Suicide Squad: Bad Blood
Was it a proper run on the title that got cut short? Or was it meant to be a ten-issue maxi-series? That’s what I’d like to know about writer Tom Taylor and artist Bruno Redondo’s (with Daniel Sampere) run on “Suicide Squad.” I was looking forward to reading this run thanks to Taylor’s track record, so I was disappointed to learn that it would be wrapping up after only ten issues. A run on an ongoing title that short usually means something has gone terribly wrong, but they don’t put runs that have misfired into one-volume hardcovers (usually). Whatever the case is, the end result is that “Bad Blood” hits all the right notes you would expect from a “Suicide Squad” story. Just about.
This is in spite of the fact that the Squad the story starts off with is one of the least impressive the series has seen. In addition to long-surviving regulars Deadshot and Harley Quinn, the team is made up of small-time thief Magpie, musketeer wannabe Cavalier, The Shark (who is a shark), and Zebra-Man who can generate force fields and also looks like a zebra. They’re called into action when a terrorist group calling themselves the Revolutionaries wipes out a fleet of Australian subs and steals one for themselves. This is just the latest in a long string of anti-government actions they’ve taken, and now Task Force X is being brought in to take them down.
Only this time it’s not Amanda Waller running the show. This op is being run by a scarred, all-business guy with a buzzcut named Lok. He cares even less about the team’s feelings than Waller did, which is as impressive as it is terrifying. That’s because Lok’s real objective isn’t to stop the Revolutionaries. No, he wants to recruit them for the Squad and bend them to his will.
The Revolutionaries are a ten-person team of all-original heroes and you should probably be able to guess what the storytelling advantage is to putting them in a title like “Suicide Squad.” So start placing bets on which of these characters are going to survive to the end of this volume! (Or better, which one if any will be granted a surprise resurrection in the final issue!) One of the keys to “Suicide Squad’s” appeal has always been its willingness to kill off key members of the team when you least expect it. This is something that “Bad Blood” is able to deliver on in spades, and I’m going to stop talking about it now so that you’ll be as surprised as I was by who makes it to the finish line.
That being said, ten new characters is a lot to introduce at once and there’s no denying that Taylor is limited by the scope of these ten issues when it comes to fleshing them all out. He gives it a good shot, though, and the end result is that only a couple wind up falling by the wayside of having me go, “What was their name and/or power again?” Some do stand out through sheer force of personality like the “Burly AF” Ostia or Deadly Six, who can command six of the seven deadly sins. The rest are agreeable enough and some, like speedster Jog, even get fleshed out as the story goes on.
This is all well and good, but I wouldn’t place any of this among the best character writing that I’ve seen from Taylor. While The Revolutionaries are a decently likeable bunch whose heads I didn’t want to see exploded, I can’t say that any of them qualify as the “Sensational Character Find of 2020” that I was hoping for. In fact, while Taylor seems to set the surviving members up for bigger and better things at the story’s end, I wouldn’t expect that to happen. My feeling is that they’ll wind up as fodder to show off the threat of a future event series by playing on the sympathies of fans who liked them in this story. Unless Taylor can convince DC to let him write a mini-or-maxi-or-ongoing series about them.
The exception here belongs to one of the team’s regular members: Deadshot. When we’re introduced to him in the story, his caption lets us know that he’s currently and quietly on the verge of a breakdown. This is further precipitated by the change in command and what he sees of the Revolutionaries on their first mission together. Taylor instills a genuine feeling with the early issues that all of the character’s sins are finally catching up with him and he’s not sure if he wants to keep doing this. This feeling is played up quite well over the course of the series, leading Deadshot to a place that I didn’t think I’d see him in.
As for the story itself, it’s pretty fun. A good “Suicide Squad” story should also have a degree of unpredictability to it, given that the team is not only working to achieve its mission goals but also has most of its members trying to advance their own agendas as well. We see this play out in “Bad Blood” in short, surprising order. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the story ends in a much different place than it did at its start.
Art for this series is handled by Bruno Redondo, with Daniel Sampere pitching in for two issues. While I know I’ve seen Redondo’s work on “Justice League” before this, he makes a really good impression here. His characters have a big, bright style to them that’s immediately appealing and his storytelling is easy to follow as well. I don’t know if his use of rectangular page-width panels a lot of the time is meant to give the series a cinematic look, but it sure doesn’t hurt. He’s also good at distinguishing the series’ large cast from one another and investes each panel with a welcome level of detail. Everything I just said about Redondo can also be applied to Sampere as well as he provides fine, stylistically consistent fill-in work.
Even if I was hoping that The Revolutionaries stood out more than they did, that’s only a minor concern as far as this story goes. “Bad Blood” delivered a story that took some unpredictable twists while having a lot of fun as it pulled them off. Though, I’m glad that this story was able to wrap up in a satisfying way, it ultimately left me wanting more “Suicide Squad” from this particular creative team. There are certainly worse problems for a series to have than that.