Suicide Squad (the comic book) was pieced together like a vintage outfit, or a winning entry on an episode of Scrapheap Challenge. The characters that made up the group were old enemies that had been hanging around in various DC books for ages, without ever being used properly, and nobody had a whole lot of love for them. In the hands of writer John Ostrander they became a vibrant, colourful and confrontational group. It's kind of genius, really: with the sort of ego and arrogance that accompanies being a supervillain, sticking a bunch of them in a team is bound to end up in a bunch of entertaining drama, scheming and back-stabbing. Especially when the stakes are so high. The basic concept of the Suicide Squad is that, well, they get sent on suicide missions. They are bad guys who were incarcerated, and offered the chance of a clean record if they helped the government out with black-ops missions. That way they acted as deniable assets for the higher ups, since who would miss a bunch of C-list supervillains if they went missing in the field? And missing they frequently went, with the main roster of the original series in an almost constant state of flux, with the unloved minor bad guys getting killed off left, right and centre. It's like the superhero equivalent of Game Of Thrones. But better.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
