WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Suicide Squad #8, available now from DC Comics.
While formally named Task Force X, Amanda Waller's black ops team of supervillains and antiheroes from across the DC Universe certainly have earned their infamous nickname as the Suicide Squad. Often tasked with missions featuring high mortality rates and facing explosive, lethal punishment from Waller if they fail to comply with her strict orders, the only way out for many of the Suicide Squad's members is through death. However, as the team returns from a fiery mission in Hell, Waller reveals that not even death is the end for those she has drafted into her twisted team of killers.
Waller had dispatched the Suicide Squad into the fiery depths of Hell on an apparent mission to recover the Rock of Eternity, the source of Shazam's magical powers. Upon arriving in the netherworld, the team was shocked to discover that an ensemble of deceased villains, all with an ax to grind against Waller and her manipulative agenda, were waiting for them to exact revenge. The battle was joined between the two super-powered groups while new recruit Ambush Bug scrambled to recover Waller's target in for extraction. And though the Suicide Squad member Culebra is killed in the fiery skirmish, she is shocked to discover that death isn't the end of her time on the team in Suicide Squad #8 (by Robbie Thompson, Eduardo Pansica, Dexter Soy, Julio Ferreira, Marcelo Maiolo and Wes Abbott).
Waller sends in her latest Suicide Squad recruit Major Force to Hell to turn the tide against the team's hellish enemies and ensure the mission ends in a success. As the fighting finally comes to an end and Culebra lies dead after being killed in the crossfire, Force recovers her body, taking the corpse with him to parts unknown. As the Suicide Squad recuperates from their journey to Hell and back, Culebra awakens in the team's morgue where Waller reveals she resurrected her with confiscated resin from a Lazarus Pit, the mythical pools where Ra's al Ghul has cheated death for centuries. And as Culebra acclimates to her renewed lease on life, Waller makes it clear that not even death can free her from her commitments to Task Force X.
Lazarus Pit resin previously figured into "Future State," with Tim Drake being doused with the supernatural residue and effectively gaining superpowers from the experience. The latest development with the Suicide Squad reveals that not only is Waller aware of the resin's existence but she has gained some of it for herself, effectively gaining the ability to cheat death. And given that the Lazarus Pit bestows unnatural abilities to those that use it, including heightened strength and restored youth at the expense of sanity, Culebra may experience some long term side effects as she regains her bearings.
The prevailing wisdom was that the Suicide Squad had its various nefarious members for life but Amanda Waller has just made it clear that not even death is a way to escape from her control.
While Waller indicates she doesn't currently have enough resin on hand to resurrect other fallen Suicide Squad members, the team is under her command longer than they originally thought, with the obsessively manipulative mastermind ready to keep them together at all costs, with death no longer doing them part.