Suicide Squad

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6 years ago - 41-year-old Amanda Waller creates Task Force X, nicknamed by it's members the Suicide Squad.
​Membership: 35-year-old Rick Flag, 21-year-old Albert Rothstein, 32-year-old Floyd Lawton, 43-year-old Digger Harkness, ​27-year-old Evan McCulloch, 39-year-old Malcolm Merlyn.
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5 years ago - After 36-year-old Rick Flag's death, 40-year-old Malcolm Merlyn & 28-year-old Evan McCulloch escape custody. The team has to be rebuilt.  23-year-old Barbara Gordon first begins operating as Oracle for the Suicide Squad. June Moon chooses a tenure with the Suicide Squad​ to shorten her sentence. Ben Turner is recruited to lead the Squad. They successfully infiltrate the new headquarters of the Kobra Cult. 
​Membership: 42-year-old Ben Turner, 22-year-old Albert Rothstein, 33-year-old Floyd Lawton,  44-year-old Digger Harkness, 27-year-old June Moone, 39-year-old Thomas Blake, 26-year-old Bette Sans Souci 42-year-old Eric Needham​
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​4 years ago - 43-year-old Eric Needham​​ dies while attempting to kill the other members of the Suicide Squad. Membership: 43-year-old Ben Turner, 23-year-old Albert Rothstein, 34-year-old Floyd Lawton,  45-year-old Digger Harkness, 28-year-old June Moone, 40-year-old Thomas Blake, 27-year-old Bette Sans Souci
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​3 years ago - 40-year-old Werner Vertiz is selected by Amanda Waller for the Suicide Squad, but has to be washed out when it's discovered that he has a death wish. The current members of the Squad are released, having completed their term with the team. Only ​Floyd Lawton  is denied release for killing a senator. 
Released Members: 46-year-old Digger Harkness, 24-year-old Albert Rothstein, 29-year-old June Moone, ​& 28-year-old Bette Sans Souci ​
​Remaining Membership: 44-year-old Ben Turner, ​35-year-old Floyd Lawton & 41-year-old Thomas Blake 
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2 years ago - A new team is recruited, but when Joseph Martin goes berserk, killing Frankie Kane. Bane kills him and assumes defacto leadership.  45-year-old Amanda Waller begins assembling a new team, recruiting 39-year-old Thomas Tresser as the new field leader, using his past crimes as leverage against him.  
Membership: 45-year-old Ben Turner, ​36-year-old Floyd Lawton, 30-year-old Bane, 24-year-old Frankie Kane, 28-year-old Joseph Martin 
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​​1 year ago - 46-year-old ​Amanda Waller recruits Rose Wilson, Owen Mercer, Caitlyn Snow​ & Nanaue into the Suicide Squad. 
​Membership: 40-year-old Thomas Tresser, 37-year-old Floyd Lawton, 31-year-old Bane, 22-year-old Owen Mercer, ​16-year-old Rose Wilson, 35-year-old Caitlyn Snow, 32-yaer-old ​Nanaue
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Noteworthy Teams

Oversight

​Original Team

Successful Team

Failed Team

Current Team
The Suicide Squad is a modern favorite; the subject of some of the highest profile media in the past several years, and essentially the flagship of DC's new movie world.  The comic Squad has spent a long time reflecting the movies and a lot of good has come from it, but it also happens to have, at it's core, one of the best ongoing series DC produced in one of it's most creatively dense periods, and any version of the team needs to make sure it focuses on getting that era right.

The Suicide Squad's Comic History

The Suicide Squad was introduced in Brave and the Bold #25 all the way back in 1959, an invention of Robert Kanigher.  Like a lot of Kanigher's work, it's a good example of him reading trends in comics, where several different military-themed special operative 'danger teams' had found success... and it also featured a surprisingly prominently place female character in Nurse Karin Grace.  This version of the Squad saw some moderate success, appearing in six issues of Brave and the Bold and then a further eight issues of Star Spangled War Stories until the mid sixties, when war comics had largely fallen out of vogue in favor of superhero stories, making the Suicide Squad on of dozens of wartime comics from the past.

This changed in 1987, after the Crisis of Infinite Earths, when one of DC's best storytellers John Ostrander created a new Suicide Squad series, this time set right in the middle of the world of DC's superheroes; a tactical team assembled by the ruthlessly cunning bureaucrat Amanda Waller, using both heroes and villains compelled to serve at her whim.  The book was a perfect fit for the new world of DC, becomes a focal point of dozens of characters stories for years.  

Several other takes on Ostrander's Suicide Squad concept followed, and in the New 52 the series saw a massive increase in it's profile when it became the launching vehicle for Harley Quinn's solo stories... and of course leading to several movies of vastly disparate quality. 

Our Suicide Squad Story

Since we can safely just jump ahead to the modern Squad, we can bask in just what a fantastically conceived narrative Ostrander has put together here.  We've had a lot of fun playing with the history of Amanda Waller, giving her all sorts of intrigue in the world of espionage, all leading up to her setting up her own secret black ops team out of Belle Reeve prison in Louisiana where she can start building the classic Taskforce X.  It's a perfect setup, and lets us start weaving the various characters together into the various lineups we want to hit. 

From there, we get to focus on specifically which characters and character combinations feel the most correct, whether one of several teams that implode on themselves, or the one more stable lineup that actually manages to earn the freedom of several members. several members wind up losing their lives, either on mission or by defying Amanda Waller.  

We also very deliberately, after the most recent catastrophe, set up a new Squad of young characters very deliberately meant to synergize together in what we hope is a really fun way, creating a modern team that should set them up for years of adventures to come. 
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