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Suicide Squad and "The Dirty Dozen"

While derivative comics sometimes reflect a lack of inspiration and a reliance on vicarious authorship in order to cover the exhaustion of ideas and/or enthusiasm, occasionally comics can borrow or reinvent a concept and improve substantially on the original.

We see such a relationship in the Ostrander / Yale sleeper favorite Suicide Squad, whose basic premise owed considerably to pieces like the film "The Dirty Dozen."

One can suspect, perhaps without every completely having the ability to confirm, that the E. M. Nathanson novel and the movie co-scripted by Nunnally Johnson and Lukas Heller, based on this novel, provided a conceptual starting point. However the information flowed, the sections below explore the fundamental similarities between the comic title and the sixties war movie classic.

The Deal

Both works begin with the premise of incarcerated offenders attempting to earn some kind of amnesty by doing dangerous underground missions for some agency that trades the possible loss of their (expendable) lives for the hope of escaping life or death sentences.

"The Dirty Dozen" began with recruitment from a military prison, from among a variety of lifers and prospective long-timers. For the most part, Suicide Squad recruited similarly from prisons that dabbled in low-level superhumans and costumed adventurers, though occasionally other elements offered services. For instance, in various moments in the first run of the series, Batman offered (or imposed) combined efforts on a particular case, and the Atom provided his shrinking technology to an ill-fated Squadder who acted in his role for a time.

Conceptually, this allows a writer to use criminal types for heroic purposes, without requiring a redefinition of a surly mob of hardened types to fit some (sometimes unbelievable) heroic model. For instance, consider the drinking, fornicating cantankerousness of Captain Boomerang, universally disliked and disrespected by his more powerful and more courageous peers within the Suicide Squad. The character holds the reader's interest for exactly the failures that make him an unlikely hero; replaced by a formulaic Silver Age DC Hero, with his stated and unstated code of heroism, and we would see more an iconic statue than a human being in the role, and, furthermore, would lack the hooks of character that made Suicide Stories work.

With the Suicide Squad, the arrangement remained somewhat less precise, Though primarily manned with costumed flotsam cleaned out from prisons, other characters showed up from sources like cancelled books or discarded members of other teams; for instance, if memory serves, Vixen from the Detroit incarnation of the Justice League and Katana from Batman and the Outsiders both, at various times, worked with the team. And, of course, during one stretch, Batman and the Suicide Squad both worked on the same mission, though perhaps with somewhat divergent goals.

The addition of non-criminal elements, rather than watering down the criminal nature of the core membership, actually provided a number of foils who could throw the flawed characters of the Squad's membership into a stronger contrast.

The Cast

For the movie, writers had to create a cast of foul-ups and invest them with suitably interesting quirks and the requisite inability to play well with others that the concept requires.

For Suicide Squad, DC already somewhat had laid out a cast in its swarms of disposable supervillains, some of whom had a fully-developed set of necessary quirks and cantankerousness, others who improved considerably with minor modifications and polish.

To this it might add the occasional failed hero or heroine (such as Gypsy, from the ill-fated Detroit Justice League) and thereby provide either a venue or an honorable disposal for the character.

Given the nature of most of the cast - low-level supervillains who lack what it takes to stay out of jail - a concept like Suicide Squad inherently avoids problems of grossly overpowered characters acting out stories on a scale to which normal human readers must invariably fail to relate, given its distance from a flesh-and-blood scope. In this aspect, Suicide Squad, although ultimately fated to cancellation, has a message to transmit to team books about power bloat in superheroes. Too much super and too little man, we might say, makes Jack a dull boy.

The Leader

Lee Marvin, in the movie, led the project and the mission around which "The Dirty Dozen" centered, also playing the role of a buffering agent between the destructive impact of ritualistic army discipline and his team of retrained goons. We see his role demonstrated in a scene where he has his stockade-fodder disarm intrusive MPs who attempt to impose army dress and grooming regulations on surly military convicts striking for the want of amenities like hot water.

Amanda Waller makes an excellent analog here. Demonstrating a kind of toughness altogether different from that of superpowered adventurers - she has an armor not of matter but of character, earned through surviving a variety of urban nightmare scenarios in her earlier life - she has the gall and gumption necessary to corral a herd of costumed hard-cases who could, if they wanted to, rather quickly put an end to the rugged rock of her life.

