Suicide Squad New 52 #3

Okay, this cover is.. a bunch of dudes in armour taken out by another dude with a fascinating groin shield while Harley leaps towards them, boobs first, with no eye balls, and some poor old guy's toupe around her neck.
When I first saw it, I thought that someone had superimposed Black Spider's head on Deadshot's body.



The Squad has 21 minutes until their evacuation but they'd hiding out in a diner and being shot at by some random called Mad Dog.

Black Spider thinks he's the only one to use smoke grenades and heat vision goggles.

Black Spider is wrong.


Black Spider gets shot for his arrogant stupidity.

This image of Harley - even with the New 52 get up - is perfect characterisation. She would totally do this during a siege. So again, not an ideal team member but hey.









Like an oddly coloured zombie... Harley Quinn rises from behind the counter, serving up doom and death by gas.

That's bad. But it comes with ice cream. That's good! The ice cream contains newfiftypootassium benzoatebyharleyalready.

..............................that's bad.












Man, Deadshot looks weird without his mask.

Aaaand right about here is where the treatment of Harley Quinn falls flat.


Yes, a skin condition. It hasn't been explained so far in the series, but Harley's response to having a skin condition that makes her so unable to blend in is to wear the absolute least amount of clothing, so as to show off as much of her corpse white body as possible.

Were there slim pickin's in this here Louisiana laundromat?
Possibly. However in the split second both Harley and Deadshot had to get changed, Deadshot managed to find several layers of clothing.

Do any of the other men get a full body panel? No. Of course not.

And Deadshot takes her shopping in this outfit because it's clearly a two person job to feed a baby and surely a man cannot be trusted with a baby by himself! Nay, a woman must be present!  

      *scoff, scoff, monocle drop*





It gets better though. Deadshot and Harley walk through the aisles talking loudly about their mission, oblivious to the creepy stares from locals. How's that blending going, Deadshot?

So we've established that Harley - who started out as hilarious and true to character in abandoning the group to eat ice-cream and also being smart enough to bring a gunfight to a ceasefire with a polite threat.... is also unable to dress herself for anyone but the male (?) audience, has to be present with Deadshot instead of say... leaving the baby with her in hiding because babies can't be without a female figure can they, and now she's presenting her pasty white butt crack as payment for the groceries.

There's also a randomly executed country bumpkin joke that reads like the writer had binged on Family Guy and decided that this scene needed a cut away that clearly needs no further explanation.

Same as Harley, El Diablo couldn't find a long sleeved shirt to hide his tattoos so he stands out like a sore thumb amongst these creepily drawn white people. Well even though he's terribly polite, he does have a skull tattooed on his face and is walking down the street with a black man (which apparently is a race that does not exist in this town)

We finally get to see a half naked male physique for a change, although the letterer tried their hardest to block out the damage with text balloons. They also fail to show us what we really want to see - if Deadshot's eye is infected or what.

They instead show us what no one... no one ever wanted to see.

Harley barging in on Deadshot in the bathroom and mashing her pasty face onto his stubbly one, in such a way that makes it seem like they've literally been photoshopped together.

Deadshot even tells her "I don't do clowns" but she basically forces herself on him. I feel like if the genders were reversed, this would have caused even more of a shitstorm than it did originally.

No means no, faux-clown girl.






Doesn't matter because this happens.

Deadshot lifts Harley into the bathroom cabinets so hard that he literally knocks the entire set of panels off centre.

The first panel makes Harley's face look kinda garish and if I were in Deadshot's... um... bare feet, I would NOT be leaning in towards that.

The last panel is ambiguous as to whether or not Harley and Deadshot are actually banging and if she's referring to her vagina as a clown car.
Personally, I think Deadshot's trying to play her like a cheap guitar - rockstar pose and all - while Harley fulfills her contractual obligation to make at least one cheap joke about something that might be sexual in nature but no one ever really knows for sure.






Duty calls, literally in the form of Waller, cock blocking Deadshot and may the Lord be praised.

