Knowledge Waits is a feature where I just share some bit of comic book history that interests me.
The other day, I wrote about how Captain Boomerang went from being a Flash Rogue to becoming a mainstay of the late 1980s revamp of the Suicide Squad that re-envisioned the team as a Dirty Dozen made up of mostly supervillains.
In the piece, I noted "There was also a plotline involving people getting hit with pies, but that's neither here nor there (maybe I'll write about that in the future)." Of course, I should know better, because whenever I ever mention doing stuff later in the future, people want the future to be, well, now. My pal Alan asked me to feature the pie-throwing mystery from the Suicide Squad, so here we are!
It all began in Suicide Squad #21 (by John Ostrander, Luke McDonnell and Karl Kesel), an issue after Captain Boomerang had been busted for disguising himself as Mirror Master to commit crimes while under house arrest as a member of the Squad as Captain Boomerang. Amanda Waller is walking at the prison base of the Squad when she is hit by a whipped cream pie...
She automatically assumes that it is Captain Boomerang at fault, so she calls him to the office, but then HE gets hit by a pie!!
That is enough to temporarily keep her from assuming it is him (although I love how it doesn't TOTALLY change her mind)...
Two issues later (with Kim Yale joining her husband as a co-writer of the issue), the Squad helps defend Australia from an alien invasion. The heroes of Earth drive off the alien invaders, but in their wake, they left a Gene Bomb designed to kill anyone with the Metagene. This way they would kill off most of the superhumans on Earth, which is what the aliens feared the most.
As the bomb goes off, Nemesis is hit by a pie after visiting Nightshade...
In Suicide Squad #26 (with art by Grant Miehm and Karl Kesel, Ostrander writing solo), Bronze Tiger and Vixen share a kiss, but during the kiss, Ben ducks and Mari gets hit by a pie. While Ben is laughing, he gets his, as well...
In Suicide Squad #30 (by Ostrander, Yale, John K. Snyder and Karl Kesel), Lois Lane is trying to expose the Squad when she gets hit by a pie...
In Suicide Squad #31 (by Ostrande, Yale and Snyder), new member Jewelee (one half of the married villain duo, Punch and Jewelee) gets pied and she blames her husband...
Due to all of the attention she is getting, Doctor Light pathetically pies himself...
But then later gets pied for real!
Page 2: [valnet-url-page page=2 paginated=0 text='The pie-thrower revealed!']
In Suicide Squad #37 (by Ostrander, Yale, Snyder and Geof Isherwood), Major Victory is hit...
This leads to the Squad's head of security, Murph, to finally get to the bottom of this, which leads to the pie-thrower to throw someone else under the bus.
Punch is shocked to find his locker filled with pies!
Murph, though, knows the real culprit - it's Boomerang! He admits it and then quits the team...
Waller, though, won't allow him to just quit. She instead strands him on an abandoned island...
When she returns back to the base, Murph can't help but keep the tradition up, pie-ing both Waller and, in a break of the fourth wall, the audience themselves!
What a great bit.
If anyone has a suggestion for an interesting piece of comic book history that they'd like to see me explore, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!