(electronic music)
- Task Force X, a.k.a. the Suicide Squad,
in a nutshell is a team
comprised of villains who go on
dangerous missions in exchange
for reduced prison sentences.
As the name implies, there
have been quite a few
casualties on the team
roster over the years
since the Squad debuted in 1987,
and just for fun, let's go
through some of them, shall we?
(upbeat music)
Before we get started, let's
get some ground rules going.
Number one, we're only
counting the modern incarnation
of the Suicide Squad that started in 1987,
not the original team from 1959.
We're also only doing
deaths from the comics,
not any movies or TV shows.
Number two, because of
the nature of comics
some of these deaths aren't permanent.
Characters return from the grave
and universes get rebooted regularly.
We'll just be counting
deaths that were permanent
or stand out as particularly
funny/interesting.
It's 100% arbitrary and
we'll absolutely skip over
some characters who
were just presumed dead,
so feel free to yell
at us in the comments.
Lastly, this video is only
a fraction of all the deaths
that have occurred in the
Suicide Squad over the years.
For the rest of them, make
sure you check out the video
that Mr Sunday Movies
did over on his channel.
You know, after this one.
We still have a lot of
deaths to get through first.
The very first person to
die on the Suicide Squad
was in Legends number three,
the first appearance of
the modern Suicide Squad.
It was the character Blockbuster
who was basically just an off-brand Hulk.
Blockbuster was crushed by a
fiery demon named Brimstone,
kinda like the real world Blockbuster,
which was crushed by a red giant, jokes!
The next death was Mindboggler,
who died in the second
issue of Suicide Squad.
This death would prove what
a jerk Captain Boomerang was.
One issue earlier,
Mindboggler used her power
of casting allusions to
embarrass Captain Boomerang
in front of the whole Squad.
On their next mission
against the villainous group
known as the Jihad, who we'll see pop up
again and again during
this video, their leader,
Rustam, was sneaking up behind
Mindboggler to shoot her.
Captain Boomerang saw it coming
yet did nothing to stop it
as payback for his earlier humiliation.
Rustam shot and killed
Mindboggler on the spot.
This would not be the last
member of the Suicide Squad
he'd killed, nor the
last member of the Squad
that Captain Boomerang would
unhelpfully leave to die.
What a jerk, here he is
with a pie in his face.
Karin Grace has the
honor of being the first
actual suicide on the Suicide Squad,
if you can call that an honor.
Unlike most of the teams,
she wasn't a villain.
She was a government
agent who joined the team
as their medic due to her relationship
with Rick Flag, the leader
of the Suicide Squad.
The story of her death is nothing
short of a soap opera plot.
The Squad was sent on a
mission to deliver a bomb
right to the center of
a temple of Manhunters,
who were androids that were created
to be an intergalactic police force
before the Green Lanterns,
and if you're already lost,
I promise you, it only gets worse.
Karin was revealed to be
a double agent working for the Manhunters.
She fell in love with
a man named Mark Shaw
who convinced her to infiltrate the Squad
and foil their mission,
except that it wasn't the real
Mark Shaw, it was actually an android.
Feeling betrayed, Karin
decides to get back
at the Manhunters for deceiving her
and toying with her
emotions by driving the bomb
into the temple herself
and blowing up with it.
Now let's talk about Slipknot.
The first character on this list
who appears in the Suicide Squad movie.
One of the ways that
the members of the Squad
are controlled is with explosive devices.
In more modern incarnations,
small explosives
are planted in each member's neck.
But originally it was an explosive
bracelet worn on the wrist.
If they got too far away
from the team's leader,
Rick Flag, the bracelet would detonate.
So in that same issue
that Karin Grace died,
Slipknot decided to call this bluff,
believing the explosive
bracelet to be fake.
He was wrong, and he blew
off his arm like an idiot.
And when your whole power is tying knots,
you're even more useless
when you have one less hand.
I should note that he
didn't actually die here.
No, he's just dumb.
In 1988, the Suicide Squad crossed over
with another DC team, Doom Patrol,
to save the hero, Hawk, from captivity,
while also fighting a
Russian military unit
called the Rocket Red Brigade.
