New Suicide Squad, Volume 4: Kill Anything

New Suicide Squad

by Tim Seeley (Writer), Sean Ryan (Writer), Juan Ferreyra (Illustrator)

THE SUICIDE SQUAD IS DEAD
LONG LIVE THE SUICIDE SQUAD!

Killed in action. That’s the official story on the Suicide Squad, the crack team of the world’s most dangerous super-villains assembled to do the jobs too dirty for the good guys to handle. Also known as Task Force X, they’ve been X’ed out, leaving their minder and master, Amanda Waller, behind to pick up the pieces.

At least that’s what they want you to believe.

Thanks to Harley Quinn’s secret contact on the outside, the Squad has faked their deaths, leaving Harley, Deadshot, Cheetah and Diablo free to live life on their own terms…or so it seems. But by escaping both Waller and the walls of Belle Reve Prison, they may have dug their own graves. They’ve fallen into the clutches of the Fist of Cain, the insane death cult that helped them play dead—and who are now trying to make their ruse a reality!

To survive, the Suicide Squad must turn to their one-time captors—and Deadshot’s hated rival, Captain Boomerang—for help, or they’ll finally live up to their name…

It’s the end of an era for the team behind the blockbuster movie, as creators Tim Seeley (GRAYSON, BATMAN ETERNAL) and Juan Ferreyra (GOTHAM BY MIDNIGHT) seal their fate in NEW SUICIDE SQUAD VOL. 4: KILL ANYTHING!

Collects: New Suicide Squad #17-22 and a special preview of Suicide Squad: Rebirth #1.

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Dc Comics, Graphic Novels Comics, Comic Book, Crime, Action

168 pages, Paperback

First published November 22, 2016

About the author

Tim Seeley is a comic book artist and writer known for his work on books such as G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, The Dark Elf Trilogy, Batman Eternal and Grayson. He is also the co-creator of the Image Comics titles Hack/Slash[1] and Revival, as well as the Dark Horse titles, ExSanguine and Sundowners. He lives in Chicago.

Reviews

[Jayson · Rating 3 out of 5]

(B+) 77% | Good
Notes: Artistically atypical, it's appreciably abnormal: an amusing, albeit awkward alteration of accustomed antihero antics.

*Progress updates: Preamble ◦ Issue #17 ◦ Issue #18 ◦ Issue #19 ◦ Movie Review

[Danielle The Book Huntress · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a pretty good conclusion to this run of Suicide Squad. It's very frenetic and wild. It's hard to keep up with what's going on. Waller fans will like this volume because she gets to show how badass she is in the field. I wish I remembered more, since it's been forever since I read this. If you want to read modern Suicide Squad, then this is pretty decent, but I preferred the previous series.

Edited since this morning: I remember this. It involves a cult of death, and that was a pretty cool idea. Lots of crazy types stuck in a castle, trying to kill each other. Now that I think about it, this is my favorite in this run.

Pro tip: Don't wait three months to write a book review.

Overall rating: 4.25/5.0 stars.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the last book of the "New Suicide Squad" era, our intrepid team of villains find themselves in a trap and kidnapped by a ruthless cult of mercenaries who worship death and killing. At the same time, Amanda Waller gets outfoxed by a villain from the UK, and she's faced with the challenge of rescuing her team from certain death. Because, of course, Amanda is the only one who gets to decide their fate.

The vitriol the Squad has for Waller is palpable in this book, and they all fantasize about being the one to kill her and free themselves from her underground government operation. They have to put all that aside as they fight for their lives in one of the more bloody issues of this comic that I can remember.

Tim Seeley is always fun to read, and his stint on Grayson a few years ago cemented his reputation for writing action packed comics. Gore galore aside, this was a really good swan song for the team heading in to DC's Rebirth era.

[Brandon Skanes · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was good. I also enjoyed the two short stories at the end.

[Chad · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty decent story where Task Force X take on the Fist of Cain. The art is good but he keeps orienting the art across 2 pages but not splash pages. I had a very hard time knowing which panel to read next to read the story. It's not a natural motion for a reader and should be used sparingly, not the norm.

[Quentin Wallace · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

So in this volume the Suicide Squad is tricked into thinking they are escaping, but instead end up being hunted for points by a death cult. Then an supernatural murder entity crashes the party, and things really get nuts.

