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Some Kind of Suicide Squad: “Get Joker!”

By | August 7th, 2022
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

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 “Blaze” and then for various pipeline delivery reasons they kept getting delayed, the final issue of “Get Joker” especially. The three-issue series first two issues came out August and September 2021, the final issue finally came out May of 2022. I thought the final issue had been pulped since they’d dated the collection before the final issue. If you would like to read this three issues series, it is collected, and the first two issues are up on DC Universe, and the final issue should be on the service in October.

Given their work, it is surprising that Brian Azzarello hasn’t had a run on the core “Suicide Squad” book. It’s the kind of pulpy, grimey, pocket of the DCU Azzarello should be right at home with. The overall plot of “Get Joker” is your basic mission for Task Force X. It’s captured in the title of the series: Get Joker. But it’s never that easy. After the Joker, dressed in their best Clockwork Orange cosplay, attacks Amanda Waller and steals the Box. Jason Todd, Harley Quinn, and a gang of original characters must balance not pissing off the Clown Prince of Crime and losing their head (though technically in this story they’ll just immolate from the inside with nanites) and making sure the Joker loses his. All before another Task Force of hard bodies comes in and mops everything up.

The promise of the Black Label has been the ability to free creative teams from the constraints of mainstream continuity and to tell the story they want to tell, and more importantly ones with an ending. All wrapped up in a square bound prestige presentation. Black Label serves as the publishers Elseworld imprint which for all the “freedom” the dislocation from the main DCU is supposed to bring it frequently acts as a meta meditation on the often-immutable core aspects of a property. Interestingly this pair of Suicide Squad minis both pick up on an aspect of Task Force X that’s present in the Ostrander-Yale run, nihilism, from differing perspectives. In “Suicide Squad: Get Joker” writer Brian Azzarello focuses on the terminal status of Task Force X to tell an action-packed story that metatextually considers the predicament of Jason Todd aka Red Hood aka that Formerly dead Robin. A character in the infinite DC multiverse cannot seem to escape the tag line of being the mostly dead Robin, who got better … or maybe worse. This sort of emphasis isn’t new to the character in the DC mainstream with the Rebirth era “Red Hood and the Outlaws” attempting to work through that label into being something more productive. Jason Todd becomes the figure through which this Squad’s nihilism runs through as he excepts the suicidal mission to get the Joker. This results in an ending that is arguably nihilistic, but not with the baggage of negative connotations such a descriptor usually brings. All of this is shot through with Azzarello’s pulpy, lurid, and Brian De Palma-esque, way of doing writing.

“Get Joker” leans heavy on the “trauma”, I put this in quotes not to discount the notion but to emphasize how constructed the concept employed in this series. Arguably everyone on the Squad is working through something. With the Joker as an interlocutor Jason and Harley Quinn’s shared abuse at the hands of Joker becomes a point of recognition and relationship between the two. The particulars of what Harley Quinn endured are textually left vague at “abusive” but as we see in the second issue you can get a good idea for what it could be like.

Azzarello’s hardboiled everything is contrasted with moments of real beauty, subtly, and absurdity, found in artist Alex Maleev and Matt Hollingsworth’s watercolor like art. Maleev and Hollingsworth more than does their fair share of gruesome imagery, in particular FireFly I am being burnt alive comes to mind. But these moments are than contrasted by meditative cut aways to the environment, peaceful images of quite in a book filled with noise. Noise that often takes the form of onomatopoeia, which in turn become the panels itself to contain Maleev’s art. This postmodern pastiche approach is tonally all over the place. But what it does is constantly force the reader to remember they are reading a comic book and in all that supposedly shallow style is a reminder of the humanity of everyone involved. An often very damaged, unhealthy, humanity, but one none the less. Even the Joker, a character I loathe, is given a surprisingly poignant moment as he ponders the sisyphian joke of trying to stop the tide and the existential anxiety and dread that results from recognizing that joke. So of course, he forces the members of the Suicide Squad to fight the tide and shoot in his stead. That sort of recognition is at the core of Ostrander’s run.

