Suicide Squad #7 – Review

By: Adam Glass (writer), Clayton Henry & Ig Guara (pencillers), Scott Hanna (inker), Val Staples (colorist)

The Story: Shacking up with the Joker?  Where’s a disapproving mother when you need one?

The Review: Part of what makes Joker so compelling as a character is the question of how much of his behavior is genuine madness and how much is simply a twisted sense of the world and one’s place in it.  Not surprisingly, the same questions apply to his protégé.  Harley, however, has a bit more complexity to her because she was drawn—seduced, shall we say—into her craziness, and she had a deep understanding of the human mind.

So as you read through this issue, you have to wonder how much of her particular brand of insanity is innate, and how much of it was foisted upon her by the man she loves.  If we’re meant to believe Harley was always a little nutty deep inside, even when she was Dr. Harleen Quinzel, Glass doesn’t do the best job in giving weight to that theory.  It just seems unconvincing that she jumps from sympathy and gratitude to the Joker to all-out, enraged violence over her colleague’s illicit use of her Joker notes to write a book.  What would make her breakdown more convincing is if we had seen how she was overworked, disrespected, and mocked, as she accuses.  But that’s not what Glass chooses to show us, and so her lashing out feels sudden and a bit groundless.

Anyway, it’s pretty hard to deny how much Joker’s influence played into her current state of mind, considering he basically pushes her, against the last vestiges of her will, into a vat of the same stuff that turned him clownish.  However she came into her madness, that’s pretty much her default mentality from here on in.  It doesn’t make her any less dangerous, obviously; here she proves that even lacking Savant’s martial finesse, she can make up for it with unpredictable cleverness—and the help of a well-placed pressure mine.

All this insanity culminates in the final scene between her and Deadshot, where she, in a rather unconventional use of a common psychological method, uses him to speak out her unresolved feelings for her lately defaced lover.  Actually, the macabre nature of the whole sequence would be horribly over the top had Glass not written Deadshot’s reactions so well in that scene, keeping his tension somewhere between freaked out, angry, and professional.

Deadshot easily remains the most developed member of the cast.  After all these years reading him as a humorous supporting player in Gail Simone’s Secret Six, it’s actually nice to see him take on a leadership role in the Suicide Squad, upholding some standard of heroic behavior.  Besides, Glass clearly has the best handle on Deadshot’s voice, giving him some of the better lines of the issue: “Lady you just picked sides on ‘dead or alive!’”

Guara comes in as support on art, drawing all the flashbacks between Joker and Harleen.  His is a cartoonier, bolder style, which works well to bring out the dark comedy of those scenes (Joker, musing on a skull he finds at the bottom of a chemical vat: “…ew, I am so firing that maid.  Or is that the maid…?”).  Guara becomes much less effective when drawing the more dramatic portions of the script, rendering the characters’ faces in an overacted fashion.  Henry is the superior artist, I’d say, though not by a huge margin.  His clean, edgier style makes the violence seem less outrageously gory and his work just feels more convincing as a whole.

Conclusion: The issue is gripping enough, though it doesn’t exactly tread new ground for the characters in question.  Still, Glass does a good job giving you a completely batty Harley, yet one who somehow retains a bit of charm.

Grade: B

– Minhquan Nguyen

Some Musings: – Call me a perv, but I just noticed that Deadshot’s costume includes something of an outer, armored codpiece—an update on the ol’ “underpants outside the costume” tradition, I’d say.

– Only in this title would you consider it generous for Waller to give Lime not one, but two clear warnings before pressing the blow-up button.  She’s just misunderstood, I tell ya!