Comics Archives - The Ween Speaks

The other day I was watching some of my favorite episodes of the Justice League cartoon. I went straight to the end of season 1 for the the three-part season finale: “The Savage Time”.

In “The Savage Time”, the Justice League (sans Batman) arrives home from a space mission to find the Earth changed in chilling ways. Touching down in Metropolis, they discover jackbooted sci-fi commandos patrolling the streets beneath building-length banners of one Vandal Savage. The League fall in with this timeline’s Bruce Wayne, still a bat-adjacent vigilante, but one who battles the Savage regime rather than supercriminals. The League discover that Vandal Savage used time travel to change the fate of the Second World War, helping the Nazis win while appointing himself the Supreme Leader of the regime. With Bruce’s help, they find the time travel technology Savage used and head back to the ‘40s.

In the past, the League explores different ways to resist Savage. Wonder Woman and the Martian Manhunter get entangled in espionage at the heart of the regime in Berlin. Superman, Hawkgirl, and Flash assist the Blackhawks, a group of airmen from the various countries occupied by the Nazis. Green Lantern, separated from the others after his ring loses its charge, falls in with a group of marines behind enemy lines. Lantern, himself a former marine, fights to prove himself against the hostility and suspicion of certain members of the unit, a plot point I see in sharper relief as an adult with a knowledge of the history of US military segregation. The cartoon show uses the John Stewart incarnation of Green Lantern, who is a Black man. His immediate rejection by one of the white marines of Easy Company makes almost too much sense.

It’s Lantern’s lonely struggle which brings him out of all the Leaguers to have the final confrontation with Vandal Savage. Again, as an adult, I see the choice to make Lantern the one who fights the Nazi overlord with greater poignancy. He takes Savage on one-on-one, without his power ring and without any superpowers, and he saves the world by crashing Savage’s command ship. Savage goes down with the ship, alone except for his bumbling subordinates. Lantern gets rescued by his teammates. They go back through the time portal and find their world restored, no one besides the Justice League able to remember the brief authoritarian perversion of reality.

It’s all right there. I would be insulting your intelligence to go on at length about why I went straight here when I decided I wanted to rewatch some of this show. This three-parter is likely one of the first places I learned about who Nazis were and what they believed. Like Indiana Jones, the other place I first ran into them, “The Savage Time” doesn’t dive deep into their repugnant ideology, but it lays down a couple clear lines: the Nazis are stupid, they are venal, they are violent, and we don’t like them. When we see them, we fight them.

For standards & practices reasons, the creators of Justice League couldn’t show anyone dying onscreen in the cartoon, except under very specific circumstances. They always have to show enemy pilots parachuting back to earth. They really test this rule here. There are several Nazi footsoldiers who definitely fully eat shit at the hands of our heroes, who – as you may know – are otherwise vehemently against killing their enemies.

I’m with it. If you’re a Nazi, Superman would straight up let you die, and he’d be right to do it. Fuck you.

But I was much more moved by another part of the story, the scene where Superman, Hawkgirl, and Flash meet the Blackhawks and hear their story. The show is called Justice League, Superman is the most iconic superhero ever created, but when he hears what the Blackhawks have accomplished and what they want to do to stop the Nazis, he says “How can we help?”

Not “I’m in charge now”. Not “Here’s what we’ll do”. “How can we help?”

It’s easy to fall into hero fantasies in a dark time. I’m literally talking to you about a superhero show; I am not immune to propaganda. But there’s something really important here, to me – Superman sees the fight and he knows which side he’s on. He also knows the Blackhawks have been in it a lot longer than he has. He puts aside his identity as basically the most important person in the whole DC universe to find out what they need from him, how he can give his power to them.

Even Superman knows that saving the world is not about being a hero, a liberator, an icon remembered forever. It’s about seeing those who are already in the fight and asking “How can I help?”

I used to really love comic books. I used to really love superhero comics in particular. But somewhere in the avalanche of movies and tie-ins and reboots I got buried and I never dug myself out. Perhaps the massive increase in volume did not correspond to an equally massive increase in quality.

Or perhaps I just reflexively start hating things when other people like them.

Either way, now I only go to the comic book store by a sort of rote impulse – I look at the books on the shelves, I make eye contact with the familiar cowled faces, I buy nothing, and I go home.

I’m trying to avert this nullification by diving back into my comics collection and reconnecting with the material that made me crazy in the first place. And we’re starting at maybe the worst possible place for this journey to make any sense: the John Ostrander/Kim Yale/et al era of the Suicide Squad.

The Squad has gotten a bad rap in the last few years because of the godawful David Ayer movie, and then the, like, very okay James Gunn movie, and then the video game (I can’t remember if it was supposed to be good or bad, and I don’t care). But back in 1988, the Suicide Squad was just becoming itself, and the awkward wild nasty process of its birth is one of the most fascinating serial narratives in comics history.

