Well this dropped right on time for this article.
Originally appearing in The Brave & The Bold #25, created by Robert Kanigher and Ross Andru, then revitalized in Legends #3 by John Ostrander, the “Suicide Squad” is the nickname for the US government group Task Force X, in the DC Universe. The idea is that supervillains can have their sentences reduced if they agree to have a bomb put in them and do certain dirty jobs for the government. If they don’t agree or try to run, their heads go boom.
Let’s be honest, though. Suicide Squad is just an excuse to cull the herd of supervillains because having them reform or just stay out of the way of superheroes apparently isn’t an option, much like how nowadays they love killing off lesser known heroes for shock value. Back when sympathizing with the villains was just an occasional story plot rather than the current “villains aren’t evil unless they don’t agree 100% with my ideology” mentality where they have to be “complex” in a way that makes them less effective as villains, there was some merit to the idea. They tended to stay in their own bubble rather than actually going after superheroes because Task Force X lead Amanda Waller has a combination paranoia/superiority complex and an ego trip. It used to be something that I, as someone who really doesn’t care about the villains, could ignore and move on with.
Now we have two live-action movies, one of which failed, an animated movie, the above anime from Warner Brothers Japan, a video game that suffered from killing the heroes combined with terrible game play, and it doesn’t stop there. Marvel Studios, continuing to not care about the source material while still adapting it wants to turn the Thunderbolts, a comic that started out about villains pretending to be heroes only to have most of them want to go straight, and becoming a team for villains seeking redemption, is now being treated as a form of Suicide Squad or maybe Secret Six. Since Gunn worked on the actually liked Suicide Squad movie and the comedy(?) spinoff with Peacemaker, signs are pointing to him trying to keep them in his DC movieverse whether it makes sense or not. After all, his wife is part of the cast.
DC Entertainment and Warner Brothers are becoming obsessed with the Suicide Squad and making them a household name, when you can’t even say “Unalive Squad” properly on the internet without some content warning popping up on some sites or a video being demonetized. Part of me wants to know why, and part of me just doesn’t care. Can we end this?
The Suicide Squad are so below my radar that finding images of them at all in my image library is hard.
While researching the concept’s history I found a couple of reddit posts discussing this, and while reddit tends to be a bubble for certain groups, the skimming I saw had some interesting comments. The first asks whether or not DC/WB explained why they keep making Suicide Squad content, while the other is one guy asking if anyone things the Squad is overused and getting pushback. The common theory seems to be Harley Quinn. DC has pushed hard for Harleen Quinzel to be bigger than she’s supposed to be, turning the poster child for abusive relationships into a crazed girlboss with little connection to the Joker…which makes no sense if you know anything about her origins both in universe and in general. The problem with that theory is that Harley is only a recent addition to the Suicide Squad. Margot Robbie ruined the Birds Of Prey with her movie when the Gotham Sirens, the villainesses of Gotham City who hang out, would have been a better option. Suicide Squad isn’t Harley Quinn and Harley Quinn isn’t the entirety of the Suicide Squad, so to say this is just about pushing her doesn’t quite fit with me. Harley is a Gotham villain, not a Suicide Squad villain.
Memento_Morrie on the first article had an interesting bit of reasoning for the Squad’s push.
I think there’s a confluence of many factors, a lot of which has to do with the Suicide Squad’s potential in other media.
I think DC likes the character of Amanda Waller. She is not like other comic book characters–she’s a female who’s not young, not a size 0, and acts “like a boss.” She’s memorable on the screen, big and little. For an actress, she’d be fun to play.
They like being able to trot out their anti-heroes. We’re not just squeaky-clean goody-two-shoes characters, they can say.
Except they’re not antiheroes. Antiheroes do evil things for noble reasons. These are villains being forced to do things for the government they otherwise wouldn’t care about because they’d be willing to kill, when the usual DC heroes wouldn’t. In recent years Waller has sent them to kill the heroes, which they would do anyway, but that still makes them villains. Someone else tried to call it “Dirty Dozen with superheroes”, except that’s not accurate either. These aren’t superheroes, unless Waller can get access to characters like Bronze Tiger and Vixen, who have been forced onto the team, or characters like Rick Flagg and Peacemaker, who are the closest thing to an antihero in the Squad.
The rotating cast is good for budgets. They don’t have to keep bringing back actors who can demand higher and higher paychecks for each appearance. Feel like mixing it up in your next cartoon or movie? Great, pull another character in. Cast a new actor.
The stakes are interesting. The audience doesn’t know who lives or who dies. Hell, it could be any of them. Is Deadshot going to live to the end of the film? Who knows? You’ll have to pay for a movie ticket, watch, and find out!
Your villain catches on with the audience? Awesome. Throw them in the next Suicide Squad film and let’s watch them again.
These are just some of the factors that led to a big Suicide Squad push, imho.
Don’t worry, ladies. Archie is only hot for teacher these days.
Others brought up the cast rotation idea, but that’s fine if you don’t care about a regular cast. Shows have done it before. I think war shows like Combat had one-shot characters in their units. That’s not why they’re doing it. None of the Suicide Squad appearances, be it their own offerings or guest appearances really kept a cast. Only Margot Robbie, and that’s because she’s hot and willing to dress in a babygirl top. That would be part of DC’s attempt to push their revamped Harley, who now bears little if anything from her classic appearances. The harlequin outfit is practically nostalgia at this point.
