On John Ostrander's "Suicide Squad: Trial By Fire"

In which the blogger comes to praise the achievements of John Ostrander as evidenced in the new "Suicide Squad: Trial By Fire" TPB. Discussion of the undeniable virtues of Luke McDonnell's art in the same collection will, the blogger assures you, be attended to in a future piece here on TooBusyThinking;

            
1.

One day, when my excesses of enthusiasm and arrogance combine to overwhelm my better judgement, I will set up a private university of The Comic Book Arts Of Storytelling.

I’m still working on the details of the curriculum, but I’ve already got some of the broad outlines of the course up and ready for further development. For example, students will spend their first year slaving to master as many of the fundamentals of the craft as they can without resorting to either amphetamines or smart drugs. (They’re not to filch from my sugar or caffeine stashes either. After all, we’re teaching them to be laudable citizens, not citizen snack thieves.)

At the end of their first three terms, all students are going to be required to read the first volume of John Ostrander’s “Suicide Squad” stories, and overnight too. And if each and every single one of them doesn’t turn up on the morrow with their mouths locked wide open with a respect tumbling into stupefaction, then they’ve effectively volunteered themselves to repeat the first year of the course again.

This is, I really do believe, the fairest and most objective of all exam regimes.

                   

2.

It’s hard to believe that the stories in the “Trial By Fire” collection were part of the mainstream of superhero comics almost a quarter of a century ago. How is that possible? If stories this clever and involving, smart and moving, ambitious and well-crafted, were somehow being published by DC in the May of 1987, then surely there’d be more of a trace of such a golden age in our here and now? For although it's not that Mr Ostrander stands without professional admirers, or that his work failed to inspire modern-era successors, it is that there surely should be a greater mark of his influence evident today. Gail Simone, for example, has written that Mr Ostrander’s work on the Suicide Squad “influences everything I do”, and refers to the respect he’s held in the industry in general in the article you'll find here. In particular, she identifies how an “entire wave of writers, including myself, Greg Rucka, Christos Gage, and Geoff Johns, learned how to write morally twisty characters at least partially from John long before any of us had ever met him.”

But that's still not Mr Ostrander's due, and of course, Ms Simone was never suggesting for a second that it ever could be. For even the single example of "Suicide Squad" among all of his work can serve to illustrate what an important writer he is. In its own fiercely-engaged fashion, it was a epochal comic book, a mark of ambition and competence in those post-Watchmen months when the business suddenly and temporarily forgot to repress its potential. Nobody in comics had ever before approached the matter of a team book by paying so much attention to the psychological flaws of each of the individual personalities on the page. The many and various characters in the “Suicide Squad” are nearly all so fundamentally damaged as people that any two of them could maim each other over the feather’s extra weight of stress caused by a slow-delivering chocolate dispenser. Indeed, so horrendous and irreconcilable are the barely hidden flaws in Mr Ostrander’s cast that the reader almost feels shamefully voyeuristic in watching one terrible conflict play out after another.

There’s Rick Flagg, who believes he was tasked by his dying father to carry on the ugliest of battles while knowing that he was responsible for his own mother’s death. He sits exactly where a hero would in the narrative, but he’s so busted-up and haunted that he’s often on the edge of exhaustion even before the punch-ups can begin. There’s Amanda Waller, with a murdered daughter and a murdered husband and perhaps one of the most thoroughly unpleasant personalities ever created in comics, and that includes a fair number of line-leading criminal masterminds and tyrants. The sociopathic Captain Boomerang, the schizophrenic Enchantress, the morally catatonic Deadshot, the emotionally-compromised Marnie Herrs, the amnesiac Bronze Tiger, the professional revolutionary Plastique; if any single one of these characters reached out and slashed another with a switchblade, no-one could be entirely surprised and no-one could be short of a host of hypotheses concerning why.

The holy grail of team books is one composed of characters who never need to be made to behave in an inconsistent and unconvincing fashion, no matter how extreme a plot-twist it is that's being executed. With such an armory of a cast, conflict never has to be imposed, because the very nature of the folks on-panel screams out that conflict is what’s inevitably going to occur.

      

3. 