The Suicide Squad is the brainchild of Amanda Waller – if you’re reading this, you probably know that. The Wall’s been getting a bad rap of late, with depictions of her in other media tending toward the utterly villainous. But Waller is more complicated than this, and in the hands of John Ostrander and Kim Yale she becomes one of the most challenging and interesting characters in the DC Universe. She’s not a good person, definitely not a hero, and she knows it, but she believes wholeheartedly that she is a necessary evil, that all the ways she’s mortgaged her soul were required to safeguard her children and her country. And she might be right: Ostrander and Yale write with surprising sensitivity (BY 1980s STANDARDS, NOT 2020s STANDARDS) about the struggles she faces as a Black woman in the non-stop white boy winter that is the American government. The dislike other characters hold for her is probed and considered, revealing ugly and unflattering and deeply real aspects to characters who might otherwise get away looking squeaky clean. I appreciate that.

There’s so much shading to each member of the Squad, and many of their adversaries too. Bronze Tiger, Deadshot, Nightshade, Count Vertigo, even Captain Boomerang – the stupidness of their gimmicks and bits elevates the poignancy of their mistakes and failings. The characters of the Suicide Squad, being disposable on an ontological level, are allowed to fail big, much bigger than more mainstream heroes. And they’re allowed to change significantly, sometimes for the worse. They are a mess of competing goals, desires, and schemes, and frequently that mess escalates into a total trainwreck. They do not slide into the currently popular (and perfectly fine when it’s used well) trope of Found Family. The members of the Squad hate each other and their masters at the beginning, and they still hate each other at the very end. Their relationships are all diseased by the power they wield over each other. In that way, this book is very honest about how ugly human relationships can get.

The thematics of power scale up in fascinating ways throughout the story, escalating into a type of late Cold War foreign policy kitsch which I find endlessly fascinating. The decision to depict the actual Reagan and actual HW Bush deploying the Squad to battle Commie superheroes will never not amuse me. The Suicide Squad trots the globe like a CIA-trained circus, wrecking up the place and usually making things worse for everyone around them. Much like the real CIA. This relationship between the Squad and the US government is a beautiful/ugly inversion of the relationship constructed every time Superman mentions that he’s fighting for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Superman uses his god-like strength to maintain the ever-crumbling pedestal of American exceptionalism, papering over American evils with his own incontrovertible goodness. Conversely, anyone who associates with the Suicide Squad is dragged down to their level, made venal and violent by association. And since it’s the US government which invents the Squad, one must wonder who was the really venal and violent one in the first place.

I have to be clear that this book is full of plenty of material which now reads as cringe. Ideas that were progressive or groundbreaking in 1988, 1990, 1992 feel wildly embarrassing in 2025. The decision to color the skin of everyone from South Asia and the Middle East grey is consistently baffling to me. I know you guys had brown ink. All the Black characters have human-colored brown skin. Surely it couldn’t have been that hard to make a slightly lighter brown??? There is a lot of discomfort to be had here.

I still love the book, though, because of the thrill of its best and biggest moments, as well as the fervor of its convictions. Even cynicism was brighter and more alive in prior days.

Very, very, very few pop culture works, especially goofy old comic books, have the strength to confront and condemn their core concepts. The 2004 Battlestar Galactica is one of the few TV shows to risk this, and to my mind the penultimate mutiny storyline is one of the show’s all-time best. Similarly, the final arc of the Ostrander-Yale Suicide Squad is a complete deconstruction of its central premise, a final judgment delivered on the idea of government-enslaved supervillains press-ganged into performing “righteous” violence (and when you put it like that…). I have no qualms about spoilers for a work that concluded before I was born, but if you have that kind of fixation, keep scrolling until you see Batman again.

The last operation is a battle between the original Squad and a new, even worse Suicide Squad developed by another, especially shadowy arm of the US government. In the wake of the conflict, Waller dissolves the Squad and frees its members, admitting that her scheme did more harm than good. Deadshot and Count Vertigo confront each other atop a hill: Vertigo earlier asked for the option to be killed by Deadshot, rather than continue to live with bipolar disorder. Deadshot asks Vertigo one more time whether he wants to live or die. Vertigo hesitates, hesitates, hesitates, and then refuses Deadshot’s offer. They both depart.

This is an obvious literal denial of the book’s title. No more suicide, no more death. Count Vertigo, for all his SIGNIFICANT flaws, gets to live, and wants to. Deadshot, for all his depraved obsession with slaughter, does not kill again, and he makes that choice of his own volition. Both men are better than we have been led to believe.

I love seeing Batman eat shit.

Supervillains are supposed to represent an outsize evil and perversity, the exact mirror to the outsize good of superheroes. But in the Ostrander-Yale Suicide Squad, whatever heights of villainy our Squaddies achieve, none of them match the craven brutality of The State – America, Russia, Israel, all of them that appear in the book.

That idea, more than any other from this book, feels sharper than ever. And yet imagine hearing that from a comic book or a superhero movie today.