Amanda Waller
47 years ago - Amanda Waller is born
31 years ago - 16-year-old Amanda is admitted as a student into the Université Notre Dame Des Ombres, where she meets headmistress Sandra Knight.
28 years ago - 19-year-old Amanda graduates early from the Université Notre Dame Des Ombres to have her first child & becomes an Argus operative.
25 years ago - 22-year-old Amanda becomes a member of the covert strike unit Team 7.
24 years ago - 23-year-old Amanda shoots fellow Team 7 member Slade Wilson to stop him from killing a prisoner, costing him his eye.
23 years ago - 24-year-old Amanda has her second child. When Team 7 is shut down, she becomes an operative in Sandra Knight's new extra-governmental spy organization, Checkmate.
19 years ago - 28-year-old Amanda has her third child.
16 years ago - 31-year-old Amanda's three children are among the victims of Starro's attack on Happy Harbor. When the Justice League are formed, she privately blames them for not saving them.
14 years ago - 33-year-old Amanda betrays Sandra Knight's trust, leaving Checkmate for a tactical director position in Argus, selecting Rick Flag as her primary agent and forms a new, government-controlled Freedom Fighters. She offers amnesty to Mark Shaw and strips Frankenstein & Bones of their positions with the DEO to bring them into Argus & the new Freedom Fighters
13 years ago - 34-year-old Amanda Waller brings General Wade Eiling into Argus after his jurisdictional conflict with the Justice League to develop a Metahuman deterrent. He creates the First Strike Program, using the technology developed by Pat Dugan.
6 years ago - 41-year-old Amanda loses her postion as tactical director of Argus in a congressional oversight hearing orchestrated by Sandra Knight over the Quarac Bombing. Control of the Freedom Fighters is taken by Bones. Undeterred, she builds Taskforce X, her own tactical unit within Argus using super-criminals, retaining Rick Flag as her main operative and team leader.
5 years ago - 42-year-old Amanda, rebuilding Taskforce X after the death of Rick Flag, recruits Ben Turner as the new field leader, and begins working with Barbara Gordon as Oracle. They successfully infiltrate the new headquarters of Kobra.
3 years ago - 44-year-old Amanda releases the current members of Taskforce X, having completed their term with the team, only refusing Floyd Lawton & Thomas Blake for killing a senator.
2 years ago - 45-year-old Amanda has to sideline the new Taskforce X team when Joseph Martin goes berzerk and Bane kills him. She recruits Thomas Tresser as the new field leader, using his past crimes as leverage against him.
1 year ago - 46-year-old Amanda recruits Rose Wilson, Owen Mercer, Caitlyn Snow & Nanaue into the latest Taskforce X.
Amanda Waller might actually be a little bit TOO big a character. She's become one of the most widely ubiquitous characters in the whole DC pantheon, and thanks to the unbelievable caliber of the performers involved she's absolutely earned it... but I do actually wonder if the character was ever meant to have such a huge profile. She's such a specific concept in such a specific role, It just seems like using her correctly means understanding just where the line is between that great concept and the company-wide anti-villain she's become.
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Amanda Waller's Comic HistoryAmanda Waller appeared for the first time in 1986 in the pages of the miniseries Legends, which served to establish the new Post-Crisis status quo of the new Justice League and introduced John Ostrander's new take on the Suicide Squad.. She was a wildly innovative character in a wildly innovative series that she will always be associated with. During her original series she wound up going to prison for what she did while leading the Squad, but subsequent appearances haven't really dug that much into her own accountability for what she's done. Her stories are less about her personally. They're more about her role as the monolitih looming over the characters in the Squad.
She's appeared in virtually every version of DC in wider media, from a major role in the DCAU Justice League Unlimited series to an attempt to use her as the Nick Fury allegory in the first pass at an expanded DC live action movie universe. In the comics, she remained a constant with the Suicide Squad, but was also included on other stories, like when Lex Luthor became president in the 2000s, Waller was his Secretary of Meta-Human Affairs. . The Suicide Squad is basically a constant in almost every modern era of DC, and as long as it remains, you can count on Waller being at the head of it, as much the team's main villain as she is their leader. |
Our Amanda Waller StoryLord, is this an important character. Before we ever got to her career as the director or Taskforce X, we got to use her in a ton of earlier stories, touching on the various versions of her backstory we've been presented. We made her a long-time operative with several of the covert organizations in our timeline. She was a student at Sandra Knight's Université Notre Dame Des Ombres before becoming an Argus operative and member of their exclusive unit of spys, assassins and operatives Team 7, where she is responsible for shooting out her teammate Slade Wilson's eye. She then becomes a Checkmate operative, working with her former headmistress Sandra Knight.
It's after the death of her children during the events that lead to the start of the Justice League that she develops her any means necessary mentality, and betrays Sandra to take over as the director of Argus, creating several programs designed to regulate and control metahumans. It's only when she loses that role after the bombing of Quarac that she chooses to create her own paramilitary organization with Taskforce X, and becomes the character we all know, building it's lineup, directing it's missions, and generally just being the ultimate hardass and the last person anyone wants to mess with. |
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Amanda Waller's LookA huge part of what makes Amanda Waller such an innovative character is that she just doesn't look like anyone else in comics. Ostrander's original design was innovative almost to the point of satire; Waller was short, squat, heavyset, wore heavy makeup and more than anything else was unapologetically a powerful black woman at a time before that archetype was really acknowledged in most media. Interestingly, I'd argue that as innovative an act of representation as she was, that wasn't actually the point. She was just a powerhouse character whose design absolutely fed into her characterization.
In the New 52, for some reason, Amanda Waller started to be depicted with a much more traditional woman-in-comics physique. I hated it at the time, but in retrospect there might be something to the idea that maybe she looked more like that when she was a young agent before she became an administrator. Personally, I imagine young Waller sporting a classic Pam Grier-in-Coffy physique. Lots of unbelievably talented actresses have performed Amanda in both live action and animation; including Angela Bassett, C.C.H. Pounder, and even the aformentioned Pam Grier, all of whom are among the most talented actors of their generation... but it is absolutely impossible to ignore the EGOT in the room. Viola Davis has made this character her own in such demonstrative fashion that we all now know exactly what she looks like. |
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