Suicide Squad New 52 #2

So this cover has issues - Harley's thigh is the rough size of her waist, her arms are comically skinny with - given this is only issue two - a disturbing lack of detail/inconsistency on the gauntlets, her breasts look like popped water balloons and the ridiculous cape is missing.
Deadshot has a weird action pose going on, showing off his weirdly shaped groin protector with legs like a prehistoric beast and I'm not sure if the silly string around his arm is there to hinder him or if he rappelled down into this murky looking battlefield.
King Shark looks way over scale, like someone started drawing him and then realised they made a mistake but just couldn't stop. Which is probably why the rest of his body.. isn't where it should be? Also they weren't sure what a hammerhead shark looked like and just drew a fin wherever.


Believe it or not, this issue gave me hope for Harley Quinn.

Heck, even Deadshot sounds more like Deadshot.

He goes through the first round of several bouts, bitching about his lot (even mentioning the neck bombs that got kind of glossed over in issue one) and introducing his team mates snarkily.

I do like Harley's intro here and I can see her doing this, it's pretty in character and actually funny. Not just the comment itself but that Harley has seen Deadshot scoping them all out and decides to take the mickey out of him.

The art on this page is quite nice as well, although I don't understand how Deadshot knows what to shoot when all his scope shows him is random squiggles.







The next panel is the team - who have all landed in exactly the same spot in the stadium and have been equipped with weapons as well. I feel it's important to note that Harley already has ripped tights, yet all the fellas are tear free, scratch free, and wedgie free - even Voltaic and his incredibly shiny groin.

They stand in a circle looking a bit useless and are advised at the very last second, in this field full of potential hostiles, with one rapidly approaching them, that they need to retrieve a package from a blonde lady and basically kill everything else and apparently there's a virus.

Virus? first I've heard of it. That's fine, I'm sure they'll go into more detail about that later. Wait, they're going to use a random man to exposition some vague bullshit about it?
AND insult his weight? Really? Personally I'd be insulting his intelligence seeing as how he just confused this mess of randoms with the Justice League - a team of actual worth.

Still, he knows more than they do right now and does fairly well considering he gets a gun up his grill and a shark up in his face. I don't think he's worried about the other team mates because they're basically shadows in the background. Anyway he starts telling them about the virus, which is a simple zombie story which looks interesting because the perpetrators are half robot and it turns people into robot like beast things once infected.








Harley Quinn makes a bunch of useless comments like how much she loves zombies and yelling 'kung-fu' when she wails on a guy with her hammer.

First of all, it opens her up to slander about her intelligence.. and secondly she shoots herself in the foot about her own intelligence because she doesn't even know what kung fu is and how it's not actually hitting people with a hammer.

Then we get the beginning of a really awkward ship between her and Deadshot because she likes the 'take charge type'.

So, skimpy outfit, check. Calling the team 'ladies' as an insult, check. Main female character acting ditzy, check. Main female character's backstory so far is wanting old partner back, but immediately jumping into a relationship where she can be submissive, check.

Not an awesome start for female characters or readers.


Also not a good start for the second issue of your brand new comic to have to use back up artists to meet the ship date.

Harley sounds more like herself in this panel but holy crap, would ya look at the length of her neck in the fifth panel?!

Then look at her feet in the next panel.
Harley Quinn's battle outfit of choice is a pair of tights and sandals.

Sometimes they're drawn as nurses shoes, sometimes high heels, sometimes they look like Mary Jane's.... but after all this time we find out that she's just basically wearing the villain equivalent of socks and sandals.

We have just seen Deadshot get infected after getting some virus blood in his eyes but now Harley puts her blood covered fingers in her mouth.

It's all over her face and body too. It's not impossible that she should have been splattered in the eyes or another orifice too. Heck, the blood's doing a better job around her eyes than her bloody make-up.

A few more character developmental moments are shoved in between Voltaic and Black Spider, and Harley Quinn and El Diablo.

After that, the artist remembers that there's actually meant to be a threat in this story and draws some techno-zombies.





Elsewhere, Deadshot decides he is nowhere, and cuts his suit off at the knees because he's so hot right now. Voltaic manages to electrocute a crowd of techno zombies through a bunch of seats that manage to disappear both before and after he does this.

