Tom Taylor teases 'no one is off limits' in DC's deadly new Suicide Squad comic

It took a few months, but we finally know what the future holds for Suicide Squad. The last series the beloved anithero team starred in ended earlier this year, and while it will take until the end of the year to get 'em back, we now know officially that the Squad will return in a new series from the Injustice and Injustice 2 team of writer Tom Taylor and artist Bruno Redondo.

DC Comics announced the series early Tuesday after Taylor spent a few days teasing something Squad-related over on Twitter with the reveal of some of Redondo's new character designs, and now we know that Suicide Squad will be back in December with an ongoing series that will featuring all-new characters, new villains, and even a mysterious new leader who swoops in and takes Amanda Waller's job. The announcement was accompanied by an interview with Taylor in The Hollywood Reporter in which he teased why we'll want to play very close attention to the new series, and the short version is he and Redondo are crafting a version of the team that will really live up to its name.

"One of the main things I want to do with this series, and editors Brian Cunningham and Andrea Shea are with me one hundred percent, is to push the idea of these actually being suicide missions," Taylor said. "No reader should know what to expect when picking up this book. We don't want anyone reading our series and thinking, 'well, they can't die because they're in the movie.' No one is off limits here. Our new characters, and some more obscure established DC characters, offer us a chance to have real stakes. If someone dies in our team, they're not coming back. We want readers going in with a sense of nervousness. Yes, there will be some despair for our team, but their victories will be sweeter. When and if they survive, it will feel big."

DC Comics

Suicide Squad as we know it conceptually was solidified in the 1980s by writer John Ostrander, and 1987's cover of Suicide Squad #1 really drove the concept home with its famous cover blurb: "These 8 people will put their lives on the line for our country. One of them won't be coming home!" That book lived up to its promise, and various other Suicide Squad stories over the years have attempted to follow in its footsteps, but the "one of them won't be coming home" danger is often defanged a bit by creators who don't want to kill off one of the marquee characters they enjoy having on the roster, so a D-lister has to die instead. It's perhaps best exemplified by the moment in the 2016 Suicide Squad film when Slipknot, "the man who can climb anything" is introduced almost as an afterthought while the team is assembling, only to be killed minutes later. 

For their series, Taylor and Redondo are hoping to avoid exactly that kind of sense of predictability, so much so that they're hoping to change the game again with the second issue.

"There are going to be a whole lot of changes in our series. So much change, in fact, that issue two is practically a new number one. But we're taking that even further. I can't say how, but the entire book is going to change [and] veer in a direction we haven't seen in the Squad before. Honestly, I'm not even promising Amanda Waller makes it past issue one."

Suicide Squad #1 arrives in December.