Overall this wasn't bad, but really this series just continued to go downhill after the first arc. The first arc just had a great cast, and the revolving casts of the following stories just never seemed to match the initial team.

Overall not a bad volume, but I'd have preferred to see the title pick a team and stick with it. I think even the team used in the movie would have worked better than the constantly changing teams they used in this comic series.

Im still a big fan of the Suicide Squad, but the book seems to always fall just short of its potential.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty mediocre.....

[Wing Kee · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mehness.

World: The colors are beautiful and the tones and the art gives a very different quality to the art. I like it. It's not bro and it gives a large distinction between other bro books. The world building was pretty bad. It's an excuse for the story to take place but the world building was very meh leading to a very meh story.

Story: I thought Ryan did a good job at focusing on characters and I liked that it was not always aboit shooting and being 'badass'. But Seeley is exactly what I don't like in a squad book. It's violence and action for the sake of it with barely any character development and a paper thin plot. The villain this arc was stupid and honestly how many escape stories can we do with the same cast. There has to be a danger to the story but with the core in the team established they won't kill anyone making consequences mean nothing.

Characters: Harley is ok. She's different from her standalone and more edgy crazy. But the rest of the cast get shafted in terms of development. There is no reason for us to care for them and they are awfully stupid and one dimensional. The villain is laughable bad. Just bad.

Poor story, poor world building and paper thin characters make this a meh book.

Onward to the next book!

[Adam Fisher · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Stars
As Suicide Squad winds down towards Rebirth, we see them enacting an elaborate plan to escape their confinement at Belle Reve while out on a mission. It backfires horribly, which ends with them fighting against "The Fist of Cain" a gang determined to prove themselves by taking out Task Force X. Waller and Boomerang are called to help them and provide extraction, which puts them right back where they started.
I had two issues with this Volume. 1) The art. Just didn't feel up to par with the importance of this title in a post-Suicide Squad film world. 2) Harley. In these Suicide Squad titles, we see the manic/crazy/ violent Harley, whereas in her own title, we get the flirty/playful/fun Harley. The Harley here feels too lacking in depth. My opinion...
Overall, this title was good. I am excited to see how Rebirth will change their path. Recommend.

[Roman Colombo · Rating 4 out of 5]

And the end of the New 52 Suicide Squad run. I enjoyed it a lot--with a lot of skilled writers and artists, it was nice following the team. The last volume has a decent story--maybe not the best of the series, but a good one. And the Harley Quinn one-shot was good. Also nice to have a preview of the Rebirth era. I'll review the fist trade of that soon!

The only thing that bugged me was the art. It is great art....but it didn't match this team and this story. It was too serious and too static for the Suicide Squad.

[Jenny Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gar they keep changing the Squad members :/ of course, Harley is my favorite so I guess not that big a deal since she stays, and Deadshot. All in all, a good ending showing how they are all still trapped in Waller's little wheel.

[47Time · Rating 1 out of 5]

And then we get a writer change. And it's the Seeley guy, with his jumpy storytelling. At times I fell like the comic is missing pages. Other times the dialogue feels so unnatural, it destroys any chance at immersion. All those attempts at humor are falling short. They aren't even laughable, just cringy and oh, so skippable.

After several pages of intros, like we needed those again, the Squad is sent on a mission to protect some guy. They get assaulted by other metahumans and are soon reported as being dead on Waller's trackers. Well, that was quick.

But they survive. It was all a ruse to free themselves from Waller using a group of metahumans from the Fist of Cain, some assassin cult or something. Here comes another twist - they get attacked by said cult. And another twist - they get help from the guys who pulled them out of their mission. The Squad soon reunites and goes on the offensive. Waller also brings backup, but the good guys still get their asses handed to them. On a silver platter. With eggs and gravy. Damn it, now I'm doing the useless verbal flurries so common in this mediocre story.

But wait! The Squad is far from defeated. They keep returning to the fight and soon make their getaway. They were probably saying something important among all the skipping I was doing by this point in the story. Oh, well, so they get away.

Writer Sean Ryan returns in the last issue with a splendid, 5-star look inside Harley's mind. It's a real mess that she is having a hard time making sense of. She concludes that there is no getting away from it.

