I Don't Like The New Suicide Squad, And That's OK
I read the first collection of the New 52’s version of Suicide Squad today. to be honest, I didn’t like it. It seemed needlessly brutal, wallowing in unnecessary character death and having the members of the Squad kill relentlessly in such quantity that after a few pages, the deaths stopped registering. Adding a hard edge to the notion of super villains working off their sentences on top-secret missions makes sense; the endless scenes of cannibal Hulk-wannabe King Shark chowing down on whoever’s in reach is cartoonish.
I confess, I was a big fan of John Ostrander’s run on the series. It tackled some of the same moral dilemmas the new series seems to want to take on, and it blew away the occasional team member as needed to make an impact, but it was never less than aware of the level of its violence. The new series, on the other hand, goes for a wannabe cool nihilism, camouflaging the ever-increasing body count Deadshot’s racking up under the blanket of “badass efficiency”. These are supposed to be character moments for Deadshot, you see, not just kills.
After a while, the camo starts looking mighty thin.
That being said, the last thing DC should do is listen to my grumping and backpedal to the way things were. Why? Because the last time I bought a Suicide Squad issue, it was two decades ago, give or take. I’m not the target audience anymore, and I’m not the guy the new book is intended to appeal to. I may not like the new direction, but it’s not like they’re going to lose a customer by pissing me off. And at five bucks a new issue, odds were pretty good that even if I liked the new stuff, I wasn’t going to be setting up a pull list at my Friendly Local Comic Shop.
Besides, the Ostrander issues aren’t going anywhere. I can still read them if I want and I feel like digging through my long boxes (now repurposed as a cat perch). The sort of Suicide Squad story I want is still available to me, even if it isn’t a new Suicide Squad.
But to expect a comics company to be governed by the nostalgia of those of us who haven’t actually been their customers in a very long time is to sit in a metaphorical rocking chair on the porch, shaking a metaphorical cane at those darn kids and their rock-and-roll musics. This goes whether we’re talking about Suicide Squad (did I mention that I hate that they’ve reimagined Amanda Waller to be skinny and young. Come on, can’t we have one character in comics who looks like they’ve eaten a slice of pie in their life?) or Thor fans who haven’t picked up an issue since the Walt Simonson days yelling on Twitter about the character’s gender swapping, or really anyone who doesn’t understand why comics can’t be exactly the way they were in the halcyon days of their youth.
To which all I can say is “Let it go”. The Ostrander Suicide Squad isn’t comic back, and even if he were put back on the book it wouldn’t be the same one I’d fallen in love with two decades ago. Those comics are our high school crushes; in memory they stay the same forever, but in real life they’re live in Des Moines, have two kids, and may have recently learned what words like “diverticulitis” and “heart palpitations” mean. To expect them to stay as perpetually dewy-eyed and young as our mental image of them is cruel and unrealistic, and leads to awkward conversations at high school reunions.
So shut up and let the new creators do new things. If you like those new things, hop on board. If you don’t, try to sound less like Abe Simpson when you criticize. But always remember, nobody’s writing for twenty-years-ago-you any more, nor should they have to. To think otherwise is to be as cranky and entitled as, well, as the guys who were clogging up USENet back in 1989 kvetching about how they should put Captain Marvel back in his old Kree uniform and what Batman really needed to be good was more of the good old BIFF-POW-BOOM.
I don’t want to be that guy. At least, not the noisy version of that guy. And neither should you.
I confess, I was a big fan of John Ostrander’s run on the series. It tackled some of the same moral dilemmas the new series seems to want to take on, and it blew away the occasional team member as needed to make an impact, but it was never less than aware of the level of its violence. The new series, on the other hand, goes for a wannabe cool nihilism, camouflaging the ever-increasing body count Deadshot’s racking up under the blanket of “badass efficiency”. These are supposed to be character moments for Deadshot, you see, not just kills.
After a while, the camo starts looking mighty thin.
That being said, the last thing DC should do is listen to my grumping and backpedal to the way things were. Why? Because the last time I bought a Suicide Squad issue, it was two decades ago, give or take. I’m not the target audience anymore, and I’m not the guy the new book is intended to appeal to. I may not like the new direction, but it’s not like they’re going to lose a customer by pissing me off. And at five bucks a new issue, odds were pretty good that even if I liked the new stuff, I wasn’t going to be setting up a pull list at my Friendly Local Comic Shop.
Besides, the Ostrander issues aren’t going anywhere. I can still read them if I want and I feel like digging through my long boxes (now repurposed as a cat perch). The sort of Suicide Squad story I want is still available to me, even if it isn’t a new Suicide Squad.
But to expect a comics company to be governed by the nostalgia of those of us who haven’t actually been their customers in a very long time is to sit in a metaphorical rocking chair on the porch, shaking a metaphorical cane at those darn kids and their rock-and-roll musics. This goes whether we’re talking about Suicide Squad (did I mention that I hate that they’ve reimagined Amanda Waller to be skinny and young. Come on, can’t we have one character in comics who looks like they’ve eaten a slice of pie in their life?) or Thor fans who haven’t picked up an issue since the Walt Simonson days yelling on Twitter about the character’s gender swapping, or really anyone who doesn’t understand why comics can’t be exactly the way they were in the halcyon days of their youth.
To which all I can say is “Let it go”. The Ostrander Suicide Squad isn’t comic back, and even if he were put back on the book it wouldn’t be the same one I’d fallen in love with two decades ago. Those comics are our high school crushes; in memory they stay the same forever, but in real life they’re live in Des Moines, have two kids, and may have recently learned what words like “diverticulitis” and “heart palpitations” mean. To expect them to stay as perpetually dewy-eyed and young as our mental image of them is cruel and unrealistic, and leads to awkward conversations at high school reunions.
So shut up and let the new creators do new things. If you like those new things, hop on board. If you don’t, try to sound less like Abe Simpson when you criticize. But always remember, nobody’s writing for twenty-years-ago-you any more, nor should they have to. To think otherwise is to be as cranky and entitled as, well, as the guys who were clogging up USENet back in 1989 kvetching about how they should put Captain Marvel back in his old Kree uniform and what Batman really needed to be good was more of the good old BIFF-POW-BOOM.
I don’t want to be that guy. At least, not the noisy version of that guy. And neither should you.