If you want your comics to get extra dark and weird, you can always rely on writer Si Spurrier and artist Aaron Campbell. The pair’s run on John Constantine: Hellblazer not only injected new life into DC’s favorite asshole wizard, but was a genre-bending mash-up of hilarity, horror, and hijinks. Now, the duo have reunited for another book, Suicide Squad: Blaze.
The three-part Black Label title follows a familiar lineup — King Shark, Harley Quinn, Peacemaker, and Captain Boomerang — as they face down a new, wholly unknowable threat. To counter this foe, the squad are forced to mentor new recruits, each of whom are given vast superpowers. The twist? These rookies only get to enjoy their shiny abilities for a few months before they die. Fans of the series can expect the same mix of mayhem and chuckles, but also something more. The team of Spurrier and Campbell take the team in new and strange directions, and the result is a deeply human story of love, power, fear, and why we fight when we know we simply shouldn’t.
Before issue #1 hits shelves today (February 8), we caught up with Spurrier for a quick chat about the book. Topics included why they came up with a horror story, that aforementioned sense of humanity (and why it’s so vital), how to develop an effective villain, the very real stakes at the heart of the book, and even 20th century French painters.
Some questions and answers have been edited for clarity.
AIPT: Do you feel compelled at all to reference or tap into or make some kind of engagement with the movies or just kind of the larger product? Or do you feel like you have more of a freedom to do something a little different
Si Spurrier: I think it’s more the latter than the former. And that’s, that’s probably a product of it being a Black Label title. Having worked with my editor Chris [Conroy] before, who sort of encourages that distinction in separation. I tend to take the view that if you’re going to do any kind of shared universe, work-for-hire stuff, it’s going to have any value anyway…there’s something about it that really matters to you. And that can be a challenge with some IPs and some characters. But with something like this, when you have the freedom to take these characters, some of whom I’m quite familiar with them, some of whom I’m not, it’s not a case of starting from scratch with them at all. It’s a case of saying, ‘OK, we’re going to pay some respect to the background, the canon that these characters, but then not be too weighed down by it and sort of find the ways that their voices, and their particular stories, can work for us. I could give you a billion different ways that we did that.
But the biggest one is that we, Aaron and I obviously, [are] coming from a background of collaborating on Hellblazer, and we immediately thought what would happen if we just approached Suicide Squad through the lens of horror. And that’s kind of been done before, but I don’t think it’s ever been done quite so horribly. As soon as you take that sort of approach, you are free to exaggerate the things you want to exaggerate and to ignore the things that don’t quite work. And you’ve always got that wonderful kind out at the back of your mind, ‘Hey, this doesn’t have to be regarded as the central DCU. It’s a sort of evergreen Black Label story, which operates in its own wonderful bubble. So we were able to have our cake and eat it. I mean, honestly, honestly, there’s some weird stuff. Like, when I wrote the first issue, I had never read a single word of dialogue, or at that point, seen anything on the screen involving Peacemaker. I know enough about this character from reading the stuff that I can find online that I think I can come up with a voice that makes sense to me. And I think, almost by mistake, we kind of nailed it. So nice little things like that, but that you don’t have to be weighed down by the canon.
AIPT: What about this configuration of this team or this story that you felt like having like a horror story was just the way to go?
Spurrier: I mean, a variety of things. One is just that that’s where we are at almost comfortable as a collaboration. It’s also, like, we start from a position of “What would we do if… But there’s also stuff in that milieu that I’ve always wanted to think about. One dumb thing is it’s called Suicide Squad, but they almost never commit suicide. There’s a sort of internal dichotomy about all these characters, where the core tension is supposed to be that they frequently die, and they don’t. So we sort of toy with that by, first of all, introducing a bunch of characters who can and indeed do die a lot. And secondly, to sort of twist that even further, and I can’t even talk about that, but it’s a mistake that our A-list characters are safe in this book. But then again, there’s some sort of slightly subversive commentary on superheroes in general, and that’s always been praying at the back of my mind, this approach of taking a part the mythos of a superhero, which can be quite funny. Like, you’ve seen that in The Boys and stuff like that, this sort of deconstruction that is quite cruel natured but very funny.
What always struck me about the reality of a world where superpowered individuals were present, is that it would be fucking frightening, wouldn’t it?
Courtesy of DC Comics.
AIPT: Yeah, if Superman was real, I’d never go outside.
Spurrier: Exactly. That’s something that I don’t think has ever really been the core kernel of a really good, scary story. This idea that, as a society in this hypothetical world, citizens and authorities are giving more importance to licensing people to drive a car or licensing people to own a handgun than they are to giving people the right to just self-select themselves as sort of moral arbiters who can punch a hole through the middle of the planet. That genuinely frightening idea that these people who are a billion times more powerful than you are…just one day wake up and say, ‘You know what, I think I’m in charge now.’ And nothing anybody can do about that is going to stop them. So there’s a lot of that paranoia and real politics in there speaking to sort of the politics of nationhood, and why superheroes are so important to the U.S. and so on.
But it’s all muddled quite nicely, I think, in this core story, which is about what happens when a near-invincible, unstoppable superhuman decides to just go and kill some people. It’s not working on any crude societal motives that we would recognize, like ‘I’m going to take over the world.’ It’s just hungry and it wants to eat some people…and it wants to do what only people do when they’re totally all powerful. So it’s, genuinely scary take on superhuman mythology and to kind of tack that all into the core dynamic of the team in which a bunch of total rookies are given the opportunity to achieve great power in the knowledge that it will kill them. It’s just it sort of all fits together and in quite a cohesive, thoughtful, and thematic way which is also utterly fucking horrible.
