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The Suicide Squad are back and in the hands of the man who made them great. No, not Rick Flagg but John Ostrander who created the team and wrote virtually every issue of this seminal title back in the 1980s. In the original run of the book, team leader Rick Flagg Jr. was killed when he set off a nuclear bomb in the Mideast nation of Quarac. Yet inexplicably, the character was resurrected in the pages of CHECKMATE. Ostrander clearly has taken it upon himself to do the story that the CHECKMATE creative team forgot to do: the one that explains how Flagg survived. As a result, this issue is largely one big flashback, bringing back characters like Wade Eiling, Digger Harkness and the People's Heroes who have been largely forgotten. It is a brisk, stand-alone tale that shows the effects that Flagg had on the other members of his team and also reminds us of how interesting many of these second-stringers were-- (the original Captain Boomerang for example, a true diamond in the rough.) The art is rather basic and could use better layouts but all the characters are instantly recognizable, even when they are seen from a distance-- a good thing in a multiple-character story like this one. There are still too many unresolved mysteries to say where this miniseries is going but this issue captures some of the spirit of the old SUICIDE SQUAD book and seeing as that was one of the best titles of the 1980s, then that is a very good thing.
Four stars out of five.
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