The dangerous nature of the work the Squad did often put Waller herself in physical danger, sometimes handled by decoys and proxies who might take the incoming bullets for her, sometimes only poorly handled in ways that left her in the hospital. Under one such circumstance, Oracle, the onetime Batgirl, stepped in as interim leader, setting the precedent for a shifting leadership in the future which may provide guidelines for the upcoming reincarnation of the concept with DC's planned revival of some form of the title.

The Chorus of Hardcases

In "The Dirty Dozen," writers had to come up with a crop of misfits to order to suit the premise of a potentially-doomed set of operatives in a high-risk unit of convicts performing missions to achieve a kind of amnesty from a variety of (usually capital) military offenses.

As a general rule, supervillains don't get the death penalty in comics, regardless of how many lives they take. Endings where their crimes (seem to) take their lives explain part of this; and the desire, on the part of writers, to leave their options open to reuse these villains explains the rest of it. So, therefore, we have villains who may spend a great deal of time incarcerated, in the fine fashion of DC's Lex Luthor, who seemed to pass most of the decade 1961-1970 wearing a gray uniform and scheming in a jail cell.

While the cast tended to shift, a few regulars presented recurring problems in Suicide Squad. Captain Boomerang generally required someone to drag him into trouble to get him to participate in order to find a way out; Poison Ivy spent her time trying to overwhelm just the right male to shift the balance of power in her favor; the Bronze Tiger played posturing dominance games, ad nauseam; and Count Vertigo spent a great deal of time trying to decide just the right moment to have someone kill him.

The Resident Gadfly

A team of this sort needs at least one perpetual problem, someone whose flawed character always can rise to the task of getting the heroes (or villains drafted into heroic roles) into trouble, lest things become dull from getting too tame. In "The Dirty Dozen," A. J. Maggott, the Bible-thumping, race-baiting, self-righteous rapist geek played this role (as depicted with considerable humor by the late Telly Savalas). If such characters have become a tiresome and somewhat bigoted cliche in the cinema of the third millennium, they had not yet done so in the films of the late sixties; and, at the very least, Savalas' character provides an amusing source for demented one-liners a generation later.

Aiming to make a character both amusing, troublesome, and, ultimately, much in need of death by friendly fire, Savalas portrayed the character Maggott as an obsessive, self-important, treacherous, insulting, smug, unlikeable yet admirably audacious whole, and, had he not met a well-deserved bad end at the tail end of the movie, he could have provided enough trouble to the team to provide the plots for a series of "Dirty Dozen" movies. However, the logic of the story suggested an ending where few - almost no one - would survive the Dozen's mission.

For the Suicide Squad, this role could sometimes shift, since a number of figures had some particular attributes to allow them to rotate such functions. Generally, though, through most of the sample of Suicide Squad that I managed to dredge out of two or three recent finds of sleeper comics gems, the rather silly Silver Age Flash villain Captain Boomerang lives up to the gadfly role, with occasional substitutions by the likes of Deadshot or Count Vertigo, both of whom have absurd obsessions or neuroses that can serve to cause trouble as the occasion demands.

Boomerang, though never quite as demented, in this incarnation, as the ludicrous Maggott, nonetheless could reliably cause crises on demand through his love for ardent waters or his refined instincts for self-preservation. Indeed, Boomerang showed the most charm in the series when some minor oversight or moral failing of his managed to create an avalanche of undesirable consequences.

The resident gadfly, in both cases, became an immortal component by stirring things up just when they needed it. Maggott, projecting upon his rape victim the ethical lapse that brought it about, already had a morbid obsession with sexual contamination and poor coping skills to deal with guilt; add to this mix the Dozen's graduation ceremony where their leader provided them with a bevy of hookers and you have a situation in which Maggott resolved to effect the deaths of the team himself.

Captain Boomerang, on the other hand, worked in chaos but generally without malevolent intent. His combination of inability to defer gratification and a robust instinct for self-preservation meant that he could cause trouble with his relentless resistance to the notion of risking his skin (a sane enough impulse, one would think, but often absent from comic-book heroes) or by his desire to have just one more drink. The latter impulse, indeed, resulted in a feud by the ridiculous techno-assassin Deadshot, whose weapon suit Boomerang managed to get lost in transit between airports after Boomerang's desire for one more beer caused them to miss an international flight. In other cases, one might expect situations where other team members had to incapacitate Boomerang before exposing him to danger so that he would fight like the devil to get out of trouble.

The Hostile Oversight

Given the trouble one might expect from a special unit composed of convicts, whether military or spandexed, one can see the near-inevitability of some kind of conflict with the forces of order, even if these forces created the unit in the first place.

