SUICIDE SQUAD #1

Review by: Metamorphic

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797
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Avg Rating: 3.4
 
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Written by ADAM GLASS
Art by MARCO RUDY
Cover by RYAN BENJAMIN

Size: 32 pages
Price: 2.99

This is my first review… so be gentle, fellow fanboys and fangirls!

I’m a DC fan but Suicide Squad wasn’t on my pull list for the new 52. The cover art, combined with the cancellation of Secret Six, left a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth. A new Suicide Squad with neither Ostrander nor Simone attached wasn’t really something I was interested in.

But my store had an extra copy and, darn it, I love the concept. So I picked it up, attempting to leave my biases behind.

Unfortunately, I can’t really leave those biases behind. The Ostrander Squad and Simone’s Secret Six have set the bar too high to be ignored. This comic will inevitably be compared to those runs… and it just doesn’t measure up.

I’ll start with the art which is good. It’s dark and detailed enough to match the feel of the Squad. It did feel a bit inconsistent though; I thought some pages were clearly better than others. The redesigns involved still gnaw at me, but I found them less… offensive than I originally did.

The writing is okay. And therin lies the problem, at least for me. In Ostrander and Simone’s work, there’s an undercurrent to the characters; you like them despite the fact that they are clearly monsters. But here, the characters are introduced in mid-torture and their “flashbacks” don’t offer a lot of weight to them. They feel like the veneer of the characters we knew previously. The voices are tehre, but slightly off, like a familiar song being played just a little out of tune. You can tell just enough for it to bother you.

Yes, there’s a requisite twist at the end, but it doesn’t save the book from feeling like an exercise in putting some bad guys together for the sake of a Suicide Squad book. (It reminds me of “Salvation Run” in that respect.)

Now again, I recognize that my love of what came before definitely coloured my read on this book. But if you’re going to cancel a book of Secret Six’s calibre, then its replacement needs to really deliver. And while there isn’t anything technically “bad” about this issue, there’s nothing so great that it makes me feel it was worth the Six’s cancellation.

I may give the second issue a shot, but as far as first impressions go, it didn’t make the one I would have hoped for.

Story: 2 - Average
Art: 2 - Average

Comments

  1. Totally agree with you. I also felt that there wasn’t a sense of a team. Yes, they’re criminals who are shoved together into a team, but even in the old Suicide Squad you got the idea that there was at least the beginnings of team.

    • I wonder if some of that was having some “good” characters on the Squad to balance things out. Bronze Tiger, Flag, Nemesis, Nightshade…they added a balance to the team dynamic that wasn’t in this first issue. But, in all fairness, that could be coming up.

  2. **********CONTAINS SPOILERS**********
    I haven’t read Ostrander’s Suicide Squad or Simone’s Secret Six, so I’ve come to this book fresh. And while I agree that the art is good and that the characterization was lacking, I will give the writer the benefit of the doubt as it’s the first issue. The real sticking point to me in this issue is the so-called “twist.” I hated it. I was really enjoying the book to that point, and then it hit a brick wall. The Surprise-It-Was-All-A-Test plot is the slightly less obnoxious cousin of the cretinous It-Was-All-A-Dream plot. Assembling the team could have been the first 5- or 6-issue arc. Round up all the candidates and send them on Squad-type missions, eliminating a bunch in every issue until you end up with the final roster. I’ll stick with the book because I like the concept and want to see where it goes.

  3. Yeah the twist was right out of the second drawer in hacky tense situation crap.

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