Suicide Squad Black Files #5 Review and **SPOILERS**

Welcome to Katanaworld

Writers: Mike W. Barr, Jai Nitz

Artists: Philippe Briones, Scott Eaton

Inks: Wayne Faucher

Colorists: Gabe Eltaeb, Guy Major

Letterer: Dave Sharpe

Cover Artist: Will Conrad with Pete Pantazis

Group Editor: Jim Chadwick

Editor: Harvey Richards

Cover Price: $4.99

On Sale Date: March 6, 2019

**NON SPOILERS AND SCORE AT THE BOTTOM**

Where are we with this, issue forty-eight or so? What? It’s only the fifth issue?! And it looks like this all wraps up with the sixth…unless this series really is cursed to emerge from the dead every two years. Let’s not forestall our fates, and check out my review for Suicide Squad Black Files #5, like you’re s’posed to!

Explain It!

So Katana and…what’s her name? Kobra lady? I can never remember. Eve—that’s her name. Anyway, Katana is in Eve’s body, and Eve is in Katana’s, and for some reason neither of them change their clothes or any aspect of their looks, so folks in and around the Suicide Squad assume Katana is bad. On the Kobra side of things, they seem to understand that the head honcho’s girlfriend only looks like Katana. Meanwhile, Halo has figured out that There’s Something Wrong with Aunt Katana and aims to investigate—but will she pummel the body of Eve, containing Katana, before she susses it all out? Probably. There's not a ton of forward motion on this story, aside from the new development with Halo, and Kobra seems to have abandoned its prior plan for a new one: run a flaming, falling space station right into the White House!

Over with the Suicide Squad Dark, they have to go wake up the hypnotized Task Force X, under Faust’s spell, and stop this massive golem he created to destroy magic? I dunno why a big ol’ Chemo had to be created for this, but whatever. They succeed with part one of the plan, part two has yet to be completed. This story is really decompressed, but I enjoy the characters on this magic-based team, and we get some good “all for one” type interactions here. I don’t know that we’ll ever see this group together again, but as a concept, I like it. Perhaps it’s the “Suicide” aspect of the Squad that makes the least sense: how do you implant brain bombs in people that can stop them magically? And most of all—Gentlemen Ghost?!

So this series plods along, and either story probably could have lost three issues and not missed any important beats, but…damn it, this is still the best value on the comic stands today! The stories are mediocre but reasonably engaging, the art and plotting is technically proficient, though not staggering, and this thing would probably shut a kid up for an hour or so. Is that worth five bucks? If the kid is on a plane with me, and this comic is the only thing keeping him from bawling his head off, then I’d pay twenty times that amount.

Bits and Pieces:

Neither story advances very much in this penultimate issue, but they are full of some decent character moments and reasonable dialogue in each. I’m still wondering why this series happened at all, but I’m not too mad at it.

6/10