And They Kept Falling
I've always loved the premise of Suicide Squad--a group of hard-luck villains being given an extremely deadly shot at redemption just overflows with great writing possibilities. When the first issue ended with the new team being dropped out of a plane and told to kill everyone in a football stadium, I was looking forward to seeing how this incarnation of the Squad would develop in the face of Amanda Waller's ridiculous orders.
What a difference a month makes. The second issue of Suicide Squad is a tedious exercise in team book writing, in which characters are given annoying affectations rather than actual personalities, and supposedly cool quips rather than meaningful dialog that advances the story. If this is where the book is going, count me out.
Harley Quinn is the main offender here, which is really sad. She's one of DC's more interesting villains, but her personality seems to have gone the way of most of her clothes in the New 52. Here she prattles on about killing zombies, and talks about video games in a way which suggests that writer Adam Glass has heard of video games but never seen one. She comes off like an annoying tween trying too hard to show her older friends how cool she is, to the point that I started cringing every time I saw a speech bubble next to her.
None of the other characters are much better. King Shark continues to do nothing but yell "Meat!", Deadshot has started talking like a generic hard-ass circa 1992, and the rest of the characters may as well change their costumes to red shirts given the series's current gimmick of killing off one Squad member per issue. We can assume El Diablo will outlive the rest of the scrubs who don't make the cover, because he gets the most lines--which really just means he gets more chances to annoyingly interject random Spanish words into his dialog to remind us that he's not white, his only character trait so far.
The only positive in this issue was the interaction between Deadshot and Amanda Waller at the end, which did a good job of re-enforcing the notion that Waller views all the Squad members as expendable (not just the ones who only get a couple of lines), and might even want to get them killed. But given the writing in this issue, I have no faith that that will go anywhere that will make this book worth its price tag.
