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As a new Suicide Squad scours Gotham City to find and eliminate the Joker, the supervillain goes on the offensive with strategy from a classic movie.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Suicide Squad: Get Joker #1, on sale now from DC.
Always one to tell a sick joke, the Joker provides his own savage twist on everything from classic vaudeville to contemporary cinema as he develops new, macabre ways to torment and his long line of victims. This remains true in the new DC Black Label miniseries Suicide Squad: Get Joker, with the murderous supervillain directly riffing on Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1971 dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange, itself an adaptation of the controversial 1962 novel of the same name written by Anthony Burgess.
Taking place outside of the main DC Universe’s continuity, Get Joker has Amanda Waller assemble a new Suicide Squad with the explicit purpose of tracking down the supervillain in his usual stomping grounds of Gotham City and terminating him with extreme prejudice. Handpicking Jason Todd as the ensemble’s field commander, along with Harley Quinn due to her long history with the Joker, this Task Force X lineup is fitted with the usual explosive devices to ensure their compliance before they infiltrate Gotham to conduct a citywide hunt and catch the Joker unaware. Unfortunately for the motley crew of antiheroes and villains, the Joker not only knows the Suicide Squad is out to get him but has laid an ambush of his own.
The conclusion of the miniseries’ first issue — by Brian Azzarello, Alex Maleev, Matt Hollingsworth and Jared K. Fletcher — reveals that Waller is being set up by someone from the inside. An assault on a Joker hideout descends into chaos when it was revealed that the Joker was absent and replaced himself with a decoy. Jason scrambles to call Waller to warn her, only for her to be brutally attacked by the Joker, who has dressed himself and his goons up as the Droogs — a gang of lawbreaking youth from A Clockwork Orange that celebrate anarchy and ultraviolence as they prey upon anyone who crosses their path. To maintain the charade, the Joker directly quotes the gang’s leader Alex DeLarge and speaks with an exaggerated cockney accent as he delights in the mayhem.
This is actually the second time this year that DC characters and A Clockwork Orange allusions have collided, with the first taking place in this July’s Space Jam: A New Legacy. With the film taking place in the Serververse containing Warner Bros.’ vast library of properties linking their various worlds together, the Droogs make an appearance in the crowd spectating Lebron James as he leads the Tune Squad against the Goon Squad. Both the 1960’s Batman television series starring Adam West and 1989 Batman film starring Michael Keaton are briefly seen among the Serververse worlds as well.
Waller’s fate currently remains unknown, but given the severity of the beating that the Joker dished out with Alex DeLarge’s usual cane, things are not looking good for the Task Force X commander. It is unknown how long the Joker will employ this Clockwork Orange-inspired persona but it’s likely just a one-off as he puts his own deadly twist on a scene from the film. And with Jason and the Suicide Squad now under the Joker’s mercy, the Clown Prince of Crime inevitably has other tricks and personas up his sleeve, ready to unleash on Task Force X.
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