[Nick Raines · Rating 4 out of 5]

Canadian coffee magnates, creepy castles that housed a cult and the suicide squad all come together to tell a good old fashioned brawl story. After being killed, but not really the squad wakes up in a creepy castle somewhere in Germany and find that they are surrounded by members of a death cult and the squad is the targets with each member being worth a certain amount of points. Meanwhile on the outside Amanda Waller tries to figure out what killed her squad and maybe figuring out that there is more going on than she thinks oh and she is trying to fill in some guy on how to run his own team of supervillains.

This issue is all about blood, bullets, and Harley Quinn getting her mojo back through therapy with herself, she was once a promising psychologist after all. There may not be much of a plot to this one, but it is still a lot of fun, nothing wrong with keeping things basic. Bad guys vs. worse guys in a castle siege. It was a lot of fun.

[Jaime Guzman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Cheetah, and Diablo find themselves trapped in a castle along side super powered mercenaries. Both the Suicide Squad and the super powered mercenaries try to survive as the Fists of Cain earn points for maiming and killing our team of villians. Imagine the Suicide Squad wnding up on the set of Eli Roth's Hostel with disea if action and a sense of humour thrown in and you'll get the idea of the premise if vol. 4.
Tin Seely of "Hack and Slash" fame is a welcome change with a strong grasp of our villians voices and personalities. Juan Ferreyra's color pallette fits well with the dark & dank settings if the castle along with he gratuitous violence. This volume is definitely the best of the series and sadly the last as the final story in the book gives us a glimpse of the "Rebirth" and the future iteration of our super villians team. If I could I would rate this volume 3.75 🌟.

[Richard Rosenthal · Rating 3 out of 5]

The swan song of action hero Amanda Waller. You know this because issue # 1 of the rebirth suicide squad is tacked on to the end (because the volume isn't quite long enough with out it) and in that story we have the triumphant return of fat old evil Amanda Waller. (You know she is evil cause she is fat and old). It is like the author was told to wrap it up in a few issues and they already used up all the other evil league of evil people so it is a bunch of Cain people (i think they are the religion of crime) who get points for kills. This group never made sense to me. I think they are some old lore from when Batman and detective comics were aimed at younger readers and they haven't modernized very well. I really enjoyed the final issue with Harley struggling with her own mind. I hope we see more smart crazy Harley in the rebirth suicide squad but I'm not holding my breath.

[Cale · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is over the top in probably the worst possible way. The Suicide Squad and a team of wannabes get hunted for sport in a big castle. That's the plot. There's a lot of action, a lot of random characters getting killed, and some surprisingly funny bits between Deadshot and his protege/wannabe Deathtrap. Oh, and Boomerang gets to save the day, which gets some humor points. But the whole Fist of Cain thing is just annoying, and Rose Tattoo, who I vaguely remembered from the Wildstorm days, is horribly underutilized. There are too many characters to care about.
There's also a final issue that is...psychoanalysis of Harley that feels like a really weak epilogue to the series and provides almost no actual insights into Harley as a character. It's like they ended the series with a bad fill-in episode.

[Luana · Rating 3 out of 5]

The millionth new writer on Suicide Squad and this one's pretty good! This is probably the volume that's leaned the hardest into comedy, with the squad stuck in a spooky castle and hunted by a murderer's cult venerating the skeleton of an early modern Teutonic nobleman, and Waller to the rescue with a British villain called THE HUNKY PUNK (this is a type of gargoyle, not a reference to him being a handsome new waver -- this is obvs mined for comedy).

I thought the two preview issues for SUICIDE SQUAD REBIRTH were of decidedly lesser quality so lmao looking forward to this book sucking again next time!

[caught_in_fairytales · Rating 3 out of 5]

This volume was my least favourite one. It was ok, but at some point I wasn't really interested in the story anymore, so I just finished it really quick, so I can read another one.
I didn't like Boomerang before, because I thought he was boring, and even if he isn't present in all issues of this volume, there's a moment with him at one point that changed my mind about him a bit.
The last issue of this volume about Harley was the best one, and the preview of Rebirth #1 was good too! Altogether a nice comic, but nothing special.

[Krzysztof Grabowski · Rating 3 out of 5]

Po tomie trzecim myślałem, że gorzej być już nie mogło. I na moje szczęście, tak nie jest. Przeciwnie, historia zaprezentowana nam przez Seeley'a, jest momentami naprawdę dobra, angażująca uwagę czytelnika, bo jak na oddział samobójców, nietypowa.