Further ambiguous - Harley is either undoing her shirt now to 'entice' Deadshot or is doing a terrible impersonation of buttoning her shirt up. Her bra has disappeared altogether. One wonders if her nipples are also two toned but this gets dismissed as soon as you notice her weird looking knees and the fact that there is actually room for underwear in those overgrown jean panties.

Further questions - Deadshot being infected and all - how do we know the virus is only transmitted via bites? How long has the previous incubation period been? What's that? We don't know because that would involve writing more backstory?

Uh huh. Yep.







Meanwhile back in time when Black Spider and El Dialbo were robbing a veterinary clinic... what day is this? What time is this? Everyone was on the street staring at them like ten minutes ago but there's no one present manning the clinic? Well anyway, they bond over being racist to each other and finding out that Voltaic is like, totes dead youse guys and I suspect someone in our team of killing him! It could be the guy with the guns!

I'm not sure if they meant to say 'Last Call Diner' instead of dinner. Harley calls Deadshot Puddin', the nickname usually reserved for Joker. I'm sure Deadshot doesn't want to be jumping into that purple suit/handyman's outfit and I'm not sure why Harley would want to use the same pet name for a new lover.. I mean, not only is that confusing and emotionally painful depending on what happened.. but it's weird, ya know?

Now on this page, Deadshot confirms he did get his rocks off.. so... does that mean they did have sex or did he just cream his shorts? To add to the confusion - despite being in an apparently empty parking lot they are accosted by Mad Dog and his associates who can apparently teleport with a snarling mad dog in tow.

Harley forgets she was ever in the Secret Six with Deadshot and is shocked to realise that the man she slept with/almost slept with has a first name and it is Floyd. She also runs weird.





Present day, present time. (insert manic laugh from Serial Experiments Lain)

Mad Dog retreats, asking Harley if she'd like to join them instead but she declines. Note how she says this. It's kinda cute and flippantly funny, like Harley normally is but remember this because someone else will do this in the series and will DIE for it.

This will never happen to Harley, so it's not exactly a true Suicide Squad anymore.

The diner blows up, possibly with more than just the staff inside (again, low key blending here guys) and King Shark eats someone. Harley remarks that taking care of babies is like, so much harder than she thought.








Deadshot tries to abandon Black Spider but El Diablo stands his ground, however cannot actually do this literally so Harley is conflicted and helps out.

She does threaten them not to ruin her reputation.

The evac arrives but instead of diffusing their neck bombs they're reset for another 36 hours, which causes pain apparently. They also receive replacement crew - Yoyo and Captain Boomerang.

Yoyo feels the need to state that there is no freakin' string coming out of his butt and I imagine he says that to all the peoples because he clearly didn't think his name through.

Captain Boomerang has a long standing rivalry with Deadshot... and hopefully they will go into this in more detail instead of leaving it for faithful readers to have to go back and re-read all the pre-flashpoint comics to understand it and then have to forget everything because the New 52 rebooted all of it.... sort of....

What's that? They don't... wow. Never saw that coming.




Captain Boomerang... a stereotype of Australian people reads like he has a British accent.

His eyebrows are sure as heck on fleek though.

Meanwhile, Harley and Deadshot complete another blink and you miss it costume change.

No one told King Shark where to meet up or when - and it probably wouldn't matter anyway as he only steals necklaces not timepieces - but he shows up exactly on time to stand around and to have a weird face.










So this issue was a bit of a mismatch. It was odd that Harley was actually pretty well written at the start and at the end but lost it in the middle where she just turned into a sex object randomly. It's not her fault the writers forgot to write any other female characters, but they sort of punish her for it by having her do all the tropes and roles anyway. 

The way she just managed to find a more revealing outfit while the male characters actually put on more clothes than usual was annoying and pandering. Then the interaction with Deadshot (I'm putting it nicely) just seemed forced in there instead of actual story? 

Yeah, I actually don't care if she wants to do it with someone that's not Joker.. but we had several pages focused on mashing her gross face into things instead of actually filling the story and making it interesting. That and the timeline kept jumping everywhere like a playback error.