In this one comic book we saw four
members of the Squad bite the dust.
The first one to die is
Thinker, a golden age
flash villain who wears a
thinking cap that grants
the wearer the power of
telekinesis and mind control.
He was just brutally murdered
by his fellow Squad member,
Weasel, for basically no reason.
Afterwards, Rick Flag
figured, there's no use
leaving this powerful
thinking cap lying around,
so he decided to give it a go.
Little did he know that
Thinker's dying thought
was programmed into the helmet,
and the next time Rick
laid eyes on Weasel,
the helmet blasted some psychic
energy and killed the beast.
In between those two deaths,
that book and the comic book,
we also saw the killing of Mister 104.
He was a villain with the
power of turning himself into
any of the then 104 discovered elements.
I guess he was originally Mister 103,
but then Rutherfordium
was discovered a few years
after his creation, so I
guess he had to change it.
It sounds exhausting, really.
He would have to change his name
over a dozen more times since then.
Either way, he was disintegrated
by a rocket red or something.
Pretty much the same
thing happens with another
Squad member named Cy in that same issue.
It was just a merciless crossover.
Next up, in Suicide Squad
number 25, we have the death
of one Vanessa Kingsbury, a.k.a. Shrike.
The Squad was on a mission to rescue a nun
who was being held as
a political prisoner,
which sounds simple
enough, except that Shrike
was completely riddled
with the enemy's bullets
as Captain Boomerang once
again just unhelpfully
stood by staring like a jerk.
A few issues later, the
team's pilot Briscoe
would also meet his untimely demise.
He would shuttle the
Squad around on missions
in his helicopter he named
Sheba after his late daughter.
Both of them were torn about by parademons
on a mission to apocalypse, so sad.
On that same mission,
Doctor Light was tricked
by the ghost of his former
partner Jacob Finlay
to start acting like a
hero instead of a villain,
which I know sounds bizarre,
but I guarantee you,
it's not even close to the strangest
thing you're gonna hear in this video.
When Doctor Light decided
to rush into battle
against the parademons, he
was almost immediately killed.
Finlay just wanted revenge,
but the joke was on both
of them, since they're
stuck in hell afterwards.
Doctor Light returned in later stories,
but I just thought this was
too funny not to mention.
Here he is with a pie in his face.
Ravan was a member of he
Jihad, which you'll recall
was the terrorist group that the Squad
faced up against in their first issue.
I'd say he changed in his ways,
but the fact that anyone
is on the Suicide Squad
means they're pretty much just the worst.
On a mission to stop a
supervillain named Cobra,
Ravan was poisoned by Cobra's staff.
He still managed to defeat the villain,
but the poison overwhelmed
him and he died.
During the War of the Gods miniseries
that celebrated Wonder
Woman's 50th anniversary,
the Suicide Squad's roster
grew as they prepped
to go on a mission to the Amazon.
While there, we saw three members eat it.
In no particular order, we have Karma
with a power similar to Black Cat,
able to give his enemies bad luck.
His own luck ran out on the mission
when he encountered an
Amazon with a machine gun.
Enforcer was another character
who died on an island.
Her high=tech battle armor was apparently
no match for a common spear.
Bu the last Squad member
to die, in my opinion,
is the best, and requires
a little bit of background.
During his run on Animal
Man, writer Grant Morrison
put himself into the story for
some incredibly meta moments.
I made a video about
it a couple years back,
but the point is that now
the very real Grant Morrison
was a DC Comics character who
could appear in other stories,
or at the very least,
die in other stories.
Morrison joined the Squad
for their mission to Amazon
and actually died, because
he had writer's block
and couldn't think of any clever way
to write himself out
of danger, good stuff.
In Suicide Squad number 61,
we saw the death of the Atom,
but not the one you're
probably thinking of.
It's again a very comic
book plot of Ray Palmer
infiltrating a group of Micro assassins
while having someone fill
in for him as the Atom,
and that replacement was Adam Cray,
spelled A-D-A-M, not A-T-O-M.
It's confusing, let's get past it.
