Issue #39 of Suicide Squad ended with Task Force X officially shut down, and Waller in prison for killing the heads of the Loa. Also, she let Ravan, Deadshot and Poison Ivy go free after they helped with that, as promised. As much as I've always wondered what Waller got up to that year in prison, the next issue began a new era for the book, what I'd call the "plainclothes" or "A-Team" era, which continued until the book's conclusion two years later.
Essentially, the higher-ups recognize they still need something like the Suicide Squad to deal with certain, unpleasant, problems, and Waller's the best combination of smart, hard-nosed and honorable to put such a thing together. But Waller's done being a civil servant, that just gets her left holding the bag when some politico orders her to make miracles out of a P.R. stunt. Now, the Squad are an independent group for hire. It gives Waller, and anyone who works for her, right of refusal, but also means there's no government protection if things go wrong.
But the pay is a lot better!
Ostrander and Kim Yale, who were co-writing the book by this point, retain some of the other core characters. Deadshot, who had become a compelling character with his own set of rules and perspective, but has to, in a sense, kill himself at one point. Captain Boomerang's still there, being a shitheel. There's a recurring gag after Boomerbutt causes he and Deadshot to get separated from their gear, where Deadshot makes casual threats about killing Boomerang, or debates whether to shoot or save him at different times. Waller and Vixen find Bronze Tiger, who's suffered his own nervous breakdown and is trying to act like a cold, ruthless man. Vixen wisely recognizes the emotional minefield that is and gets gone after two missions. Poison Ivy joins to save her butt from angry revolutionaries (this version is a far cry from the ecologically-mined version that exists today), and manipulates Count Vertigo, who begins contemplating ending his life.
If anything, this Squad is less psychologically stable than the earlier versions were.
There's also the mysterious Oracle, who had been helping the Squad going back to the Belle Reve days behind an anonymous identity. She was eventually revealed to be Barbara Gordon, Ostrander and Yale laying the groundwork to rehab the character after the DC muck-a-mucks decided The Killing Joke just had to be part of post-Crisis on the Infinite Earths canon. There's even an arc where Oracle takes command while Waller's incapacitated, maybe an early dry run for her Birds of Prey. And there's the Atom, seen above. The writers keep his identity a secret for less than a year, but then play with the questions of how he got a size-changing belt, and where Ray Palmer's at.
Geof Isherwood is the penciler for much of this stretch, with a variety of inkers, including himself, Luke McDonnell, and Karl Kesel. Where McDonnell tended to make the characters fairly squared-off, all sharp lines and stark shadows, Isherwood rounds the appearances more. The shading is more gradual, the faces more fleshy and textured. The angles used for perspective within the panels seems to vary more, things getting tilted or dynamic as another situation goes to hell. The new version of the Suicide Squad is in more of a grey area than ever, operating for briefcases of cash exchanged in conversations and meetings that never officially took place.
The lines about which side is "right" are obscured further, brought home forcefully in the final arc, when Waller's squad has to contend with a C.I.A.-sponsored version that's propping up a Latin American dictatorship, as the C.I.A. traditionally does. It prompts some soul-searching in Waller, or simply gets her to admit what she's known for a long time. This is a far cry from the version DC has today, who draws no lines in what she'll do, and expresses no remorse or regret for any of it.
Wasted a perfectly good character, they did.
The book seems to bring in bigger names as guest-stars. Maybe because the Squad has no official standing, so it's harder for the government to keep them out. Or because it allows for more variety in the types of situations they deal with, and where. Batman pops up a couple of times, once with Aquaman and Superman. Black Adam shows up for a 1-issue War of the Gods tie-in, that's more notable for involving Grant Morrison's stand-in from their Animal Man run.
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