Secret Six: 9 Things You Need To Know
With a TV show on the horizon, who exactly are the Secret Six?
Secret Six is one of those comics series that may not be popular enough with mass audiences that you could just bring it up casually at a cocktail party, but in a room full of comic readers, you can bet that most of them have a favorite character, storyline or moment.
Gail Simone, fresh off her stunning Birds of Prey book, brought several characters out of relative obscurity to create a villainous group that was gripping and engaging to an audience who rarely got to peak behind the curtain of a band of bad guys. They were offbeat, a bit quirky, and not afraid to kill a bunch of people for their goals.
While that doesn’t sound like a great show for little children, the overlords at the CBS Corporation have greenlit a pilot episode with a view to full Secret Six series. Given their relative obscurity, however, it's fair to assume that not many people will actually know who the Secret Six are. With that in mind, here are NINE essential things you need to know about the team, and why CBS are so interested in bringing them to life.
9. They Aren't The First Team To Use The Name
As with most teams in comic books, Gail Simone’s famous run was not the first time the name was used for a team.
Originally created by E. Nelson Bidwell in the 1960s, this version of the Secret Six was much more akin to the covert operations you’d see in the Silver Age, though they were also led by a mysterious person called Mockingbird. It only had a seven-issue miniseries and generally it was deemed “alright”, but it was popular enough to be brought back about fifteen years after their solo miniseries.
The second volume was a continuation of the Silver Age characters, more or less, in the pages of Action Comics Weekly. It meant they only had eight pages per issue, but since it was brought back in the mid-eighties, the Bronze Age allowed them to basically kill everyone, reveal who their particular Mockingbird was and mostly have a final arc.
Unfortunately, the characters never caught on the way they were supposed to, and they faded into obscurity shortly thereafter.