Suicide Squad
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The Progressive, Controversial History ofSuicide Squad’s Amanda Waller
Comics commentator Ardo Omer’s voice swells when she remembers the first time she came across Amanda Waller, the hard-ass leader of the Suicide Squad. It was in the mid-'00s, during an episode of Justice League Unlimited, a cartoon starring DC Comics characters that aired two decades after Waller debuted in DC’s Legends mini-series. “The first thing you see is Amanda Waller’s presence, the way she moves, even before she speaks,” recalls Omer, who is black. “She was this short, big, black woman — the kind of woman I’d grown up seeing in my neighborhood, calling them ‘aunties’ even though they weren’t related to me. And she was standing up to Batman!" Omer was in awe.
That moment is a decent encapsulation of what makes Waller groundbreaking in the annals of superhero fiction. When she was created in the mid-1980sby writer John Ostrander, she was explicitly supposed to be unlike any other comics persona. In a genre where women are drawn as pin-ups and black people are often either pure-hearted role models or streetwise hoodlums, she was — and is — something different: a middle-aged, heavy-set, profoundly cynical, African-American, female government apparatchik. She’s calculating, contradictory, and confrontational. She shouts down presidents and spandex-wearing crusaders. She’s had rare staying power, and that’s in no small part due to the progressive aims of her creator — aims that were, for a time, betrayed in a way that made her nearly unrecognizable.
At the time of Waller's creation, Ostrander was on an unusual path for a comics writer, having only entered the business in his mid-30s. Prior to that, he’d studied to be a Catholic priest, driven a cab in Chicago, and had a reasonably successful career as an actor and playwright there. A longtime comics fan, he turned his pen to that medium in 1983 at the behest of a theater friend named Mike Gold, who was launching a small company called First Comics. Ostrander’s work there, most notably on an outlandish sci-fi series called Grimjack,earned the admiration of a DC editor named Bob Greenberger. Around 1985, Greenberger floated the idea of Ostrander doing a series for the company, and Ostrander suggested resurrecting a team from the 1950s called Challengers of the Unknown. That group had already been claimed for a project, so Greenberger suggested another DC property from that period: the Suicide Squad.
“My first reaction was, ‘Suicide Squad’? What a stupid name for a book,” Ostrander recalls. “Who would knowingly belong to something that called itself ‘Suicide Squad’?”
It’s unsurprising that he was unfamiliar with the name — the team had only appeared in a handful of issues of the mid-century DC series The Brave and the Bold. They were a military group sent on particularly difficult missions, created by writer Robert Kanigher (who stole the name from a Nazi-fighting gang that appeared in a few World War II–era pulp magazines) and artist Ross Andru. It disappeared and was largely forgotten.
But as Ostrander pondered, he thought of the type of person who might join an organization with that moniker: “Maybe people who didn't have a choice. Well, who doesn't have a choice? Hmm. Prisoners! Prisoners don't have a choice. Okay. And that means in the [DC universe] that we're talking about supervillains, and I like villains, I always have.” He’d long been a fan of espionage stories and thought the team could be working for the U.S. government on secret missions against their will. That meant an operative would have to keep the project in line, “ramrodding it,” as Ostrander says.
Once he'd come to that conclusion, Ostrander’s self-identified “left of center” leanings came into play. “To start off, I wanted someone who is African-American, because at the time there weren’t as many African-American characters in comics,” he says. “And I wanted the character to be female because we didn't have very many female characters, either, ones who were very strong and could basically kick ass. And I thought she should be a little bit older, because I wanted her to have a life story, something that fed into who she was.”
actress Nell Carter. Wearing thick, purple eye shadow; boxy, black business wear; bunned hair; and a sneer, she brooks no bullshit. “Frankly, I couldn’t be more serious, colonel!” she shouts. “And by the way, if you ever again call anything about me ‘cotton-picking,’ mister — I’ll stuff those bright, shiny eagles on your shoulders so far up your butt, they’ll be able to nest in your skull!” Waller was already fully realized by her second page.
A few issues later, readers met the reluctant foot soldiers of Task Force X — informally known as the Suicide Squad — who were directed by Waller and corraled in the field by Flag. Right after Legends was over, they spun out into their own series, Suicide Squad, initially penciled by artist Luke McDonnell. It was a paradigm-shifting period at DC: The company had in the past three years destroyed and rebuilt its entire cosmology in a mega-crossover called Crisis on Infinite Earths, reinvented Batman in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, and deconstructed the very concept of the superhero in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen. Suicide Squad, though less well-known than those three series, was still quite ambitious in its attempts to make mainstream comics appealing for grown-ups. It killed off characters, it had a cast of jerks and misanthropes, and its story lines were set in decidedly un-kid-friendly geopolitical hotspots like drug-war-ridden Colombia, Sandinista-controlled Nicaragua, and the headquarters of a group of Islamic militants.
She was svelte. That same year, DC Comics rebooted its entire superhero line, with reimagined and younger versions of characters appearing in series after series. One of the rebooted titles was a new take on Suicide Squad, penned by Adam Glass and penciled by Federico Dallocchio and Ransom Getty. Dallocchio recalls a very specific editorial edict: “Show her as the opposite of the Amanda from the old comic: thin and young.”
changed in the comicsto be older and larger again. And though the character has been written almost entirely by white men to date, a black woman, Vita Ayala, will be writing a few Suicide Squad stories starring Waller later this year.
