Plastique
31 years ago - Bette Sans Souci is born in Quebec.
20 years ago - 11-year-old Bette's father dies of a heart attack.
17 years ago - 14-year-old Bette's mother goes to prison. She runs away from foster care, and begins associating with a commune of political dissidents.
12 years ago - 19-year-old Bette becomes active with a militant anti-nuclear power terrorist organization, and begins preparing to stage a terrorist bombing, training as an explosives expert.
9 years ago - 22-year-old Bette attempts to stage her terrorist bombing but is defeated by Firestorm when he removes her explosive tech, rendering her harmless.
8 years ago - 23-year-old Bette is indoctrinated by Kobra agents in prison, who subject her to the surgical implant of a synthetic organ that allows her to explosively ignite objects. She uses her new powers to escape, and begins working for Kobra.
7 years ago - 24-year-old Bette joins a Kobra raid of a South American weapons development lab. Seeing King Snake murder the scientists in cold blood, she rejects Kobra, saving an injured Nathan Adam and escaping the jungle together,
6 years ago - 25-year-old Bette, slowly losing control of her powers, takes a series of bombing jobs to release her built up energy. Nathan Adam insists on being the one to bring her in, because he can absorb her power and take her in alive.
5 years ago - 26-year-old Bette is recruited by Amanda Waller into the Suicide Squad, in exchange for stabilizing her powers.
3 years ago - 28-year-old Bette finishes her term with the Suicide Squad and is released from custody. She begins working as an operative for Argus.
2 years ago - 29-year-old Bette reconnects with Nathan Adam as he returns from the timestream.
Plastique might seem like a fairly minor character in the larger pantheon of DC villains, but she's a very prominent member of the Suicide Squad. When the Justice League Unlimited episode Taskforce X presented a very pared-down-to-the-absolute-essentials version of the Squad, their lineup was Rick Flagg, Deadshot, Captain Boomerang and Plastique. Clearly, if we want to get them right we'll need to use her, so it falls to us to take this relatively minor character and find what makes her fun.
|
Plastique's Comic HistoryPlastique first appeared in the pages of Firestorm #7 in 1982. She was a Québécois separatist and explosive expert taking hostages as part of a terrorist bombing, creating a sort of you-can't-save-everyone conundrum for Firestorm that he solved by dissolving her clothes, disarming her and humiliating her all at once. Later, she received an experimental procedure in prison that gave her explosive powers.
She would later begin to appear in the pages of Captain Atom, and it's there that she started to evolve as a character, slowly losing control of her powers and connecting with Adam, who is able to absorb her powers and keep her alive. The connection between these two characters as depicted in this series is the most humanizing story Bette really ever got. Once caught in this series, she went on to serve in the introductory team of the Suicide Squad, and would sometimes be referred to again in other permutations of the team, but there was never really another attempt to give her much more characterization than as a violent terrorist. |
Our Plastique StorySo we know we want to use Plastique in our version of the Suicide Squad, but given what stories are available for her, what is the best use for her overall? We can of course make her start out as a terrorist (although the sliding timeline really doesn't let us reference a specific cause) and have her interaction with Firestorm. We made the treatment that gave her her powers the result of a surgery performed in prison by Kobra scientists, and then depicted her slowly developing connection with Captain Atom.
This is what leads her to her time with the Suicide Squad, where we decided to make her part of the team that actually successfully earns their pardon. The reality is, if we just keep her as a villain for the whole story, she really doesn't do much. If we however choose to depict her slowly reforming via her connection with Adam and her time with the Squad she winds up, we think, as a much more interesting character. So what does she do when she's released from the Squad? Given that the comics don't really evolve her at all past this point, we knew it had to come from us, and we considered a few options, but the most obvious development for the character we found is to start working as a operative for Argus, no longer through the Squad but now on her own, tracking the same sorts of terrorist groups, like Kobra, that she once worked for. This is also the one version of her story that worked as a way to continue the connection between her and Adam. |
|
Related Characters & Teams
