Comic Fans Wouldn’t Recognize DC’s Original Suicide Squad

While fans are well aware of the modern-day Suicide Squad, they may not know about two groups that shared the same name more than two decades earlier.

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With the Suicide Squad arguably more popular now than ever, most comic readers would be surprised to learn that the original version of the team by DC Comics was completely different than the one legions of fans have come to love. The team that took the name that inspired two DCEU movies — the latter of which being one of DC’s most positively reviewed movies to date — bears little resemblance to the original Task Force X who predated the Justice League by two issues.

The original Suicide Squad made its debut in the pages of 1959’s The Brave and the Bold #25, with a story written by Metal Men, Sgt. Rock and Barry Allen co-creator Robert Kanigher and pencilled by Ross Andru. Kanigher’s Suicide Squad was made up of four members, Rick Flag, Jess Bright, Dr. Hugh Evans and Karin Grace, all of whom are the sole survivors of prior groups that were wiped out in World War II, swearing to carry on for their fallen team members. Each of this Suicide Squad’s members believes they have survived something they shouldn’t have, and it is the only team willing to take seemingly fatal risks while carrying out government missions with world-ending results should they fail. The team is presented as a last resort, only tackling missions when all other options have been exhausted. This version of the team would only appear in six issues of The Brave and the Bold.

In 1963, a different Suicide Squad would be introduced in Star Spangled War Stories #110 in a story called “Suicide Squadron: Tunnel of Terror,” again written by Robert Kanigher and pencilled by Ross Andru. This story set in World War II featured a unit with unnamed characters essentially finding themselves in the plot of King Kong, on a mysterious lost island with dinosaurs and a giant white ape. The Suicide Squad tales that appeared in Star Spangled War Stories were more in line with other comics from the title, being more of an anthology concept with different members inhabiting the group in each story. The World War II Suicide Squad fought a lot of dinosaurs and a few robots. This concept fared a little better than the previous one and appeared in eleven issues of Star Spangled War Stories.

In 1987’s Secret Origins #14 written by John Ostrander and pencilled by Luke McDonell, Ostrander retconned the original Suicide Squad stories from The Brave and the Bold and Star Spangled War Stories in a way that seamlessly tied the old groups to his new concept: The Dirty Dozen with supervillains. In Ostrander’s retelling, he split Rick Flag into two characters, Rick Flag Sr. and Rick Flag Jr, with the elder Flag leading “The Suicide Squadron” from Star Spangled War Stories, and Rick Flag Jr. leading the one from The Brave and the Bold. Rick Flag Sr. was given the tragic backstory from The Brave and the Bold where he was the only survivor of an air battle with Japanese planes. Ostrander also moved up the timeline of The Brave and the Bold stories to be closer to the ’80s so Rick Flag Jr. could be the leader of his brand-new version of Suicide Squad.

The original Suicide Squad stories from The Brave and the Bold and Star Spangled War Stories were often presented as classified files that the reader was discovering. This conceit was brilliantly used by Ostrander in Secret Origins #14, which saw Amanda Waller giving President Regan the classified history of the Suicide Squad to read before approving her version of the team made up of supervillains. While seldom acknowledged, the teams that predated Ostrander’s modern version of the Suicide Squad are fun stories that are well worth reading. With the way Ostrander was able to reboot the team while also folding in the history of the original groups, DC Comics could very easily present new stories from the original Suicide Squads today, and maybe it should.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/original-suicide-squad-dc-comics-world-war-ii/