In other words, there’s plenty of room for Waller to scheme and grow, and DC and Warners are placing her higher on their list of priorities than they ever have before. That’s no small accomplishment for a character who didn’t fit into any of the existing molds of success when a 30-something comics newbie dreamed her up three decades ago. “The fact that other people wanted to use her indicates that she's been a really compelling character,” Ostrander says. “And, in that way, I feel that I've really done my job.”
http://www.vulture.com/2016/08/suicide-squad-progressive-leader-amanda-waller.html
Comics commentator Ardo Omer’s voice swells when she remembers the first time she came across Amanda Waller, the hard-ass leader of the Suicide Squad. It was in the mid-'00s, during an episode of Justice League Unlimited, a cartoon starring DC Comics characters that aired two decades after Waller debuted in DC’s Legends mini-series. “The first thing you see is Amanda Waller’s presence, the way she moves, even before she speaks,” recalls Omer, who is black. “She was this short, big, black woman — the kind of woman I’d grown up seeing in my neighborhood, calling them ‘aunties’ even though they weren’t related to me. And she was standing up to Batman!" Omer was in awe.
That moment is a decent encapsulation of what makes Waller groundbreaking in the annals of superhero fiction. When she was created in the mid-1980sby writer John Ostrander, she was explicitly supposed to be unlike any other comics persona. In a genre where women are drawn as pin-ups and black people are often either pure-hearted role models or streetwise hoodlums, she was — and is — something different: a middle-aged, heavy-set, profoundly cynical, African-American, female government apparatchik. She’s calculating, contradictory, and confrontational. She shouts down presidents and spandex-wearing crusaders. She’s had rare staying power, and that’s in no small part due to the progressive aims of her creator — aims that were, for a time, betrayed in a way that made her nearly unrecognizable.
At the time of Waller's creation, Ostrander was on an unusual path for a comics writer, having only entered the business in his mid-30s. Prior to that, he’d studied to be a Catholic priest, driven a cab in Chicago, and had a reasonably successful career as an actor and playwright there. A longtime comics fan, he turned his pen to that medium in 1983 at the behest of a theater friend named Mike Gold, who was launching a small company called First Comics. Ostrander’s work there, most notably on an outlandish sci-fi series called Grimjack,earned the admiration of a DC editor named Bob Greenberger. Around 1985, Greenberger floated the idea of Ostrander doing a series for the company, and Ostrander suggested resurrecting a team from the 1950s called Challengers of the Unknown. That group had already been claimed for a project, so Greenberger suggested another DC property from that period: the Suicide Squad.
“My first reaction was, ‘Suicide Squad’? What a stupid name for a book,” Ostrander recalls. “Who would knowingly belong to something that called itself ‘Suicide Squad’?”
It’s unsurprising that he was unfamiliar with the name — the team had only appeared in a handful of issues of the mid-century DC series The Brave and the Bold. They were a military group sent on particularly difficult missions, created by writer Robert Kanigher (who stole the name from a Nazi-fighting gang that appeared in a few World War II–era pulp magazines) and artist Ross Andru. It disappeared and was largely forgotten.
But as Ostrander pondered, he thought of the type of person who might join an organization with that moniker: “Maybe people who didn't have a choice. Well, who doesn't have a choice? Hmm. Prisoners! Prisoners don't have a choice. Okay. And that means in the [DC universe] that we're talking about supervillains, and I like villains, I always have.” He’d long been a fan of espionage stories and thought the team could be working for the U.S. government on secret missions against their will. That meant an operative would have to keep the project in line, “ramrodding it,” as Ostrander says.
Once he'd come to that conclusion, Ostrander’s self-identified “left of center” leanings came into play. “To start off, I wanted someone who is African-American, because at the time there weren’t as many African-American characters in comics,” he says. “And I wanted the character to be female because we didn't have very many female characters, either, ones who were very strong and could basically kick ass. And I thought she should be a little bit older, because I wanted her to have a life story, something that fed into who she was.”
A few issues later, readers met the reluctant foot soldiers of Task Force X — informally known as the Suicide Squad — who were directed by Waller and corraled in the field by Flag. Right after Legends was over, they spun out into their own series, Suicide Squad, initially penciled by artist Luke McDonnell. It was a paradigm-shifting period at DC: The company had in the past three years destroyed and rebuilt its entire cosmology in a mega-crossover called Crisis on Infinite Earths, reinvented Batman in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, and deconstructed the very concept of the superhero in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen. Suicide Squad, though less well-known than those three series, was still quite ambitious in its attempts to make mainstream comics appealing for grown-ups. It killed off characters, it had a cast of jerks and misanthropes, and its story lines were set in decidedly un-kid-friendly geopolitical hotspots like drug-war-ridden Colombia, Sandinista-controlled Nicaragua, and the headquarters of a group of Islamic militants.
In other words, there’s plenty of room for Waller to scheme and grow, and DC and Warners are placing her higher on their list of priorities than they ever have before. That’s no small accomplishment for a character who didn’t fit into any of the existing molds of success when a 30-something comics newbie dreamed her up three decades ago. “The fact that other people wanted to use her indicates that she's been a really compelling character,” Ostrander says. “And, in that way, I feel that I've really done my job.”
http://www.vulture.com/2016/08/suicide-squad-progressive-leader-amanda-waller.html
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