Norwegian Metal Douche in the second article summed up my thoughts pretty well:
I swear to God bro, they’ve made too many SS products in the last ten years.
Assault on Arkham, Suicide Squad (2016), The Suicide Squad, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, and only two out of four of these can be considered “good”. IMO, Assault on Arkham and The Suicide Squad.
The pushbackers forgot the comic appearances and cameos when complaining about four not being “too many”, but as someone else pointed out, I’d like to see DC heroes get more of a chance. Even when they actually cared about the source material, Marvel Studios went beyond the more well known heroes in their pantheon. Granted it was by necessity given they didn’t have the Spider-Man and Hulk licenses at the time, but nobody outside of comics and cartoons knew who Iron Man or Black Panther were, and the last time they tried…actually, all THREE times they tried to adapt Captain America prior to the MCU in live-action were poor showings. The closest one was the failed Reb Brown series they turned into a set of TV movies, and it still had flaws.
I feel like they’ve already overused this concept and unfortunately not in a good way. And for me personally, I have started disliking the members of SS more and more over the years, because they aren’t allowed to develop alone or as a team. At least in that horrible game it’s like that. And, I’m sorry to say, I can’t say that I get the hype for Harley Quinn anymore. I like her the best when she is with Joker, not on her own.
So do most people I follow. That’s what she was created to be, and she didn’t break out of Joker’s shadow organically. If there was, and you can find examples of characters that did and even overshadowed the character they were “sidekicking” for, there wouldn’t be a problem. Because of the usual suspects she was forced out her role as Joker’s stooge/playtoy, and they tried to make a “better” Harley in the form of Punchline, a character who didn’t need to be tied to the Joker anymore than she needed to be tied to the Prankster or something. Harley was designed to work with Joker narratively and has never really grown out of that, since she still references “Mistah J” often enough.
It is overused, and should only be incorporated when necessary. Like seriously, who tf asked for SS: Kill The Justice League? I would’ve much preferred a Batman Beyond game.
I have two images marked for the Suicide Squad, and one of them is my comic. The other has the Banana Splits.
Bad gameplay aside, the biggest problem with the Suicide Squad game is right there in the title: Kill The Justice League. As it is, the concept of the Suicide Squad is too niche to get a regular series outside of comics. Going back to The Dirty Dozen, how many people even know there were sequels. I knew of ONE sequel existing, but apparently there were three in the 1980s and an attempted reboot in 2019. It’s not normally a concept that really works for long. The original comic lasted for 68 issues, counting the annual. Counting modern runs is difficult since they reboot every time the creative team changes or the numbers go too high for their tastes. It’s a B-list comic idea outside of the cast at best. None of the other Suicide Squad projects and appearances are in the same continuity with each other unless Gunn also worked on them. Yet they keep trying to make it into a franchise.
Edit: Some people wanna argue that Batman is overused. Well, I am here to drop a truth bomb on y’all. Batman’s potential has no limits. Same goes for the rest of the members of Justice League. The reason why Batman is popular is because he has such a colorful amount of stories. Everything from serious stories, to more over-the-top stories to more goofy stuff like the 1960’s series.
No, he is overused lately. Batman keeps running new continuities while we were without Superman for years, then got the Snyder version, then the animated movies that were actually good outside of Brainiac Attacks, but with the Hollywood pecking order they don’t care. Batman has become a brand rather than a character, a derivative because there is no iconic take anymore. There used to be huge gaps between versions of Batman, like the 60s campy show and the 80s darker movies (even the campy Schumacher movies still maintain Burton’s darker gothic tone that carried into the DCAU), or slowly evolved with comics, like Silver Age Batman to Bronze Age Batman also going from camp to more serious. Every year there is a completely new take on Batman and it feels like there is no one true Batman in the zeitgeist at the moment.
With SS there isn’t a lot to do. They tried to make it serious in 2016 and it failed miserably. They made it comedic in 2021, and it was acceptable. And with the SS game… (Jeez), that game has no direction at all. So the argument that Batman is overused, you can throw out the @#$%ing window.
We both agree and disagree here.
So do I want the Suicide Squad to go away? No…well, technically yes, but that’s more personal taste than anything else. If this is all about Margot Robbie, then it didn’t work because her solo movie failed and took other Gotham gals along with her. (Still haven’t forgiven the movie for what it did to Cassandra Cain and Huntress, they ruined Montoya years ago, and apparently Black Canary is black because we’re back in the 1960s–despite Dinah being white in the 1960s–where black heroes need to have “black” in their name even if they weren’t a replacement for the White Canary or something.) Robbie was in both live-action Suicide Squad movies despite not being in continuity or sharing a tone. Gunn’s film is the only one anyone cared about outside of Robbie and Will Smith, and he hasn’t made a decent hit in a long time. Suicide Squad is never going to stand alongside the Justice League even while killing the Justice League. DC just needs to realize that not everybody wants to see a story about a bunch of scumbags being scumbags for very long, and the ones that do are in short supply.
Suicide Squad is always going to be niche, and given how Hollywood hates niche because it doesn’t make them ALL the money in the universe, I don’t know why they can’t stop pushing these people. Best to set the head bombs off and give us a break.
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