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