Broken Frontier

DC’s Dirty Half Dozen gets tortured, terrorized, and introduced in the New 52’s Suicide Squad.

You have to love a book that starts out with a man having his chest burrowed into by frightened rats as a form of torture. Suicide Squad #1, written by Adam Glass (Deadpool Pulp, Luke Cage Noir), hits the ground running and in violent fashion. He has collected six deplorable individuals who have lived various lives of violence. Through these acts of torture they endure, a sadistic bonding seems to happen between the survivors. Psychotic team building, if you will. 

The individuals in question are some familiar faces mixed with a few characters I have never read or heard of. Deadshot, Harley Quinn (in her new provocative style of dress), and King Shark are just three of the new team. The other three at this point fill out skill sets (electricity guy, fire guy, and ninja looking guy) and with any luck will be examined deeper as the story continues.

What works about this issue are the various flashbacks and the writer’s willingness to paint his characters in a terrible light. These are not anti-heroes, not yet at least. These people are deplorable, psychotic, and murderers for the most part. They will have a long way to go to just be “misunderstood,” let alone redeemed, but I think that’s the point. 

Suicide Squad is the DCnU’s spiritual cousin to the former universe’s Secret Six by Gail Simone. Comparisons of the two books are impossible to avoid, but the texts couldn’t be any more different. Simone’s story was dark, crooked, but leaned towards an intangible wackiness that brought the psychotic nature of her characters to a tolerable level. This version of the Squad is much more straightforward so far and only seems to offer bad people doing bad things for a (seemingly) good cause. It’s a theme we’ve seen thousands of times before. 

Federico Dallocchio’s pencils are solid and service the story well. A lot of ground gets covered and a good deal of characters introduced. Under less capable hands, the final product could have been muddy, but the whole art team has banged out a good-looking magazine.

All in all, I was not particularly blown away by this number one, but not for any issue in quality. The entire creative team is firing on all cylinders, but a deviation from the more formulaic norm was something I was hoping for and, sadly, did not receive. This is a fun book with great art, a good hook, and a decent cliffhanger. I can understand and support fellow fans that adore it, but I just might check it out in trade.