We’re taking a break from digging for artifacts for a while to return to Some Kind of Suicide Squad. Originally when I did this last year there was supposed to be two more entries, the Black Label Suicide Squad minis “Get Joker” and hopefully “Blaze” and then for various pipeline delivery reasons they kept getting delayed, the final issue of “Get Joker” especially. “Suicide Squad: Blaze” written by Simon Spurrier art by Aaron Campbell, and colors by Jordie Bellaire had a much smoother release schedule, largely hitting that once every two-month schedule with the first issue going on sale in February 2022 and issue three on July 5th 2022.
It’s worth noting a shared motif between “Get Joker” and “Blaze”, nihilism, and how both series use that mode towards very different ends. “Get Joker” takes the terminality of being a member of Task Force X and uses it to explore how the outside world pigeonholes and defines you as an object and the dissonance this objectification creates with your subject position, expressed through internal monologue in the case of Jason Todd. And that gab between subject and object is where the small human moments of “Get Joker” shine when characters are allowed to be or co-mmiserate in their shared ossification. “Blaze” takes the opposite route the nihilism becomes a tool for the books overall British and black humored approach. It becomes a dare to the reader to emotionally invest in these terminal characters. You thought this was going to end “well”? They disabuse you of that notion throughout the first issue from the description of what the Blaze Program is to the carnage filled battle royale that passes for a competency exam. Or all the bloody violence that follows. At every moment where you think some amount of if not “character growth” but basic human kindness or empathy will be on display or rewarded, the book punches you in the gut. The book isn’t entirely without traditional gags, the revelation that the powers that will kill Mediocre Man Michael Van Zandt are not Cool™ but in fact lame as hell (if very useful in one very specific circumstance) is hilarious.
In the articulation of these multiple strands of comedy that Simon Spurrier and Aaron Campbell are able to show the wide berth a nihilistic comedic can give their narrative. If nothing matters than that means basic assumption of formal and narrative characteristics are able to be questioned, subverted, and to a degree undone. Take the basic assumption of what passes for a Suicide Squad story. From a thousand-foot point of view the basic plot of the series matches the people on a mission structure that is the properties core narrative engine. In this case Amanda Waller brings Project Blaze online to combat the Blaze a mysterious entity that’s killing capes and once again the byproduct of a monstrous military industrial complex. These are the broad contours of the plot; however, Spurrier instead takes this setup for the Suicide Squad and places it off to the side. Covers prominently feature popular members of the Squad like Harley Quinn, Peacemaker, King Shark, and Captain Boomerang, but this is not a story about them it’s about normal idiots who decided it was better to go out in a blaze of glory alongside them, people who dare walk with IP deities. The usual members of Task Force X are just the shallow marketing ploy to get you to hopefully notice in an over saturated media environment. No one would really buy a comic centered around the not great criminal Michael Van Zandt and how he gets by on luck and is utterly unworthy of pretty much everything decent that happens to him.
The narrative conceit of Project Blaze itself makes the book closer to the Marvel comic “Strikeforce: Morituri”, wherein a group of soldiers join a government program to gain metahuman powers to battle an alien invasion at the cost of life expectancy of less than 12 months. Even more fundamentally as the series reaches the terminal velocity of its climax the formal potential of this nihilistic approach is revealed as artist Aaron Campbell turns the elements of the comic on their head. Or more accurately pays homage to the works of Grant Morrison in “Animal Man” and others that explode the constraints of the panel and instead produce art that is closer to the direct address of Brechtian theater. All this nihilistic approach to form and narrative does is reveal the opposite of the meaningless of this mode and instead revels in the interconnectedness of everything. How through those layers everything has meaning and “nothing ever ends” in the land of the superheroes. So, what if this one got a ‘bad’ ending it just means they have to go and search for a better one. Campbell and Spurrier take the nihilistic impulse of Suicide Squad and reframe it from “nothing matters” to “who cares?” and uses that question to look for the better story. Maybe not in this instance, but maybe Van Zandt will find it in the next one. It ultimately asks for the power of hope.
Continued below
If all of that doesn’t turn you off from this book, Aaron Campbell and Jordie Bellaire’s art might. Not because it is of poor quality, quite the opposite. It sits outside the bounds of traditional comic storytelling and instead acts more like a high art pastiche captured with a punk lens. Cambell’s figure work and environments are in a realist tradition, but then Bellaire just splatters it all in color. There isn’t a lot of rendering in Bellaire’s artwork instead it functions more like flats and leaning Campbell’s inking to give a sense of dynamism and depth to the image. This isn’t entirely effective but as the series progresses and the fundamentals of comic art break down from panel design and the nods to realism are replaced with surrealism. In these moments of powerful excess Bellaire’s color palette begins to become more like chromatic abstract paintings with Campbell’s lines over top of them. I think these pages are phenomenal to look at and vibe to, they’re also frustrating to read. Together Campbell and Bellaire’s work push their work more in the direction of an artist like Renato Guedes (see “Shadowman/Rae Sremmurd #1” and their “Shadowman” work in general).
After reading “Blaze” several times I’m not entirely sure it is successful, maybe it didn’t plan to be successful. But I appreciate that it exists as this gonzo rendition of “Suicide Squad”. In an era of IP management, the fact they got this published and sold is cool, or maybe just hegemony being flexible and incorporating them into itself. To get close to a story like “Blaze” you’d have to look at Michel Fiffe’s “COPRA” which is both not-“Suicide Squad” or mainstream the way this book technically is.
Next week, it’s time to revisit the surprise 2016 hit “Suicide Squad” for the first time since I saw it in theaters and promptly never wanted to consider it yet again. But this time it’ll be the “extended” edition.
