Suicide Squad #25 Review and **SPOILERS**

Waller Takes a Fall

Story: Rob Williams 

Art: Giuseppe Cafaro 

Epilogue Art: Agustin Padilla 

Color: Hi-Fi 

Lettering: Pat Brosseau 

Cover: Juan Ferreyra 

Cover Price: $3.99 

On Sale Date: September 13, 2017

**NON SPOILERS AND SCORE AT THE BOTTOM**

This is it! The conclusion of the arc…whatever it’s titled. “Kill All Children?” No wait, “Kill Your Darlings,” a delicious double entendre that titillates as much as it excites. Amanda Waller’s been taken over by a Russian techno-ghost and is part of an international conspiracy to trap superheroes! Bomb-brained Suicide Squads around the globe have been activated by secret society The People to do just that! And I think Batman is there? Why am I writing all this nonsense? Let’s hop into my review of Suicide Squad #25 and get cracking!

Explain It!

Membership in the Suicide Squad is a crash course on the failures of America’s prison system and the concept of criminal rehabilitation as a whole. Task Force X assumes that criminals—at least some criminals, those with useful abilities and a predilection for murder—cannot be rehabilitated, and so their debts to society must be extracted by force. That is pretty bleak, my friends. Better one be sentenced to death than to have their freedom, as sociopathic a bent it may have, utterly nullified. You could argue that any incarcerated person is, by rights, without their freedom, and yet they still maintain the basic freedom to commit misdeeds on their own accords, and not in service to an overbearing overlord.

So we have Amanda Waller, compromised by an Internet ghost, prepared to send International teams of brain bomb-controlled Suicide Squads to subdue superheroes around the world and bend them to the will of The People. There’s a big flaw in this plan: what if these supervillains can’t defeat superheroes? I mean, the reason they were in prison is because they lost to their regional Superman in the first place. Another thing to consider is that when all the metahumans are locked up, what exactly would you have them do? I suppose they could be forced into dangerous labor jobs.

The big surprise in this issue is the return of Boomerang, which was done by Teleportin’ Enchantress on Katana’s orders. Not surprising is the team more or less accepting him back into the fold, despite having left him for dead the other day. He injects some levity into the proceedings, but not quite enough. In the end, anyone and anything still threatening is murdered or commits suicide, so all’s well that ends well. Theoretically.

All of the action and swagger seems correct, but this issue is devoid of any real story. It’s a bunch of sustained reactions to revelations that, in truth, aren’t very surprising or interesting. Looks like Katana will be leading the team, which is something we wanted, I guess? The art in this is a little inconsistent, but overall it’s good. I’m not sure why artists keep hopping on and off of this series, and if editorial has any control over it, they should stop it.

Bits and Pieces:

Plans are enacted, plans are thwarted, and I can't help but feel like we've trod this ground before. A fairly flat ending to a pretty sluggish story arc, this book has its moments but overall it's just a pastiche of japes and jests and wholesale murder. In that light, it could be worse.

6/10