AIPT: I wanted to talk about the book’s big threat. It feels like a really good, mostly proper horror movie villain, and not a usual big bad like a Doomsday. Is that an extension of making this a horror story?
Spurrier: I mean, it’s true of movies, but it’s especially true of comics that the art of the horror storyteller is not to horrify people, but manipulate them into horrifying themselves. And that’s why the third act of so many monster movies is so ghastly because once you show the monster, you’re completely ruining the whole premise. So we sort of played with it. For instance, one of our core characters is a fucking hybrid man-shark, so we couldn’t get away with the bad guy being a scary monster, because, yeah, so what? So the approach was to do what smart horror creators do, which is to just not show the villain, the beast creature, the scary thing, for as long as possible. And then to do a little bit of a bait and switch, which is when you eventually reveal what this thing looks like, it’s just some guy. And I suspect most of us, if we stopped to think about it, would acknowledge that there is nothing scarier in the whole universe than just some guy.
Courtesy of DC Comics.
AIPT: Yeah, when it’s some guy named Jeff or Steven just eating people.
Spurrier: It’s Harry from down the street who has decided to stop obeying any of society’s funny little conventions anymore. And that’s a really frightening thing.
The design for the killer, it has no name and we just call it The Killer. But I was very annoying in my scripts, I can say things like, ‘We want to see the killer. But by the way, we don’t need to see it, we want to make sure that we don’t see any details, but we do need to see him.’ And that’s the sort of dumb thing that writers can get away with. Aaron’s approach to solving this, which I think is genius, was to think back to this hilarious fan theory from many years ago, about why is that nobody ever recognizes Clark Kent as Superman. And the fan theory, which by the way, is silly and it doesn’t fit with Superman and Clark Kent at all. But it’s been shown not to be the case many times, but the fan theory was when he is Superman, he is vibrating on a cellular level at a rate that nobody can focus on him well enough to differentiate the two characters.
And Aaron just ran with that. So when you see this thing, it’s clearly a person, it’s clearly humanoid. It’s clearly nothing monstrous. But it’s shivering and vibrating at such a rate that it’s the sort of psychedelic bundle of movement and expression. There’s a Marcel Duchamp painting called “Nude Descending a Staircase,” which we refer to a lot. And it’s that it’s just the sort of spooky things that happen when people don’t move, and don’t appear in a way that fits with our standard laws of physics. It’s really spooky when you start to think like that.
AIPT: I felt like this story was really human, and it was really nice to see the team and the new recruits on a really personal level. Why was it important for you to show people that very specific form of humanity and to have that intimacy between the reader and these new characters?
Spurrier: First, for the crude reason that if I’m going to advertise to readers that the stars of the show are a bunch of unheard of characters, and the Harley Quinns and [Captain] Boomerangs of the world are sort of relegated to a second tier, then I’d better be extremely good at very quickly making the readers care about these characters. Otherwise, they’ll be like, ‘Well, why should I care?’ And I get that – it’s totally reasonable. So there’s the idea that there is something profoundly interesting in the sorts of people who will volunteer. When the question is, ‘Are you willing to die in exchange for a very brief flirtation with ultimate power,’ and the sorts of archetypes you would expect to volunteer under those circumstances are some of the fascinating characters we play with. But the central character, a guy called Mike, isn’t doing it for any reason that you would expect…It’s quite pathetic and quite sort of codependent and I’ve always been drawn to pathetic, doomed, and useless characters.
Courtesy of DC Comics.
Because there’s so much you can do with those characters. And you can sort of only go up with somebody who’s at rock bottom. So all of this, I think is, is to say that you impose stakes in a way that you probably couldn’t if we were only telling a story about the four recognizable Suicide Squad characters, and most people would be like, ‘OK, this could be a fun thriller. But I’m not expecting any of these four to die’ (P.S. – they are completely wrong about that.) Because for a title called Suicide Squad, it’s quite rarely about mortality, and about the uncomfortable reality of one’s own impending demise, and what it makes you do and feel and think when you know that your time is short. That’s one of the benefits of using everyday Joes rather than these kind of slightly heightened exaggerated characters that we’re all more familiar with.
AIPT: Without spoiling too much, I gravitated toward the character Boris in the first issue. It showed there’s some real stakes here when he [SPOILERS REDACTED].
Spurrier: We love that moment. Because it is typical of the sorts of stuff I write that when eventually one of our characters does die, it’s the one who doesn’t want to. And the one you expect is going to bite the bullet does not.
AIPT: Final question: again, without spoiling too much, what can we expect from the rest of the story?
Spurrier: The front cover of the second issue features are an extremely ragged, tattered, and blood-slaked Superman logo quite prominently. So that tells you something. We’ve got some utterly awful things befalling the people of Iceland. We’ve got an awful lot of extraordinary plot shenanigans hinging on whether or not a single pubic hair can be successfully snatched. We’ve got some exciting and horrifying stuff to deal with King Shark’s mom. And just a fairly industrial number of body bags constantly. But at its heart, it’s the story of this absolutely pathetic man slowly realizing that he has things to live for just in time to die.
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