Suicide Squad #3: No Strings On Me

And there it is. Just when you think you have an idea of what a Tom Taylor book is really about, he has a way of gracefully yanking the rug from beneath your feet and knocking you to your ass. Yes, this issue featured another death of a mainstay character (you’ll have to read to find out) but the revelations regarding the recently evolved power structure for Task Force X changes the game in a drastic way. With machinations within machinations, Taylor manages to subvert the typical modus operandi for Suicide Squad into something that occupies a more pliable space for social and political exploration in an age of increasing privatization.

The carryover Squad characters that Taylor is playing with in this series have felt, for lack of a better term, sidelined thus far in the series. Harley has been barely more than window dressing, King Shark a plot device, and Deadshot something of a fool. This issue helps to bring those concerns into focus, in particular for Deadshot, who notes he can’t remember how long it has been since he had a conversation without somebody capable of killing him not listening in. As the core team of Suicide Squad grew more and more stagnant over the past decade and a half, the implications for those core characters became an afterthought, leading to little to no growth. With just a few subtle moves, Taylor has both exposed that truth and worked towards a path that could breath new life into some stale creations.

Bruno Redondo and Adriano Lucas continue to shine as Suicide Squad is one of the best looking books on the shelves coming from DC Comics right now. Dominantly a wide-screen format for the layouts, Redondo is careful to scale back when necessary, showing that he has an understanding for the role that layouts play in the pacing of a comics narrative, something of a lost art with the reemergeance of the nine panel grid as a dominant mode of storytelling. There are times and places for all sorts of layout structures but knowing what those are seems to only be the purview of the most gifted of artists.