I have another potentially unpopular opinion - I don’t like Amanda Waller’s progrrssion in recent years.
I checked out the first volume of Suicide Squad a few years ago and I highly enjoyed Waller in it. She was tough, intimidating, and a bit antagonistic towards superheroes depending on the situation. But it did show she was someone who genuinely wanted to do good. Her ways are morally questionable for sure, but she was given nuance.
Admittedly, I haven’t read every Suicide Squad series or read all of Waller’s appearances. But I did check out the last Suicide Squad title where she now all of a sudden has taken over Earth 3 and left her own world, only to now apparently return and work for some organization where she is now hunting down all heroes and metas.
I just don’t get what Waller’s goals are anymore. And now she is just another supervillain.
I have made the argument for retiring the Suicide Squad for a while now, for a number of reasons.
I think they are so much of their time - the particular blend of fears, hopes, values, and artistic tastes (dark, but not edgy like the early 2000s, etc), and attempts to keep them going, even by Ostrander himself, have felt less urgent and powerful.
The addition of character you literally cannot kill means they aren’t the Suicide Squad, they’re The Heroes Plus Redshirts
And what you highlight - the destruction of Amanda Waller’s character. Both of the movies make Waller really, really dumb (and I say this despite not hating either movie, and actually liking Gunn’s TSS quite a bit). She has to be dumb so that the main heroes can look cool and heroic despite all the bad stuff we watch them do.
Furthermore, in the comics, writers have no interest in writing a complicated Waller. They just pit her against heroes instead of pitting her against more complicated threats, and when Waller fights a hero, she has to lose. And therefore, she has to be in the wrong AND probably stupid.
The Wall is a titanic character - Ostrander and Yale did great work with her. And a few others have, too. But I’m tired of her being trotted out to be someone’s idiot ball plot holder.
That being said, Viola Davis acted as her brilliantly. She just needed way better writing.
Your third point is the ine I agree with the most. And while the Suicide Squad has certainly struggled to keep an ongoing for a significant length of time, I’m not sure they should be retired. Also, I don’t really think they are “of their time”. I just want DC to find writers that can do GOOD work
I think its okay I liked it enough to buy it twice and I would buy it as a gift
as far as batman stories go its not my favorite but there are a lot of others I would not give the honer of being my book I only have so much room
I dislike all the cw shows I want to like them because it would be something else comic based for me to enjoy even some of my family likes them though the ones that do don’t read comics the ones that do don’t seem to like it much ether I tried many shows but no matter what I just didn’t like them
Am I a hypocrite for feeling exactly the same way but insisting that Smallville was good? Obviously there are bad seasons and certainly bad episodes… I’m not entirely biased
It’s probably because I was the target audience then and now I’m not.
I think it asked a lot of great questions but did a poor job answering them. It started out great but the more it progressed the more I felt like it lost sight of what made it special. It went from a smart subversion of Batman comics to a bad Batman comic with mindless action and forced character development.
But those are just my thoughts. I know I’m in the minority.
