Today, we look at the time that Black Adam drew the Suicide Squad into a War of the Gods!
This is "Can't Cross Over," a feature where I look at instances when comic book writers had to adjust their stories to deal with crossovers.
War of the Gods was a Wonder Woman-centric crossover event designed to celebrate Wonder Woman's 50th anniversary. The concept is that the villainous Circe manipulates the various gods of the DC Universe into conflict with each other. This whole thing is designed to weaken the cosmic balance enough so that Circe can kill Gaea and take control of Earth for herself, reshaping the whole world in her image.
The War of the Gods miniseries (by George Perez and a number of other artists, mostly Russ Braun doing pencils, though, and Pablo Marcos) saw Black Adam called into the scene...
Black Adam wants to attack Circe at her Amazon stronghold, but he needs cannon fodder to distract Circe's soldiers while he makes his attack, so he goes to visit Amanda Waller and demands the use of the Suicide Squad in Suicide Squad #58 (by John Ostrander, Kim Yale, Geof Isherwood and Robert Campanella)..
This event came at a curious moment in the history of the Suicide Squad. As I noted in a recent feature, the Squad was ruined as a government operation after some villains went public with the government's connection to the team. Amanda Waller then murdered the villains who tried to take the Squad down and she went to prison for the killings. She was sprung by the government, working along with Batman. She was allowed to set the Suicide Squad up as a freelance operation that just did work for the government on its own. At this point, the Squad dropped the costume aspect of the series, as it was now more of a black ops operation. Heck, Deadshot flat out LOST his costume, so Floyd Lawton was just wearing normal clothes.
However, if you're doing a tie-in to a major crossover, you sort of want to appeal to the general audience, which means costumes, and so
Ostrander and Yale cleverly get the costumes back for this bigger crossover event by having Black Adam specifically ask for them as part of a sort of mystical totem-like deal...
Very clever thinking.
Waller was actually recovering from an assassination attempt at the time, so she was holed up at the Institute for Metahuman Studies, which was a concept that Ostrander had introduced in his Firestorm run. The Institute was run by Simon LaGrieve, who had previously been the head of the psychological staff for the Suicide Squad (the guy who picked which villains were reasonable choices to include on Squad missions. Of course, Waller ignored his recommendations frequently, especially for Squad members that she, herself, relied on, like Deadshot, who LaGriever would frequently try to get pulled from missions).
At the time, the Institute was the home of the Captains of the Industry, a short-lived concept introduced by Ostrander that saw the various corporations of the DC Universe forming their own superhero team (mostly meant to further their own corporate interests). The Institute had recently been privately sponsored by one of those corporations, so it was tied to the Captains. However, since they were there, Waller quickly took control of the Captains of Industry and sent them on this mission for Black Adam.
The other members of the Squad put together for this mission is a fascinating mixture of weird characters, including Grant Morrison's character from Animal Man, which was, of course, supposed to be Morrison themself, but here, Ostrander assumes that Morrison's character is a distinct being known as the Writer (the dangers of writing yourself into a comic - other comic book writers could then take control of you!), plus a character from the pre-Morrison Doom Patrol, Karma, who was part of an attempt by Paul Kupperberg to do an "All-New, All-Different Doom Patrol," with a mixture of young heroes combined with the previous Kuppeberg revival of the Doom Patrol. Those young characters were mostly written out of the book before Morrison took it over for their iconic run on the book, but here, Ostrander wraps up the plot of the character, Karma (the "wrap up" is just Karma dying in battle).
Seeing the Squad in action by Isherwood and Campanella is quite the sight!
It was rare to see such colorful stuff in the Squad of this era, so this was really cool to see.
The end of the Suicide Squad tie-in issue leads directly into War of the Gods #3, and in that issue, we see Black Adam confront Circe, where he learns that he is being manipulated by the Egyptian gods (who are being manipulated by Circe)...
Black Adam temporarily loses the majority of his powers and is sucked into a plot that involves bringing Captain Marvel back (after he had been written out of the story early in the series).
Fascinatingly, one of the Suicide Squad members, Javelin, actually gets killed off in War of the Gods #3 and not in the pages of Suicide Squad itself (Javelin is famously one of the characters in the new The Suicide Squad movie)...
Javelin was introduced by Len Wein and Dave Gibbons in their classic run on Green Lantern and he was one of the rare "success" stories of the Suicide Squad, in that he joined the team for a single mission (the Justice League crossover that I just wrote about last week) and he then presumably went on with his life, but he was sucked back in for this event and paid the ultimate price (or at least it seemed like he did. He then showed up a number of other times, and was "killed off" twice more, amusingly enough).
Ostrander and Yale were very giving with the use of their characters for this crossover. They definitely played ball well.
Okay, folks, feel free to suggest ideas for a future Can't Crossover to brianc@cbr.com!