Suicide Squad #13: War for Earth-3 Part 2:

The beating heart of Robbie Thompson’s Suicide Squad has been the development of relationships among various squad members, be it the romantic turn for Match and Nocturna or the buddy-cop partnership of Culebra and Talon or the growing antagonism between Peacemaker and Waller. In a massive crossover such as this, those types of subplots tend to get swept aside in service of the larger story but not here. In fact, in “War for Earth-3” these relationships are being weaponized and used to drive the greater narrative rather than hinder it. Those relationships, forged under Waller’s nose, seem prime to tear her much more powerful team apart and the team does an exceptional job of capturing these moments.

The back and forth narrative structure of this issue, oscillating between “Now” and “Before” is somewhat jarring and difficult to track, unfortunately, and the issue does suffer some from that, particularly because the switches are not always clearly marked. I’d take perhaps more exception to this problem except it isn’t indicative of how the series has been written prior to this so I don’t anticipate it being a continuing feature.

Both art teams turn in very good work here. While Eduardo Pansica and Julio Ferreira have been the standard team and their art style and page layouts resonate more for me in association with these characters, Dexter Soy’s pages don’t contrast too much in that it becomes a fiction breaking moment. Also of note is that Soy does some really great work the negative spaces in his pages that gives those pages a little extra pizazz. All in all, a solid book from top to bottom with plenty of action and character development.