A 4-issue mini-series from the early 2000s about a group of super-powered enforcers for a crime family. Their long-time leader with electric powers, Cardinal, is out of prison, and planning to secretly retire to run a flower shop. But there's a new drug on the street that turns users into difficult-to-kill monsters in crablike exoskeleton armor, and whoever is behind it is trying to kill the team.
The Silencers are mostly damaged goods, people with powers that are sometimes dangerous to them. Missile 21, the big flying guy, wears that metal suit that makes him look like a battering ram not just because its useful for hitting things, but because otherwise the velocity he flies at would break his neck. Most of them were scooped up at loose ends and turned into weapons by your standard mobsters. The black suits and ties, the bullshit about family, which roughly translates to keeping your mouth shut and going to prison to protect the bosses.
The Silencers themselves are a group of nutcases and sadists to various degrees, cheating on each other, backstabbing each other. Most of their casualties come as a result of that, rather than anything their enemies do. Stiletto and Kid Chaos were a couple of runaways brought in as new recruits, and while they seem close-knit, Kid Chaos is sleeping around behind Stiletto's back, and Stiletto's whole Dragon Lady look is just a disguise for a scared, immature kid. It's a nice bit of teamwork by Ellis and van Lente, how the designs sometimes match the characters' personalities, and sometimes contrast them.
Of course, the crew's main advantage is the cops and the costumed heroes are all written as such morons I half-suspect Garth Ennis ghost-wrote this thing. Van Lente even gives Cardinal a big speech when the heroes (who Ellis draws a thinly-veiled allusions to DC or Marvel's big names) finally catch up about how the "heroes" will never fight real evil because it's so easy to see them coming.
Then Cardinal takes them all down because, even though they've fought and captured this guy with electric powers many times, they all decided to just stand in a plainly visible puddle of water. The book's cynicism means it fits with the era when it came out, but coming to it 20 years after the fact, it just felt tired. Superheroes don't make real change, yeah yeah. Sometimes you need a group of bastards to get things done, uh-huh. Sir, I believe that horse has been successfully turned to dog food.
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