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98th out of 103 books
—
31 voters
Suicide Squad, Vol. 1: Trial by Fire (Suicide Squad #1)
by
John Ostrander,
Luke McDonnell , Bob Lewis , Karl Kesel , Dave Hunt
When super-villains get caught, it’s up to the government to keep the bad guys in captivity. Amanda Waller, a tough-as nails federal agent, has other plans. She’s heading up Task Force X (a.k.a. the Suicide Squad) as an ultimatum to the world’s biggest villains. You either go on her shady, near-impossible missions in the name of democracy, or rot in jail. And one other thi...more
Paperback, 232 pages
Published
February 15th 2011
by DC Comics
(first published October 1987)
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Consider the Reagan era of international politics. A decadent Soviet Union, CIA ops still running wild all over the world, and odd Middle-East oligarchs demanding favors. This is all an excuse for cynical laughter in Giffen and DeMatteis' JLI, which pretends to be naive enough to believe in US-led United Nations policing, while cracking a few jokes every now and then. The humor in Suicide Squad exists as a nervous break, and mostly as a wink to the reader, who recognizes some of these oddball ch...more
A friend of my wife's lent this book to her and me after hearing that I have been enjoying Arrow. He was apparently offended by the short-shrift being given to the character of Deadshot in the show.
Having read this book, I'm not sure wg=hy this Deadshot is all that better than the TV version. Yes, there's a bit more depth, including a death-wish (I know because the psychologist character says he has a deathwish; and once, when trapped in Russia he says the team should shoot themselves instead of...more
Having read this book, I'm not sure wg=hy this Deadshot is all that better than the TV version. Yes, there's a bit more depth, including a death-wish (I know because the psychologist character says he has a deathwish; and once, when trapped in Russia he says the team should shoot themselves instead of...more
Oct 30, 2011
Patrick
added it
One thing that's sometimes irked me about superhero comics (especially Batman comics) is how the same supervillains are constantly reappearing, week after week, year after year, decade after decade. It's one of those leaps of logic you have to make when reading a comic book, but every now and then it makes me wonder how fucked up the justice system in the DC/Marvel Universes can be.
DC, usually, addresses this complication in an interesting way: There's the madhouse of Arkham Asylum, where all nu...more
DC, usually, addresses this complication in an interesting way: There's the madhouse of Arkham Asylum, where all nu...more
Suicide Squad was one of the first new series, in 1987, of post-Crisis on Infinite Earths (in fact, it was introduced during the Legends mini-series that re-established how the rebooted DCU was going to work). It was and remains a fascinating book, including (as it does) regular cast turnover (in a body bag) and protagonists who are all either villains or folks trying to ride herd on them. It revitalized some secondary DCU characters like Deadshot, Capt Boomerang, the Enchantress, Rick Flagg (an...more
I remember reading the original issues of this series back in the early '90s, courtesy a friend who owned the entire run. Some 20 years later? I was surprised by how much fun the comic still was.
It's such an easy concept (convicted super-villains go on black ops missions for the government in exchange for reduced or commuted sentences) that it's surprising that it's never been revived successfully, or that the option for a television series went nowhere.
This first volume has a lot of setup for s...more
It's such an easy concept (convicted super-villains go on black ops missions for the government in exchange for reduced or commuted sentences) that it's surprising that it's never been revived successfully, or that the option for a television series went nowhere.
This first volume has a lot of setup for s...more
I've been wanting to read this for ages - pretty much ever since I discovered Secret Six. Unfortunately, the series had never been collected until this February, and the single issues proved too difficult and expensive to get. But either way, the wait was worth it.
The series does show its age, yes, but it's still a very good read. Taskforce X or the Suicide Squad consists of a group of criminals who get the chance of an early pardon in exchange for some covert ops work. The head of Taskforce X i...more
The series does show its age, yes, but it's still a very good read. Taskforce X or the Suicide Squad consists of a group of criminals who get the chance of an early pardon in exchange for some covert ops work. The head of Taskforce X i...more
I've been wanting to read this for a while and I wasn't disappointed. Suicide Squad works with the sometimes harmful 80's vibe, allowing for dark storytelling that stays smart. I enjoyed the issues in this volume, both story and art. John Ostrander, who also wrote Star Wars: Legacy, seems to have a knack at writing those who walk the line of the law. Reading Suicide Squad is waiting for a bomb to go off. Some of the characters are jerks, some are broken, others are looking for redemption and the...more
rereading this, mostly for nostalgia. The writing is sharper than I remembered -- Ostrander was one of the best working in the 80s. The art's pretty bad, honestly. It's an object lesson in the house styles of the time, and how they excelled at storytelling but were completely wretched aesthetically.
For a late-80's comic book series, this stuff is surprisingly modern. It's not cheesy or goofy at all - in fact, it's very "adult", more like comics of the past decade than comics of the 80's.
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John Ostrander is an American writer of comic books. He is best known for his work on Suicide Squad, Grimjack and Star Wars: Legacy, series he helped create.
Originally an actor in a Chicago theatre company, Ostrander moved into writing comics in 1983. His first published works were stories about the character "Sargon, Mistress of War", who appeared the First Comics series Warp!, based on a series...more
More about John Ostrander...
Originally an actor in a Chicago theatre company, Ostrander moved into writing comics in 1983. His first published works were stories about the character "Sargon, Mistress of War", who appeared the First Comics series Warp!, based on a series...more
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May 02, 2013 05:35am