Continued below

Modern incarnations of Task Force X are often filled with a few obvious red shirts, obscure Silver Age villains or just plain original characters. The Task Force in “Get Joker!” is often refered to as cannon fodder, outside of Jason Todd, Harley Quinn, and maybe Wild Dog – for no other reason than the character was a main cast member on Arrow – everyone else is cult status or an original invention. This clear hierarchy is what makes the quite scenes like the one between Silver Banshee and the character known only as “Meow Meow” as they discuss the nature of what made them “villains” and how that paradigm of hero and villain is created through patriarchal control of language effective. Now the character Meow Meow and her story is pretty much a contemporary Orientalist stereotype wrapped in misogyny. But I would argue that this stero-archetyping is countered with the quiet moments of her alone eating ants or laughing at Pebbles. The character isn’t perfect but that ability to mix what is perceived as good and negative traits within these characters is a storytelling subtly that is not given due consideration. But also, it’s utterly understandable why someone would want to discount everything about the character from their name, origin, and monstrous nature as being nothing but the perpetuator of harmful tropes. It’s that kind of noir ambivalence that these kinds of stories frequently trade in that I find interesting. These characters are often discounted and cannon fodder for more popular ones but are still the byproducts of systems of power and culture and have depth and the ability to be “well rounded” characters if given the space.

That sort of surface level dismissal and refusal to grapple with the more ambivalent aspects of the text is also found in a sequence from the second issue that understandably people didn’t like. Under the Joker’s threats, Harley Quinn is forced to get up on stage and perform for the patrons of the strip club his gang is hiding out in. Now normally this sort of sequence would exist to give the assumed male reader the spectacle of the female body, one that is under duress and lacking in agency. This lack is lampshaded by Todd’s attempts to stop her, Maleev drawing Quinn with this sad withdrawal as she leaves to the stage. The reader isn’t supposed to feel excited at this spectacle they’re supposed to feel dirty about it a point Azzarello underscores in the dialog. And then the dance begins and Maleev does an interesting thing, he censors Quinn’s body – for the most part. While Quinn is consistently drawn in fully body her chalk white skin is hidden in hard shadow the viewer is not given a good look at an objectified figure. More emphasis is placed on the crowd of anonymous onlooker the reader staring back at themselves. The only time the reader arguably gets a “good” view of Quinn is in the panels necessary to show Wild Dog slipping her the razor blade. And then another surprising thing happens Quinn’s thong miraculous turns into normal bikini cut underwear … which she is than forced to fight in for the reminder of the series. Nobody’s perfect. Throughout the series Maleev and Hollingsworth’s art uses style to reflexively remind the reader of their position as observer and subtly undermine or remind them of that privileged perspective.

Another moment of visual denial to spectacle comes in the moment of “Goddamn Evil” wherein the rival Squad mows down a bunch of feral kids the Joker has adopted. The moment of violence is narrated to the reader through onomatopoeia and reaction shots, but we’re never shown the bodies or the act.

These moments of denial help to bring the story to his nihilistic, ambivalent, conclusion a showdown between Jason and the Joker. The ending is less ambivalent, the Joker says there’s only one bullet left as Jason and Joker stare into the Ocean/Abyss. A turn of the page and ‘BLAM’ tells us a shot is fired. The other Squad is on the approach. And finally, that image of a peaceful environment. A nihilistic ending is generally centered on a concept of futility, it doesn’t matter what they do the outcome is the same. Jason can kill the Joker, live, and keep working for Waller or the extra Squad can show up and blow them all away. Death is the end. On some level that’s not a real choice, but in the presentation of the action or the lack thereof the creative team find an out of this normative nihilism to something potentially more productive. The point isn’t that the outcome is functionally the same it’s that Jason choose an action something on their own terms. Or maybe the Joker to just shot him with their gun. Once again ambivalence and strategic ambiguity become the refugee to find new possibilities. Which is the sort of potential and conclusion I didn’t expect to find in a Suicide Squad comic.

This edition of Some Kind of Suicide Squad will run with “Get Joker!”, “Blaze”, a reconsideration of Suicide Squad(2016), and The Suicide Squad(2021).


//TAGS | 2022 Summer Comics Binge

Michael Mazzacane

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