Adam Cray was stapped by a
member of the Micro Force
named Black Snake, and Ray
Palmer avenged his death,
and blablabla, comic book stuff.
A few years later, the Squad popped up
in Superboy number 14 where their mission
was compromised by one of their own.
Remember that how the Squad works
is they promise reduced prison sentences
for those who agree to go on missions.
However, one member found a loophole
he thought he could exploit.
A member of the team
named Sidearm realized
that nowhere did it say
that the mission needed
to be successful for him
to be granted amnesty.
So he purposefully botched
the mission in hopes
it would be called off
and he could go home.
However, another Squad
member named King Shark
wasn't having any of that nonsense
and just murders Sidearm on the spot
so they can get back to the mission.
I love this guy, he gets the job done.
Now we can move onto all the
deaths in the early 2000s,
starting with Suicide Squad volume two.
The first casually is a not-too-bright
muscle man named Big Sir.
He died on the new team's
very first mission.
A failed cloning process
led to an enormous
sentient fleshy mass which
had the ability to make
organic bombs in the shapes of children.
See, I told you you'd
hear crazier things today.
Why? Because comics, TM.
Either way, one of these children
exploded in Big Sir's face.
Moving on, on that same mission,
we also saw the somewhat classic villain
King Clock get shot up by
a bunch of hired thugs.
Same with Cluemaster and Multi-Man,
but unlike those last two
who eventually returned,
King Clock and Big Sir
were just real dead.
The Squad would get a whole
new roster two issues later
comprised of ice villain Killer Frost
and a handful of new villains
who were created specifically
for the purpose of being
killed off immediately.
An army of genetically
engineered super ants,
yes, super ants, got loose,
so the Squad was sent to stop them.
Every single member of the team,
Bolt, Putty, Eliza, and Larvanut were each
either eaten alive by the
deadly ants or blown up
in a massive explosion
that the ants had set off.
The only surviving
member was Killer Frost.
Later in this series, Rustam returns.
You remember him, he was
the leader of the Jihad,
one of the two people responsible
for killing Mindboggler.
Looking at you, Captain Boomerang.
Only this is actually a different Rustam
who appears to want revenge
for what the Suicide Squad
did to the original Jihad team.
One member of Rustam's
crew named Digital Jin
attacked and killed the Squad's resident
computer genius, Modem,
through the internet, somehow.
I'm not gonna question it,
weirder things have happened.
Do you remember the exploding kids?
Yeah, that was pretty fun.
The new Rustam went and
killed a woman named Havana.
She worked on a more
behind-the-scenes aspect
of the Suicide Squad as
a strategist of sorts,
but almost immediately after her death,
Deadshot came in and murdered Rustam
with a thousand bullets to his body.
I probably don't need to
mention these last few,
but Mirror Master lead the squad on an op
that went almost immediately south.
One of the Squad's own
members, the Tattooed Man
betrayed the team, leading to the death
of a jester-like villain named Punch
who has been on the team
since nearly the beginning.
In retaliation, Mirror Master
turned the Tattooed Man
into glass, and Punch's
wife, another Squad member
named Julie, smashed that
traitor into a million pieces.
I should also note that
this version of the team
wasn't really an official Suicide Squad
but rather a rogue team
made up of villains
who were previously on the Suicide Squad.
Their goal was essentially to piss off
Amanda Waller, the woman who historically
has been in charge of Task Force X.
Here she is with a pie in her face.
And I think that's gonna
do it for this video, guys.
As I said at the top,
there's plenty more deaths to go through,
so head on over to Mr
Sunday Movies' channel
where he'll be tackling the rest of them,
including the ones from the new 52.
I'll have that link in
the description below,
and at the end of this video.
And hey, since we split
this up into two parts,
each one of us can blame the other person
for deaths that may have gone overlooked.
Or you can just leave it
in the comments down below.
Which Suicide Squad death
stands out the most to you,
either as the weirdest or
funniest or most meaningful?
Let's talk about it all down there.
And if you want to learn
more about how Harley Quinn
was created, check out this video we made
that answers exactly that
question, and nothing else.
But really, you should just watch
Mr Sunday's video right here.
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See you.