Początek to pokazanie oddziału w akcji, tyle że w nieco zmodyfikowanym składzie personalnym. Do oddziału doszła świetna Cheetah i El Diablo. I trzeba przyznać, że nieco silniejsze postacie wpływają odżywczo na dynamikę całych zajść. Niemniej oddział Amandy Waller w pewnym momencie znika z radaru. A ładunki wybuchowe nie działają. Czy to oznacza, że Harley Quinn i spóła są wolni?

Tak nie do końca, bo ich wyzwoliciel ma w całym ambarasie własny interes, który w odpowiednim momencie się objawi, a oddziałowi przyjdzie walczyć z tzw. Pięściami Kaina w jakimś średniowiecznym zamku. Takie obrócenie ról, czyli to teraz Deadshot i reszta są królikami, a nie łowcami jest naprawdę zabawne. No tak nie do końca królikami, chyba że te ssaki mają na wyposażeniu wyrzutnie rakiet, broń z ostrą amunicją i moce...

Końcoweczka to taka ala psychoanaliza dokonana na Harley, gdzie przyjdzie nam się pobawić z podświadomością bohaterki i nie tylko. Dla mnie było to akurat całkowicie zbędne, ale rozumiem że strony muszą się zgadać i trzeba było czymś je zapełnić.

Początek jest wizualnie boski, a nawiązania do kultury meksykańskiej świetne. Szkoda, że potem mamy zmianę rysownika i całość wygląda porządnie, ale i przeciętnie. Najgorzej było mi patrzyć na ten końcowy odpał po byłej Jokera. Zaskoczenie na in plus, choć w gruncie rzeczy każda przeciętny tytuł byłby boski po poprzednim tomie.

[Sean · Rating 2 out of 5]

This iteration of Suicide Squad ends just as its always been, pretty terribly. Although new writer, Tim Seeley comes aboard, the book is still incredibly corny, generic, and pointless. Seeley has written some very good works in the past but this painfully bad. The antagonists are laughably bad. Their motivations are all over the place even with the ridiculous twist. Their was no explanation why the team changed at all. This was a filler arc in a filler series. The art wasn't bad but I didn't like it either. Overall, I'm glad this book is done.

[Tracey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a good closing to the short comic series. Harley Quinn gets the Suicide Squad caught up in a deadly game when they all thought they had finally escaped from Waller. Waller and Boomerang come to their rescue, losing Diablo in the process. It seems like he's always sacrificing himself for redemption. It ties up the story arc nicely. I won't be seeking the reboot anytime soon. This one wasn't all I wanted it to be and I don't want to be disappointed again.

[Sylvester · Rating 4 out of 5]

After Harley's contact from outside faked their death and helped them escape Belle Reve, the Suicide Squad thought they could enjoy their freedom. But what they are really in is for a game of the Most Dangerous Game as part of a death cult's bigger plan. Then, an underwhelming Harley Quinn special to conclude the series.

I enjoy the death cult arc, it was fun, violent, rapid, exactly what made Suicide Squad readable.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was very meh. The art was all over the place, the story didn't have much of an overall plot and the artist kept using double page images (whatever that's called in comics) which I didn't realize bc of the layout until I got to the next page and had to reread. And the art would change mid book. Lots I didn't like about this one. Prolly in the 2.5 range. I think this series is over but if not, I think I'm done with it.

[Aidan]

In lesser hands, the wealthy liberal running a charitable foundation would preach some real world morals and help the suicide squad to freedom (😴), but in the hands of Tim Seeley that shit was a lie and this trust fund kid’s actually a psycho running a murder cult and he threw the squad into man hunter tournament in a castle (👏👌💯).

[Roberto Diaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

The swang song of the New 52 Suicide Squad is as absurd as an all—out—action closure can get. Bayhem by Seeley and the beautiful art by Ferreyra(One of the best of the series) finishes with a face off between another mirror of themselves in the way of a death cult.

[Jenna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been reading numerous comics of Suicide Squad lately and they're all about Harley Quinn. Sure there are other villains at the squad too but Harley seems to steal the spotlight every damn time.

[Bel López · Rating 4 out of 5]

No me gustó como terminó, solo Harley con sus pensamientos...

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

The palace deathtrap was a neat idea. I also liked the character Deathtrap with his ability to create a gun and ammunition out of anything.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good complete story with a lead on of course!

[Will Cooper · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just a run and shoot volume. I enjoyed this!