
Title: “Kicked in the Teeth”
Writer: Adam Glass
Artists: Federico Dallocchio, Ransom Getty, Scott Hanna
Cover: Ryan Benjamin
This Suicide Squad #1 review is the first in my series of reviews of the DC Comics’ The New 52. I’m probably the perfect target audience for DC’s not-a-reboot-relaunch, since I’m a former comic book collector who has wanted to start reading comic books for a few years but couldn’t find a jumping-on point for any of their books. I’m not reviewing these books in any particular order, but I’m going to commit to writing a review of at least the 52 first issues of the event. I’m not sure if I’ll continue to write reviews of these after that.
One of the things I’ve noticed about a lot of The New 52 titles is their similarity to action movies. Suicide Squad #1 is a perfect example of a comic book that reads very much like an action movie you’d see at the theater. It’s gritty, grim, violent, and dark, maybe too dark for my tastes. But it’s very cinematic. Be warned; my plot summary and review below includes spoilers.
Suicide Squad #1 Plot Summary and Spoilers
Thugs resembling the movie version of Scarecrow torture Deadshot by letting rats chew on him. The “camera” pans back, and we see that several other thugs are torturing other characters too, including King Shark, Harley Quinn, and four other characters I don’t recognize. (I don’t know if they were newly-created for Suicide Squad, or whether they’re existing supervillain characters. I suspect the latter.)
The thug torturing Deadshot implies that he knows who the single person that Deadshot cares about is, and Deadshot makes a mental note to kill his torturer. Then he has a flashback to his encounter with Batman that resulted in his incarceration.
Some Hispanic character with flame powers is being tortured too, and he has a flashback to the events of his arrest. I guess he wanted his cut of some gang members’ money, they didn’t pay, so he burned their house down. Turned out they had kids in there, and he felt so guilty that he didn’t resist when the police arrested him.
Harley Quinn mocks her torturers for thinking they’re scary. She tells them she’s seen scary, and their smile doesn’t compare to HIS smile. (She’s talking about the Joker, of course, who’s disappeared.) She flashes back to her arrest at the hands of Black Canary, as she’s in the process of killing the lawyers responsible for his incarcerations.
King Shark bites off a torturer’s arm.
Savant, a character I don’t recognize, is willing to talk, because heck, the torturers have him covered in insects. His flashback explains how they were all prisoners in Bell Reve who were recruited into Task Force X, which all the guards called the “Suicide Squad.” He relates, via flashback, their first mission, to capture a rogue agent dead or alive. But it’s pretty clear it was a trap, as their target turns out to be a dummy with a bomb on him. The explosion is the last thing that the “team” remembers before waking up at the hands of the torturers.
Of course, once he tells them what they want to know, they drop him into a pit. The rest of the Suicide Squad are then knocked out. When they awake, they have guns to the backs of their heads. All they have to do is admit that Amanda Waller is behind the team, and they’ll spare their lives. The rest of them refuse to talk.
That’s when a disembodied voice announces to the rest of them that they passed the final test, and they’re now officially members of Task Force X. It’s made pretty clear that the voice is Amanda Waller, who advises them that they’re going on their first mission right now. They’re given six hours to wipe out an entire stadium of 60,000 people.
Suicide Squad #1 Review and Grade
I enjoyed this to some extent, although I think it could have been just as entertaining without being so gruesome. Suicide Squad #1 is not for kids–not mine, anyway. I don’t need my kids reading about torture in this way.
I liked the artwork, and I like Harley Quinn’s sexy new Goth look. I don’t see the need to make Amanda Waller a hot chick too, but maybe in DC’s The New 52, ALL women are just a little bit hotter than they were in the old continuity.
King Shark was especially cool, even though he didn’t get a flashback. I liked the way he yelled, “Meat! Meat! Meat!” after he bit the torturer’s arm off.
Ryan Benjamin did the cover art, which was really sharp looking.The interior artwork was good, too, and I was able to follow the story fairly well. A lot of the dialogue was written with a black background and red letters, and that was hard to read, so I didn’t like that.
Overall, I’ll grade Suicide Squad #1 as a solid B. It was an entertaining comic book and represented competent work from comic book professionals. The cliffhanger made me want to read the second issue.