There's an audacious two dozen speaking roles in the script for the first issue - "Trial Of Blood" - alone, as well as an unsettling half-page involving a silent and rat-soul-sucking Parasite and a debate about his civil rights. That number includes twelve or so members of Task Force X, including the Suicide Squad, and six of their opponents in the super-terrorist cell known as Jihad. Yet, though the story feels packed with character and incident, it never comes across as stodgy, slow-moving or uninvolving. Everyone we meet is introduced, everyone is made distinct, everyone has a role to play, everyone does something telling.

And to carry such a mass of character-work, Mr Ostrander's story is woven from some very different cloth than is typical in most of the books of 2011. There are what would now be heretical panel configurations containing ten and even twelve information-rich frames. (How would that appear according to what's supposed to be the new-DC "no-talking-heads" orthodoxy?) And yet there's also a five page sequence showing a murderous terrorist assault on a movie-set of an airport, full of blood and spectacularism and the destruction of a faux-Airforce One, and a two-third-of-a-page moody establishing shot of the Belle Reve Federal Prison too adding a touch of the monumental to events.

More than a decade before the likes of Warren Ellis and Brian Michael Bendis began in their individual ways to experiment with mixing the grandest of set-pieces with the most everyday of still close-ups, John Ostrander was after his own fashion pioneering techniques to try to achieve the same. His work was often far more literary in its inspiration, far closer to the melodrama of the post-Stan Lee consensus, and far less determined to stand as an extravagant break with the past. But radical it was, and conspicuously successfully too.

         

4.

Continuity is of course something of a potty-mouthed word these days. It carries with it a sense of the shameful obsessions of unworldly Fanboys. Continuity, it seems, is an insult, an indulgence, a petty distraction from the business of telling stories and attracting the inexperienced reader. But that's not how continuity plays in "Suicide Squad", where the world and history of the DCU are so utterly integrated into the tales at hand that the affectations of what we commonly know as continuity appear to belong to quite another storytelling tradition altogether. There's no sense of playing with a host of ill-integrated past stories in these tales. Instead, Mr Ostrander presents us with what feels like an entirely convincing and coherent fictional world. And so, the Jihad operates in a geo-political context established in "Superman", 

     
while Madame Xanadu from 'The Spectre' is called upon to help out the Enchantress, with Jim Corrigan making a smart two-panel cameo. Even the Manhunter-trained Privateer from the JLA turns up as a prequel to the then-coming "Millennium" crossover. It's not just that the continuity is tight and wide-ranging here, but that it's joyful and imaginatively used and it's applied to create a universe rather than to revel in obscurantism. The People's Heroes in the "Firebird" two-parter are obviously and entertainingly the same characters as last shown  in "Outsiders", while they logically discuss Pozhar, another Soviet superhero last seen in Mr Ostrander's "Firestorm" tales. Darkseid's orders to rescue Glorious Godfrey from the Task X prison flow directly from the mini-series "Legends", while even the helicopter used by the Squad had previously been seen being constructed in the factories of Ferris Aerospace in "Green Lantern". (Editor Robert Greenberger, who obviously threw himself into this universe-building with a commitment above and beyond the call of comicbook duty, discusses the process in the text pages of the original "Suicide Squad" # 1.)

Here is the continuity-consistent immersive universe that's apparently now considered a chimera, that's so often thought of in 2011 as involving too great a burden of trivia and constraint to achieve anything but the alienation of readers. Yet "Suicide Squad" is an argument that continuity isn't the death of entertainment, but a vital component of it if approached appropriately. In these pages, Mr Ostrander created an extravagantly impossible and yet entirely-plausible fictional world by looking at events as seen from the margins. It's a song from under the floorboards, and I've never so been able to believe that the DCU is a universe rather than an insubstantial backdrop as here.

      

5.

A reader who knew nothing of the past of the superhero sub-genre and only a little of its present might, upon encountering "Suicide Squad: Trial By Fire", be moved to conclude that some catastrophic collapse of creative and intellectual IQ had occurred in either the industry or its audience, if not both, in the years since 1987. Some of that presumption would come from a recognition that even medium-selling titles of the past had apparently been targeted at the kind of patient, literate and curious-minded consumer that Big Two now seem often to have stopped believing in. And there might also be a sense that creators as a whole had either become a great deal less knowledgeable about the world beyond the pages of the superhero comic, or that they'd decided that their readers couldn't or wouldn't cope with any such enthusiasm for anything beyond the least taxing view of life beyond Avenger's Mansion..

