The read through continues with ‘The Phoenix Gambit’ which contained Suicide Squad #40-49. These issues are available to read with a DC Universe Infinite subscription.
The titular ‘Phenix Gambit’ is more than a pulpy name for issues #40-43 of “Suicide Squad,” it’s a statement of purpose by John Ostrander and Kim Yale as they attempt to reboot the Squad … again. The writing team had previously done that in the pages of ‘The Janus Directive’ and ripped it all apart by the end of ‘Apokolips Now.’ With Amanda Waller in jail and the Squad disbanded, again, the pages of “Suicide Squad” is littered in ashes for something new to emerge. Rebooting the concept of the titular squad for a third time seems foolhardy, and to a degree not dissimilar from how fast the Big Two announce the next creative teams or books before the previous one has ended. Ostrander-Yale’s work, however, differs in that all of this still exists as a continuous run by them, and the core functionality of the Suicide Squad never really changes. At the end of the day this is still a Men-on-a-Mission style book, what changes is the infrastructure around them.
Amanda Waller’s latest iteration of the Squad reads like the newest version of a product or an established company trying to reimagine itself as a startup, always trying to show how “new” it is when in reality little has changed. For herself she wants a no strings attached Presidential pardon. For the Squad at the core, it is same as it ever was, access to the same lot of prisoners and the same deal as before. The support structures around them, however, are all different. The Squad will now be autonomous from the government and without a headquarters, no more D.C. politicking bureaucracy. They will be hired out on a case-by-case basis for $1 million with whomever their client is covering their expenses. In return they will operate without a safety net “no more support or protection, no rescue in case of capture.” Suddenly in this arrangement, the writing creative team have injected a new deal of suspense into a book going on its third year. While at the same time by reducing the safety net it also pushes them closer to being the Mission:Impossible that was so clearly a point of inspiration for the series. It pushes them out on the road, pulling jobs and makes every issue or mission like a heist comic unto itself.
Yale and Ostrander use a narrative device that I do not think would be possible in the current publishing strategy of the Big Two. In “Squad” #39 readers left Waller in her jail cell after taking a plea deal. When readers picked up issues #40, Waller was still there but the writing team and series letter Todd Klein make on addition a box that reads “one year later”1 The idea that editor Dan Raspler and the rest of the editors would let the creative team just jump one of their books a year into the DC future sounds daring and unheard. While yes DC did do ‘One Year Later’ coming out of “Infinite Crisis” that was a line wide mandate with lots of communication and miscommunication by editorial and creative teams. This is just one book, technically showing readers the future. It puts “Sucide Squad” in a space where if they wanted to, future events could be teased rather artfully compared to how things normally go with their lumbering obviousness.
The push into the future also, ironically, allows for “Squad” to respond to real world events in a way. By the 1990s the USSR was dissolving, the Berlin Wall wouldn’t come down until 1991 but things were heading in that direction. “Squad” was built in many ways on Cold War era blueprints, by the end of the ‘Phoenix Gambit’ it is positioned for the brave new world of constant and sudden change. It enmeshes the Squad in the anxieties of the present moment where the beast nearly 40 years of thinking is out of the window, and maybe something like a covert Suicide Squad would be very useful for fast changing deniable operations.
In reconstituting the Squad, Ostrander-Yale stick to what works with Captain Boomerang, Vixen, Ben “Bronze Tiger” Turner, Count Vertigo, Poison Ivy, Ravan, and Deadshot all being recruited or impressed into service. And after three years’ worth of publishing, these are the characters that you should use they are the ones that readers have an emotional investment in. An investment that will seem very precarious without any of their old support. Sticking to the old hands also allows #41 to easily flow as the Squad gets back together. Mari is doing well with her first fashion collection, but once Waller shows up with the promise of finding Ben Turner she’s right back where she started. Ben is in a similar state, once again plagued by questions of identity stating that there is no “Ben Turner” only the Tiger. Waller, if she ever cared, has little time for his issues and wants her field commander back and she has the money to make it happen. Batman is responsible for recruiting Ravan and Ivy, who finds herself like Queen Marie Antoinette after seducing the leadership of the fictional Puerto Azul. Ravan is in London with the CyberChurch, which serves as a cyberpunk hangout and front for him to be a contract killer or paid for his offerings to Kali. It’s worth noting that Ostrander-Yale and and artist Geoff Isherwood have Batman blow up this church and leave plenty of bodies behind him as he drags Ravan out thinking to himself that next time “maybe a little less dynamite.” There is a glibness to the punchline, but it fits the dark humor of the book and the kind of sick gag that Batman works with.
