Everybody wants to be a superhero, right? You look at Batman and Superman and
Wonder Woman, and they're amazing and they do great things and you want to be them
but that's not what would happen. Most of us, if we were to be on a
superhero team, we wouldn't be on the Justice League. We would be on the
Suicide Squad because the Justice League is already taken up with the best of the best
Sometimes you don't get the super strength and the super speed
Sometimes you just throw boomerangs and they explode. And maybe you're clumsy
or you screw things up
It's so much more relatable to have these antiheroes and these villains who
aren't particularly good at what they do. They have these powers but they're not
necessarily the best powers and they're not the best at using them
That's what the Suicide Squad has to offer, and that's super relatable
My name is Julia Madden and I work at Forbidden Planet
the comic book store in Union Square
My dad bought me my first superhero comic when I was seven and I got hooked
and I've been reading them ever since
and I'm Debra Minoff from ScreenPrism, looking closer at the
movies and TV shows we're watching. The Suicide Squad is a team of convicts
super villains and heroes running dangerous black ops suicide missions for
the US government. There's more to the Suicide Squad than the 2016 David Ayer
movie. To fully appreciate the story it's important to go back to the comic books
origins to understand why it was so unusual
The first version of The Suicide Squad appeared in the 1959 DC comic
The Brave and the Bold, as a team of Monster Hunters called Task Force X
Then the John Ostrander version in 1987 introduced the concept of convicted criminals being
sent on US government-sanctioned dangerous missions. It also brought to
prominence characters such as Captain Boomerang and Deadshot, as well as
introduced government agent and Squad creator Amanda Waller. The modern concept
of the team comes from the 1967 film The Dirty Dozen about the US Army sending a
group of convicts to attack the Germans during World War two
it also was inspired by the DC comic book series The Secret Society of
Supervillains
and many of the near impossible missions were based on the original 1960's
television series Mission Impossible. The squad was revamped again in 2011's New 52 Reboot
If people are fans of the movie i would say the closest comic is the one that's
running right now. The Suicide Squad that started in 2011, ran to 2014
The New Suicide Squad that started right after that. It's just a direct continuation
except they've added "new" to the title and then the new new Suicide Squad that
just restarted, still just a continuation of the last one. That's going to be the
closest to the movie. If you want to go a little bit deeper, see
where it comes from
go with the John Ostrander run. The core of the Suicide Squad story with its
social, political and heroic undertones originated from John Ostrander's 1980s run
Ostrander intended the story to be a critique of American
foreign policy in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal and US tendencies to wage
covert wars abroad. His character-building was incredible because in such
a short amount of time he would let you live a person's entire life with them
and then you would also see them die and it was heartbreaking
It was one of the first times that they put together a team of just nobodies and
the whole point was that they weren't always going to be coming back
At this point in the eighties we had hit Crisis on Infinite Earths which
essentially was a complete reboot of all comics in DC. They redid everything and a
lot of Golden and Silver Age villains had fallen to the wayside. Most of
the Squad characters had existed as prior villains for these superheroes in a time when
everything was really, really episodic. They had to come up with bad guys every
other week, so not all of them were going to stick around, like Captain Boomerang
who is a Flash bad guy and they weren't using him as much. That gave Ostrander
this freedom. He wasn't held accountable to anything because they were characters
that for the most part were out of use
nobody really cared about them, so he could remake them. Ostrander's legacy can be
found in complex characters like Amanda Waller, the tough-as-nails government
agent and mastermind of the Squad. When she first appeared Waller's character was
pretty radical: a strong no-nonsense woman of color and single mom made tough
by the losses she experienced in Chicago's violent housing projects.
"All you need to know is you work for me."
Amanda Waller is absolutely the linchpin of the whole thing. She creates the
taskforce. Really nobody else wants this team to exist. Her nickname is The Wall
because she is literally a wall. She's a short, squat brick of a human being
But strength only gets you so far when you're dealing with super-powered people
so she needs to build these relationships in order to make sure that
they're going to do what she wants
"That is just a mean lady." Her backstory is that she lost a son to gun
violence in the projects, so she hates superheroes and supervillains
because she can't really control them that well. She's very gray and she's very
the end justifies the means. She thinks about protecting the whole and forgets
that everybody is a part of the whole. She's very much: if I can protect all
normal
non-meta human beings, I will dispatch as many superheroes as I have to
Deadshot was introduced as the loose cannon of the team
but he is kind of a psychopath
He wasn't desperate like the other ones to get the time off. He was just kind of
like, I guess I'll do this because it will let me out and I get to shoot
people again. Ostrander did a four-issue miniseries where Deadshot ends up shooting his brother
and the fact that he shot someone really close to him
snaps whatever was left in there. He has a certain black humor to him but he also
will just start talking to himself sometimes and will slip into another
world where nobody else is
He can be completely unhinged. Harley quinn was first introduced
Batman Adventures comic book and the Batman Animated series, so she hadn't been in
the Suicide Squad till 2011 for the New 52 Reboot. She was a psychologist at
Arkham Asylum who ended up falling in love with the Joker, decided to break him out
and that she was going to be his partner in crime and they were gonna be in love
and it would be amazing, but the Joker is not actually capable of love
or strong emotions like that except probably for Batman
and he just uses her and she's completely devoted to him.
Her classic costume is a play on the Harlequin costume and it's full body
which is really cool. She had her own Mad Love series with
Poison Ivy
I think people like Harley Quinn for the same reason that they were drawn to
the Suicide Squad, which is that she often wants to do good things but
doesn't know how to do them. She has a huge teen girl fanbase it because you
have these teen girls who just have these horrible messages thrown at them
every day about how they're worthless, how their bodies aren't the way there supposed to be
and then you have this comic of this woman, and she's been in this
abusive relationship for a really long time and she' just had things hurled at her
But it never keeps her down for that long and she keeps trying. There's something
really strong about that
"What a shame...
a pure innocent little thing like her...
led astray by bad companions."
It's really clear that there's no such thing as straight heroism in our world
The way the Suicide Squad approaches villains and heroes with that gray area
is really appealing. People go to extremes and those extremes are not
necessarily helpful, and there's something about looking at the humanity
of a person and seeing that they are capable of doing good things
even if it's because you're saying I'll take time off of your jail sentence
they're putting their lives at risk to do a good thing
Ostranderr wanted his characters to be... people. Made up of a mixture of good
and bad
"We're all human," he's said. "Including the worst of us. If we try to disown that
we're trying to deny their humanity." Whether seen as a commentary on the
modern justice system or US involvement in world affairs or
pure entertainment
The Suicide Squad reminds us that we're all on this planet together
so we better figure out a way to get along