Perhaps such a limited sample of the comics of 1987 as are included in "Trial By Fire" really might evoke an imagined comicbook industry of the past far more commonly marked by ambition and intelligence than that of today. But the truth is that Mr Ostrander was every bit as much an anomaly back then as the likes of Cornell and Simone and Ewing are now. Yet there's a wonderfully invigorating sense in these tales that Mr Ostrander simply couldn't help himself from mining these stories with far more than just a narrative spine, an obvious conflict, a water-cooler moment and a link-up to a crossover. His fascination for politics, for example, is woven throughout these tales. It's an exquisite, and rather repellent thing, to watch his take on President Reagan waving away criticism of the Red-Baiting of the Justice Society in the early Fifties. Out here in Earth-it-really-happened, Reagan had been, after all, an informer snitching on his Hollywood colleagues in the late Forties, so of course he'd not want to hear the period discussed or his old bosses bad-mouthed once safely on top of the greasy pole. And Mr Ostrander's take on Gorbachev is similarly convincing; he never makes the mistake of portraying the Premier as a cuddly little liberal lacking a spine and a sense of his own power. His Gorbachev is fiercely bright, but still obviously a man who's lived within and fought his way up through the Soviet hierarchy.

         

But then, this relentless and playful love of everything, this determination to retain a faith that the audience finds thinking and questioning as fascinating a business as Mr Ostrander evidently does, is evident in so many different aspects of these stories. Yes, he's engaged with both contemporary affairs and the backstory of the DCU, and with the narrative traditions of the thriller and adventure movies too. But there's other unexpected nuggets underpinning his stories, lending meaning to them without ever drawing attention to themselves. My favourite is the way that Mr Ostrander uses the details of the famous and tragic murder of Kitty Genovese in Queens in 1964. The appalling absence of altruism on the part of those who heard Damita Waller's torture by the Candyman in "Secret Origins" # 14 carries the same spirit of anomie which the Genovese killing inspired in most everyone who heard of its circumstances. That folks could listen for that long to a woman's suffering and yet not even call the police; the real horrors in "Suicide Squad" are often very much those not of the super-worlds and the super-people, but those of our time and place.

     

6.

Like all the best pop-entertainment,  the stories in "Suicide Squad" can obviously be enjoyed solely in terms of their considerable virtues as rather bleak, tense and white-knuckle-ride entertainments. In fact, I strongly suspect that Mr Ostrander would be appalled at the idea of anyone sidestepping the pleasures of the narrative in order to first play around with all the continuity and history, psychology and politics. But the more the reader cares to return to these stories and spend some time in their company, the more it becomes clear that Mr Ostrander just wasn't content to ensure that he delivered the reader their money's worth in terms of plot and spats and deaths and explosions. Instead, there's a form of writerly enthusiasm that's obvious in these pages and which is still furiously working away in both text and sub-text. It's never too obvious, it's never too indulgent, it's certainly never pretentious. But sometimes it snares the edge of the reader's concentration even at the least conspicuous of scenes and makes them think twice about what they've just read.

For example, at the end of the second chapter of "Trial By Fire", the Squad are returning home from the Jihad's mountain-side base after an only partially-successful mission. Yet they're obviously going to escape, and though one of their number has been killed, the rest of them will surely make it back across the border. And there in Mr McDonnell's art stands all the tropes of the closing sequence of a gritty action-adventure epic. The lonely helicopters flying safely across the desert, the rising sun behind them, the danger receding into the distance. But then the reader considers the very last narrative caption on the page, which argues for anything other than an optimistic reading of the success of the mission or the future of the survivors;

"The two aircraft turn west, away from the dawning day, heading back into the night."

But shouldn't they be headed into the dawn, and away from the night?

Even in something not unlike victory, there's an appalling unease ....


Tomorrow: It's Friday With The Champions here on TooBusyThinking. Oh, yes; California 1975 here we come ...

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