The new suicide squad by Tom Taylor and Bruno Redondo is said to be a fresh start for the team of DC villains who have become heroes. That means the first issue of the series is about putting together a fresh team with some new characters, at the worst super villain meeting ever.
[Ed. Note: This post contains spoilers for Suicide Squad # 1.]
Suicide Squad # 1 opens with the unveiling of the brand new Australian nuclear submarine arsenal. In other words, the perfect place for a super villain robbery. A team of unknown characters arrives on time, sinks ships, insults the Australian military industrial complex and sets off with the one ship that actually had a nuclear weapon on board.
Here Taylor and Redondo break expectations and we get a first impression of who these sub-thieves really are. Instead of planning to end the world with their new nuclear weapons, a suitable threat to Task Force X, this new band is more concerned with defusing the missile.
This colorful crew calls itself revolutionaries, and while they may be known as terrorists, their ultimate goal is to make the world safer. We don’t have much time with the individual members of this new team before Task Force X shows up. The suicide commission is headed again by Harley Quinn and Deadshot, but almost everyone else is an unrecognizable DC deep cut like Cavalier, a swordsman who sees himself as a musketeer or magpie, a normal thief.
The two teams have a quick and brutal clash, with members on both sides dead before the revolutionaries are captured and forced to become the newest members of Task Force X. It’s not the first time that characters are pressured with a real moral compass. has joined the suicide squad, but now they are the majority. And for the worst team in the DC universe, there’s another twist. Amanda Waller hesitantly steps back to find a new handler, the mysterious Meathead Lok.
Tom Taylor, Bruno Redondo / DC Comics
The addition of the new revolutionaries to Task Force X is preparing this latest series of suicide squads for some interesting future dynamics. Although we haven’t spent a lot of time with each member – all of which are new creations for this series – their goal of helping the world makes them a uniquely bad figure for the rest of the suicide squad and should lead to some major frictions for team support like Harley Quinn and Deadshot.
And whatever the team does, with Lok as the person in charge they will definitely not be happy about it. He’s the closest thing to a bad guy, and he gets hatred within a few lines. At the end of the edition, he even managed to murder one of the revolutionaries after they had already been captured – and he was implanted with the throat explosion devices typical of the suicide commission.
Taylor and Redondo’s first edition of Suicide Squad undoubtedly maintain the show’s typical mix of violence and humor – including some jokes about the Express from Zebra Man, a DC that also had a nonsensical name. More importantly, however, the No. 1 Suicide Squad makes the characters of the revolutionaries characters that are worth rooting for, even if they can’t compete with the more famous Task Force X members, which they almost certainly do will do.