A really badly drawn Quinn is saved by El Diablo, who throws bins dramatically, curses the sky dramatically and then burns everyone but Quinn somehow, also very dramatically.

The gang that had split up reappears together shortly after their ridiculously overpowered staff do the job the entire team was sent there to do. They find a pregnant blonde who appears to be the infected carrier for some reason and is able to sort of fight it.

We're back to the original artist now but things are still mostly drawn in shadows and when Black Spider is thrown PAST El Diablo towards Harley Quinn, El Diablo is able to get behind Black Spider to catch him while Harley is no where to be seen.

El Diablo starts beef with Deadshot because he doesn't want to kill a pregnant woman. For some reason, this pregnant lady decided the best way to be comfortable at a sporting event was to wear a teeny white tank top and no bra along with Daisy Dukes or perhaps underwear. Very unclear.
I don't know anyone that would be comfortable doing that, let alone a heavily pregnant woman.

Preg-techno-virus-zombie-carrier then proceeds to dissolve into a bloated, tentacley blob that kind of resembles someone from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle's Krang's family tree - albeit the branch no one likes to talk about.

She basically kicks the crap out of the squad and then gets all tentacley with Harley Quinn because of course she does.
She even gets a 1960's style Batman action swirlie background.
It was nice to see Harley call out for anyone with powers, perhaps realising how useless she actually is on the team.

It's not even really clear what the preg-techno-virus-zombie-carrier-tentacle monster even wants. It keeps muttering about taking one of them and spreading itself outside but doesn't really make an effort to infect or host itself in anyone?







Harley Quinn - a grown ass woman who has spent at least 8-12 years after her standard education in getting her various doctorates has the physique of a skinny prepubescent boy except when it comes to her chest.

It's pretty disappointing that her knee cap to her uppermost thigh is the exact same size. Sure, she might be inclined to have a slimmer build but if that was the case she generally wouldn't have huge knockers.

There's still an awful lot of the art work that's either shadowed out or has no background, so there's not really much context for where the squad actually is, unless you go back a few panels.

Deadshot manages to cut the baby out with a small pen knife and the baby is fine apparently.
Voltaic isn't, because Deadshot shoots him as a patsy for the crime.

How this works isn't clear either. Just because Voltaic electrocuted everyone (even though he said he needed a few hours to recharge) it doesn't explain why the corpses are all messed up and techno-y.
Hell, some of them have been bashed with hammers or set on fire, or clearly dead before being electrocuted so uh, no, Deadshot.. just because 'his energy signature' is on every corpse and his dead body is at the scene is no one going to ask why everyone's so messed up and who exactly shot him?

Also has no-one in the crowd uploaded anything to social media during or leading up to the break out? No? There was a camera crew on the field initially... is this shit not live?
As punishment for his terrible logic, Deadshot and the rest are unable to be evacuated and are told to scramble for it. Deadshot had time to shut the baby up and clean it though so that's nice.


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Where to start...? I love the idea of this issue but it really should have been panned out more like maybe at least another issue or so. Nothing is explained or makes any sense. Hell, even Zombeavers took the time to explain how their zombie outbreak started and that was a fairly straightforward movie. Here, there's the technological aspect which could have been so good but is just there to look cool and not explored at all which is an absolute shame because it really could have set this comic apart and been super interesting.

Harley Quinn is still not shown to have any reason to be on the team apart from 'didn't crack during questioning' and can 'wield large hammer'. She's a liability and is pretty unsuitable for the job - clearly only there to be something for guys to look at and to be the token crazy girl.

This issue was basically the first draft for the Suicide Squad movie.
It features a large amount of unexplained blob zombies they can kill without worrying, an air drop into a generic location under lockdown or evacuation, scenes mostly shown in dark/shadow, Deadshot pushing El Diablo to use his powers, unsuitable or stupid costumes, dialogue/actions that seem character appropriate at times but at other times like they wanted the characters to come off as super edgy, the squad is only really told what they're doing at the last possible moment and the shipping of Harley Quinn and Deadshot.