The bad guys got into trouble for their manifold services towards humanity as villains, and we could therefore expect that the officials who picked them as likely cannon fodder do not like them. Furthermore, a leader who manages to instill loyalty into such a crowd will tend to find himself on the wrong side of the goodwill of his own higher-ups, precisely because the means to build a loyal following among hardened men generally will require deviating from policy and protocol (for instance, administering privileges to prisoners whose sentences generally preclude merciful treatment).

Military hierarchy provides the hostile oversight in the movie, and in the book, various players got to assume this role. Sometimes government agencies stepped in to make trouble, inasmuch as they had a vested interest in having put most of the team members behind bars in the first place. At a later stage, however, the Suicide Squad acted as a private, mercenary body, and thereby eluded the intrusive interference of congressional committees and the like.

Nonetheless, other actors might, on occasion, step into the role of hostile overseer. During at least one arc, Batman played this role, typical with post-Miller interpretations of the character where he provides scowls and disapproval as the occasion demands.

The Body Count

Superhero comics did and do have a great need for culling of superhero populations, unless they intend, ultimately, to create settings akin to that of Ross' Earth X or Valentino's Normalman. However, few credible vehicles have existed for getting rid of the superfluous, the overused, the dated, and the outright lame. Suicide Squad, however, during its ill-fated but very entertaining run, did all these things, and we can understand the temptation DC intends to indulge to recreate this team.

As the name suggests, this title provided a place for costumed characters to go to the Great Beyond in the acting out of their assigned duties. This provides a generally-absent kind of realism to the stories, inasmuch as superhero comics tend to involve stories that pretend to an earth-shaking quality, yet which allow nothing significant to happen to characters and in which nothing changes.

In a world populated with superhumans, we could expect some things to change. However, when such beings engage in some equivalent of low- or high-powered superhuman gang wars, we could expect cadavers to appear. Not everyone, after all, enjoys the ability to shed bullets like a duck sheds water.

Had this title more aggressively pursued the role of culling the superhuman herd, it might have done a great deal of good cleanup work for the DC universe. Even in its limited mortality rate, it exceeded normal superhero comics, where things usually don't change because no one wants to toss an intellectual property to the Grim Reaper even when said properties compete with each other (instead of the merchandise of rival publishers).

Settings and Intrigue

The basic premise of "The Dirty Dozen" bound it to a four-year window during which the United States involved itself in World War II. While the themes of this war allow for all manner of explorations, from simple depictions of bloodletting to amusing treatments like Catch-22 and The Secret of Santo Vittorio, it nonetheless does have some limits that ultimately bind the tales. One generally must play the game as Axis or Ally in creating a World War II tale.

Suicide Squad, on the other hand, enjoyed the rich backdrop of settings such as collapsing Soviet satellite states and the contemporary Middle East as scenarios that required their presence and intervention. This occasionally took them into jungles, more frequently into geopolitical trouble spots, and sometimes through presumably peaceful locations like Marseilles.

The End

Mortality ended the Dirty Dozen, though that team had served its storytelling purpose, inasmuch as the writers of book and movie intended a single and complete story, rather than an ongoing series.

For the Suicide Squad, however, one must assume poor sales killed it, since the book hadn't really lost momentum or aesthetic credibility towards the end; in other words, we might assume that Yale and Ostrander didn't choose to euthanize the concept once they had exhausted their interest in it. However, when commercial forces kill a comic book, writers frequently must compose a reason this happened within the logic of the stories.

Therefore, after one particularly obnoxious mission in the jungles, in which the Suicide Squad dealt with an annoying copycat team, Amanda "the Wall" Waller simply called it quits for the team, and the writers closed what hanging threads they could resolve without foreclosing the future possibilities for the concept.

Most of the team members returned to their criminal careers, including Boomerang (whom the Walter West "Dark" Flash would put in a body cast during one of his encounters), and Waller herself ended up in a cabinet position in the Luthor administration. Yet some rumor suggests that, indeed, the concept may be in line for a comeback, with a different cast.

Given that the title died prior to exhaustion of the concept, we can see that some influential talent who fondly remembered the original piece might attempt to recreate it in its salient particulars, regardless of the specifics which change (for instance, Manchester from the Elite will play some role in this team, although DC might have done well to abandon the character after they made their point with him in Action Comics #775). The vigor of the concept shows itself in two generations of interpretation, through cinema and comics, and the new Suicide Squad, if it happens, will have at least that much going for it, even in the absence of Ostrander and Yale.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 245. Completed 01-APR-2001.