Things I Read This Week: Suicide Squad #24, and Why DC Needs to Embrace Amanda Waller Being the Villain

I know there are never any truly new ideas in comics but man Tunguska sure looks like Holocaust from Age of Apocalypse

I have really enjoyed the Suicide Squad Rebirth title. They've done a good job of changing the roster and look of the team to appeal to fans of the movie (and restoring Rick Flag to his role of leader of the squad for the first time in the modern continuity) while honoring the pre-existing comics continuity of the team and its personalities. The current arc has been very good, and has seen the Suicide Squad battling a mysterious organization called The People, which has been forming its own suicide squads made up of metahumans from various countries.

A few issues ago Waller found herself face to face with the director of The People, a man named Karla who explained to Waller that The People represented just that: ordinary human beings, who wanted to reclaim their planet from the metahumans who Karla says have ripped control of the planet away from the people. Instead of seeking to destroy Waller and her Suicide Squad, as originally thought, he was actually hoping to recruit her to his side and use her group to help capture all of the other metas, including the Justice League. We didn't see Waller's answer, but the next issue had her sending the team on a mission to battle Batman and Killer Frost (currently redeemed and acting as part of Batman's Justice League of America team) and bring Frost back into captivity, leaving the viewer to assume that Waller has agreed with Karla's proposal.

I for one, am 100% down with this. The fact that one should never lose sight of when dealing with Amanda Waller is that she is and should be the goddamn worst. She is hyper-competent, and her ultimate aims as far as the defense of the United States against all threats foreign and domestic, meta or otherwise, are sometimes defensible, but she should still be someone you do not ever root for. Her tragic backstory is just that, tragic, but it is not an excuse for the levels of horrible she is willing to be in order to achieve her goals. It is important to remember that the Suicide Squad is called just that because she views all of the metas under her command as expendable and would happily sacrifice any one of them, and she utilizes them mostly because she realizes that metahuman threats are beyond the scope of traditional law enforcement or military responses. In other words, she is exactly the person to whom Karla's proposal would be most appealing.



Which is why it is so very goddamn disappointing when the ending of this issue "redeems" her by revealing that she's actually possessed by a metahuman controlled by The People. This arc has been building for such a long time, doing such a great job of eroding the basically non-existent trust between Waller and the Squad, and creating a split in the team between pro-Waller and anti-Waller factions, which exploded in this issue as Harley and Katana break ranks and assist Batman in rescuing Killer Frost. However this arc concludes, having a Waller who tried to use the Squad to bring down their fellow metahumans (demonstrating exactly how much she despises their kind) would have all kinds of good long term effects in terms of building mistrust and conflict as the team has to continue to follow Waller's orders. These are the things that make Suicide Squad such a great book when done well, and allowing Waller the "I was mind-controlled" cop-out is weak as hell.

I have noticed this trend in comics for well over 20 years now. People want books with villains and anti-heroes as the protagonists and yet when they get those books the stories inevitably avoid the ugliness that would actually come from seeing those villains routinely do villainous things. I sort of understand given what an icon she's become now why we never really see Harley Quinn do anything other than kill other bad people who probably deserved it, but I see no reason why Suicide Squad has to soften the character of Amanda Waller. She is a cold-hearted, machiavellian person who would be considered bad by any objective sense of morality. She is supposed to represent the very worst of the government agent trope, someone who will do whatever they think is in the best interest of the government, good or bad (and its usually bad). So introducing subplots about how bad she feels about being a shitty mom to her kid or allowing her a mind-controlled out when she commits to something as heinous as rounding up all metahumans (even though that is 100% something Amanda Waller would do if she thought she could get away with it, and The People give her a chance to think she'd get away with it) weakens the character in the end.

Overall I would still recommend this issue because it is always entertaining to see Batman fighting his way through Belle Reve along with Harley and Quintana, and it continues a very strong run since the start of the title by writer Rob Williams (who wrote the short-lived Martian Manhunter title that is one of my all time favorites). I am looking forward to seeing how the conflict with The People resolves itself, I just wish they'd had the guts to stick with Amanda Waller being the villain she was always meant to be.