Continued belowCaptain Boomerang was last seen marooned on a deserted island off the coast of Australia after being revealed as the Pie Faced Bandit! Amazingly he is still alive and ever one to live the gimmick prepared himself a giant boomerang to ride back to the land down under. Mari quickly shows Boomer the error of his ways. Greg Isherwood is once again on art duties for the majority of this book, and he has widened his style. The opening panels to the Boomer sequence read like they were done by Luke McDonnell, save for the heavy amount of spotted black on Waller in the third panel. There is a thin lined simplicity to the island and its inhabitant. It’s only on the next page where Mari goes into action that his harsher inking style begins to come through. Isherwood’s inking variety is to the books benefit as he is able to render grit and texture without rendering everyone inhuman. The opening pages of #40 as Waller sits in her cell show this the best. The prison walls are textured but not like white noise or stucco, when mixed with Carl Gafford’s coloring it does just enough and importantly doesn’t distract from the point of the image. He manages to create a real sense of weariness within Sarge Steel, an affect once again supported by Gafford’s coloring. Isherwood uses a light holding line and lots of vertical lines to map out the dimensions of Steel’s face. By creating clear dimensions, the coloring technology of the time is able to easily capture the shadows that hang over his face as he asks for Waller’s help.
This collection also does something that has been building for years it seems, the full reveal of who is Oracle. Technically speaking Oracle was revealed in #38, reacting to the death of Flo, with a conspicuous Batgirl doll next to her computer. But it isn’t until #48-49 that Barbara Gordon fully enters the game as Oracle. “Suicide Squad” #49 is the more well-known cover by Norm Breyfogle, with Gordon angrily mocking Joker’s command to “smile” gun drawn. The Steve Lightle covers for #48 is perhaps more interesting. You have a strong quasi-parallax negative effect for a background, with an image of the Joker once again terrorizing Barbara in the foreground. The Joker’s hand suggestively on her stomach and working her coat open. It’s like a messed-up cover to a Romance novel. It’s the commercialization of female trauma that would spark the righteous fury over the now canned Batgirl #41 by Rafael Albuquerque.
In these pages Ostrander and Yale do their best to deal in the aftermath of “The Killing Joke,” a comic that has many formal qualities I enjoy, but like much of Moore’s work from that time I’m bored by its legend. Ostrander wrote an excellent blog post when The Killing Joke adaptation was announced about their thought process on using Barbara as a character. “We didn’t want Barbara to magically recover. Given the violence she had endured, we felt she would be paralyzed from the waist down and in a wheelchair. However, we felt she could still be a hero.” They succeeded, Oracle would be a major lynch pin of narrative justification and appear in live action adaptations like the short lived Birds of Prey and in the forthcoming season of Titans.
But when we find her in the pages of #48, she isn’t quite there yet. Ostrander and Yale spend 4 pages on Barbara in therapy or going about her daily life. It’s not pretty, she blames herself on some level for this horrid act of violence that was inflicted upon her. She’s angry at a lot of things. There isn’t anything magical about her healing process. There isn’t anything magical about her maneuvering around in her wheelchair, thinking about all the things she probably can’t do – some of which fall along lines of essentialist logic but also reinforce the way patriarchy constructs womanhood through mechanical function instead of recognizing it as the class of enacted characteristics that it is. It’s all just profoundly human for a series that is eccentric and dark. These are the pages where I’m glad Geoff Isherwood started to render in a more realistic style. Barbara Gordon isn’t some site of pity; she is just plainly human trying to get by and deal with it. If the previous style had been in place it would not be nearly as effective.
With the addition of Barbara Gordon, Yale and Ostrander fully rebuild the Suicide Squad and set it up for new adventures in a strange new world. The wrappings around it are all different, but the core of it remains the same effective hook.
