members are incarcerated in full super-villain gear and armor, for whatever reason, despite ostensibly being within a supermax prison. The members are gassed and injected with micro-bombs, like the al-Qaeda version of Fantastic Voyage.

Page thirteen: the Squad in action. Savant’s narration indicates that this is their first mission, taking out a “rogue agent” in a log cabin somewhere snowy. No one seems particularly concerned with stealth or the possibility of traps; either that or they’ve already disabled them, so they can freely walk around the woods — like that one scene in Reservoir Dogs, only in the woods.

Page fourteen: El Diablo, Deadshot, and Harley Quinn charge the cabin. El Diablo tries to reason with their mark, but Deadshot shoots him in the head right away. El Diablo is angry about this, even though he just recently was setting gang members on fire (apparently without negotiation) because they owed him money.

Page fifteen: It turns out the guy was really a guy-shaped bomb, which only Harley Quinn notices. This is consistent with El Diablo’s previous lack of attention to detail (i.e. Charbroiling kids by accident), but makes Deadshot look fairly oblivious. The cabin blowing up apparently knocks out the entire team.

Page sixteen: Savant is dragged away by the torturers and presumably killed. The rest of the team showcases reactions ranging from “spite” to “callousness.”

Page seventeen: having killed Savant, the torturers decide that they’re done, and one orders the rest of the Squad “bagged.” Killer Shark gets in more clever dialogue, implying that he would like to eat another person. The rest of the group are apparently whacked with tiny hammers until they’re all knocked out.

Page eighteen: The Squad has apparently been up for eight hours. They’re suddently in their gear again, with hoods over their heads. (One of them comments on how strange it is that they’re in their gear again.) People point submachine guns at their heads and attempt to goad team members into giving up the name Amanda Waller, but none of them will confirm that Waller is their boss.

Page nineteen: We are told that the team has passed a test for joining Task Force X (aka the Suicide Squad). This test apparently is contingent upon them totally fucking up their first mission and getting themselves caught in a devastating explosion, and then surviving the resultant torture without speaking. The team is released from their bonds, and then allow themselves to be buckled into restraints of some kind, thus demonstrating a somewhat ambivalent attitude toward their new masters. No one seems especially perturbed that they’ve been put through this ordeal; the most of a stink that gets raised is that Black Spider, in his only dialogue of the issue, notes that some team members need doctors. Deadshot identifies the voice giving them orders as Amanda Waller, because apparently now that he’s not being tortured over it, who cares if he says it.

Page twenty: Amanda Waller, holding a torturer’s hood despite having a body type that matched none of the builds of the previously seen torturers (who all appeared to be men), informs the Squad that they have to kill a whole stadium full of people. The Squad are then kicked out of an airplane. This is the cliffhanger. No internal monologues have appeared since page nine.

If you’re even still reading this, let’s review: a bunch of assholes got tortured as part of what was honestly a pretty stupid initiation test (see page nineteen), and then don’t seem to really care about it. Or about anything, really. They collectively show the personality and motivation of a bag of Cheetos. Two members of the team are not even explained beyond “well, these guys exist, too.” Not only does nothing really happen, but the scenes in which something risks happening — the flashbacks — cut in and out without explanation. By “explanation,” I don’t mean that they’re not marked as flashbacks; I mean that this is a comic book that considers context an almost total waste of time. It wants to stand as its own new thing amongst the relaunch, but it can’t be bothered to explain itself to more than the laziest, most indirect degree.

Why should we care why these people are doing anything? So they have to kill a whole stadium of people. So? So they work for Amanda Waller. So? Who’s that? So they’re all hardened criminals and prisoners, but according to Savant, they’re also volunteers. Why? We get three internal POVs in most of the first half of the issue, but once things move beyond “what got the three main characters to where they were,” those POVs vanish. Do these characters have nothing to say that might shed light on the situation for a new reader? Certainly, based on that ending, they don’t seem to feel anything. To facilitate the cliffhanger, they allow themselves to be removed from bondage and then immediately placed back into it, which just makes them seem weirdly passive for a group of dangerous, presumably fully equipped criminals who’ve had car batteries hooked up to their faces or (groan) salt poured into their wounds.

The original Suicide Squad series is one of the best things DC ever published. From this one issue, this one looks like it’ll end up like the second Suicide Squad series: an unrelatable, swiftly canceled mess. At the risk of sounding like one of Suicide Squad‘s near-interchangeable, tougher-than-thou asshole crooks: I can’t bring myself to feel bad about this.

Final Verdict: 1.0 – Lame