Review of Suicide Squad 1-7

Suicide Squad, volume 1: Kicked in the Teeth, trade paperback collecting issues 1-7, cover-dated September 2011 - March 2012. Written by Adam Glass, with art by Federico Dallocchio, Clayton Henry and others.

What good are supervillains? Well, if you can recruit them out of prison and send them on covert missions to reduce their sentences, maybe they do some good. At least they can do the jobs that superheroes are too upstanding and noble to do. In this version, Amanda Waller runs the squad, made up of King Shark, Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Voltaic, Black Spider, and El Diablo. And what keeps the villains in line? That would be the nanite bombs that have been implanted into their necks.

It's a set-up that has been done many times before, including prior incarnations of the Suicide Squad.

Their first job involves containing a plague (of The Rot, from the Swamp Thing and Animal Man books) that has infected a stadium of 60,000 people. Only one of them is to live, an unborn baby who seems to be immune.

Then Harley hears that the Joker has been treated poorly in prison, and may even be dead. And she is not happy about it. And she manages to escape Waller and the Squad, which itself quite an accomplishment.  The last two issues in the collection, “The Hunt for Harley Quinn” storyline, tell her origin story as well as telling us her search for the Joker’s remains.

Harley is the breakout star of the book, although King Shark is an entertaining character, as well. The slimmed-down Amanda Waller is still a tough broad, but I agree with the complaint that she was more intimidating in her pre-New 52 body.  

 Over the course of the collection, which encompasses only a few weeks of "real time" at the most, we are introduced to a number of new Squad members. It seems that one thing the New-52 has plenty of is super-powered villains.

Source: Westerville library