Story: Rob Williams
Artist: Elonora Carlini
Backup Story Artist: Wilfredo Torres
Colors: Adriano Lucas
Lettering: Pat Brosseau
Cover: Tony S. Daniel, Danny Miki & Tomeu Morey
Cover Price: $2.99
On Sale Date: October 25, 2017
**NON SPOILERS AND SCORE AT THE
BOTTOM**
I feel like that Suicide
Squad movie came out a hundred years ago, when it was just about fourteen
months ago. I think we can loosen up the reins on the core team roster, now!
That won’t be happening in this issue, since it continues from the last. You
can find out for sure by reading my review of Suicide Squad #28, right here!
Explain
It!
The comic book origins of the Suicide Squad contain
quite an interesting tale: it seems Robert Kanigher and Ross Andru conceived of
a paramilitary team led by Rick Flag that appeared in six issues of Brave and the Bold. That’s about it.
Really, the Silver Age Suicide Squad is as boring as white bread. Few beat the
Silver Age drum as loudly as I do, but the Silver Age Suicide Squad really
ain’t shit. That’s why few have ever tried to mine it for new stories. John
Ostrander’s revamp of the team in the 1980s, which resembles the same
Waller-led team of criminals we know today.
When Harley Quinn, Katana, Croc and Boomerang first
find Rick Flag Sr. and Karin from the first Suicide Squad team on an abandoned
satellite, it looks like it’s going to be some wacky Silver Age hijinx: killer
robots, a shape-shifting alien…could be some good times on space heap. But in
this issue, it’s just so much freaking talking.
Like, a ludicrous amount. A realistic amount, which is not necessarily
something I want to see in my comic book about half-crocodile humanoids and
sociopathic government agents. Turns out that the Red Wave monster, a threat
faced by the Silver Age Suicide Squad in their first adventure, infected them
with a disease, but they also defeated it and took its heart and that’s why
Rick Flag and Karin are immortal? Or something? Basically, the two of them are
up to no good and want to cajole the Suicide Squad into making this Red Wave
monster whole again, a point illustrated by Rick Flag exploding the Suicide
Squad’s brain bombs—at fifty percent, which merely knocks them…you know what,
we have to address this shit right now.
One of the elegant parts of the brain bombs as
originally conceived is that they were an on/off switch for life or death.
There was no variance, they weren’t devices for punishment or torture. If you
displeased Amanda Waller, you got your melon squashed by that internal
Gallagher. Now, you’ve got Batman shooting frequencies at them, they can be
half-exploded by old Silver Age farts—what’s next? Maybe they can be accessed
by Bluetooth to play music from your phone? Or maybe they can spray some nice
perfume from time to time, keep things fresh. I think they’ve gone too far with
these brain bombs now, and at the very least they shouldn’t be called “bombs”
but “remote control torture devices,” since they clearly do a lot more than
just go boom.
Anyway, back on Earth at that Groom Lake airplane
graveyard, Deadshot, El Diablo and Enchantress are under attack by robots that
emerged from the ground, and Enchantress can’t help because she’s having
psychic visions of “not joining the two,” which if you ask me is some prophetic
second sight about the very thing that Katana’s crew is getting cajoled to
commit in outer space at right that very moment! Plus there’s that two-page
King Faraday backup that seems nearly unrelated, something about him joining a
covert government agency that held Starro? Fair enough, I suppose.
Here’s a comic book with a few half-baked concepts
based around a Silver Age property that really lacked any substance to begin
with. The stuff about the Red Wave is so nebulous, and clearly a diversion by
Karin and Rick, that it’s painful to read. And I just have no clue about what’s
happening in Las Vegas. They’re gonna find a UFO, I guess? Was there a point to
all of this that I missed, or does this all still stem from Waller being
threatened by that robotic spider? I feel like I missed a day of classes
somewhere and now I’ll never catch up.
Bits and
Pieces:
A lame, aimless issue that moves one team from a space station to their certain doom. Ho-hum. They are called the Suicide Squad, after all. Some nice artwork, but a boring issue to read.
5.5/10
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