New Suicide Squad #3

I know DC Comics wants to sell lots and lots of issues of Suicide Squad, but Harley Quinn really shouldn't be on the team. Neither should The Joker's Daughter. Or Deathstroke. You know what? This whole roster sucks.

Last issue, Deathstroke was busy proving why he's the wrong man for a covert government black ops team. He's too skilled for government work. People will pay gross national product sums of money to hire him to kill and Deathstroke has no qualms about dropping a job to begin working for the next highest bidder. At least, he doesn't when he's not currently concerned about his reputation. You see, sometimes he's more concerned about how the assassin community views him than he is about money, and then he can't be bribed with a higher offer. But I don't think he gives a shit about the Suicide Squad. Besides, they're covert! Nobody knows he's working for them so nobody will know if he drops the ball and switches teams.

I don't even know why The Joker's Daughter was asked to join. I think because DC Comics realized she must have a fairly fanatical fan base seeing as how the Lenticular cover Villains Month issue of The Joker's Daughter sells for around $25 or more even though it's the worst written issue that came out that month. Holy shit is it garbage! It's just awful! I don't think I'll ever enjoy anything with The Joker's Daughter in it ever again simply because of that issue.

Harley is obviously on the team so the book actually sells. Deadshot is on the team because he's always on the fucking team. And Black Manta is on the team because the team needed a little diversity. He's certainly not on the team because they're going after sunken treasure or Aquaman's life.

Well, Black Manta, you're going to have to unless you think the corpse of The Joker's Daughter will be an effective teammate.

Is this match-up supposed to get me super excited? Even if The Joker's Daughter was my favorite character of all time and I was completely biased, I couldn't pick her to win this fight. She's just a fucking kid that ran away from home and shoved a rotting piece of flesh on her face. Harley has experience! She has anger issues! She has a reason to kick the shit out of this girl wearing her ex-boyfriend's face! The Joker's Daughter really should just shorten her name to The Joke.

Also, in that panel above, can you see that little box with the words you can't read? It explains that the Suicide Squad is a team of "incarcerated super-villains." Really? When has Deathstroke been incarcerated? When did The Joker's Daughter get put into juvenile detention? And what fucking super-powers does she have, anyway?! At least Harley seems to have the super-power of making cartoon violence look absolutely adorable. The Joker's Daughter is just a whiny asshole.

Now that The Joker is back in Batman, does he have a new face? I'm sure somebody in the DC Universe has the ability to grow him a new one in a lab. He should get Element Girl on his payroll to make new faces for him every week.

Harley Quinn and The Joker's Daughter continue to fight with each other as Vic Sage, Amanda Waller, and Black Manta bore the fuck out of me. None of this dialogue serves any purpose! Stop wasting my time, Sean Ryan! I have a feeling Ryan's entire pitch for the new Suicide Squad was this poorly thought out team and an idea that Vic Sage should be in charge. The Editors came in their pants over that idea and forgot to ask him if he had any ideas for a plot. Although he did make sure to have the most skeletal of plots ready to go: "The Squad invades Russia because, um, Putin! And Rocket Reds!"

Although, I have to admit that I enjoyed the resolution of the Harley vs. The Joker's Daughter fight (which Harley won, of course, by beating her senseless):

Harley was also helping herself get over The Joker by punching his face again and again and again.

The issue ends with the team searching for Deadshot who's busy being tortured for information about where the rest of his team have gone. Why would they think he knows that when they pulled him from a pile of rubble with a serious head injury? Plus, shouldn't they be more concerned about why these super-villains were stealing state secrets? Oh wait! They have Deathstroke to answer those questions for them now that they're paying him. Speaking of Deathstroke, he comes in to "torture" Floyd for the Russians. I put torture in quotation marks because we all know that Deathstroke was just pretending to work with the Russians to gather additional information (or to complete the real mission that none of the others knew about) and now he's actually going to "save" Floyd. I put save in quotation marks because he'll probably feel like torturing him at least a little bit.

New Suicide Squad #3 Rating: -1 Ranking. It really is mostly boring bullshit. I suppose Sean Ryan is still trying to come up with a reason why he stuck Vic Sage in command alongside Amanda Waller when she's been doing the job well for years. Although she did work alongside Frank Rock and some other teammates for a few issues back in the early Naughts. So far this book is sans plot just to make the clowns fight and to see the guys with "dead" and "death" in their names struggle for power. I'm pretty sure that was the whole premise of this crap.