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Today, we look at how Rick Flag was resurrected in the pages of the Suicide Squad decades after he suffered a rather definitive death.
In Death is not the End, we spotlight the outlandish explanations for comic book characters (mostly super-villains) surviving seeming certain death.
What’s fascinating to me is that, totally unintentionally (I mean, I intentionally wrote about this era of the Suicide Squad, but the specific Rick Flag aspect of it is what wasn’t intentional), I have spent the last month since The Suicide Squad was released into theaters examining the slow but steady downfall of Rick Flag and it just seems right to show how he was killed off in the comics and his bizarre return to life.
First off, let’s recap how Rick Flag got to this point. In Suicide Squad #8 (by John Ostraner, Luke McDonnell and Bob Lewis), Mark Shaw, the former hero (Manhunter) turned villain (The Privateer) turned hero (still the Privateer) joined the Suicide Squad along with Dr. Karin Grace, former member of the Squad in their old days when it was just a bunch of non-powered adventurers led by Rick Flag. Grace and Flag were lovers at the time, but had since broken up due to the tragic ending of their Squad. This was all tying into the Millennium crossover, where every comic book series had the characters in it betrayed by someone controlled by the evil Manhunters. Since Mark Shaw literally used to work for the Manhunters, he was the logical suspect, but in Suicide Squad #9 (by Ostrander, McDonnell and Lewis), it turned out that Karin was the traitor. She had fallen in love with a Manhunter android pretending to be Mark. So she believed that the Privateer WAS part of her plan, but he was not and so he took her down. She was so disgusted at how she had been used by the Manhunters that she volunteered to sacrifice herself by completing their mission by herself, which involved driving a giant bomb to blow up a Manhunters headquarters (despite being betrayed by Karin, Flag had to be knocked out to stop him from keeping her from completing the mission).
So, right after that, Batman broke into the Suicide Squad headquarters to expose the secretive organization. Flag respected Batman a great deal, but he had to try to stop him and they had a long fight that took enough time for Amanda Waller to recover and prevent Batman from leaving with the files he had stolen. Flag was a bit disgusted with himself for choosing the Squad over Batman.
Flag then went on a special Suicide Squad mission in Doom Patrol and Suicide Squad Special #1 (by Ostrander and Paul Kupperberg and artists Erik Larsen and Bob Lewis) to rescue (or kill, whichever was easier) the superhero Hawk, who had been captured while on a mission in Nicaragua. Hawk was rescued, but every member of the team BUT Flag was killed on the mission (and one of the villains who was killed briefly took control of Flag’s mind and, in the final moments of the story, killed the team member who had killed him earlier in the issue). So by the time that Flag returned to the main team, he was a bit of a mental wreck with Karin’s death, Batman thinking he was a bad guy and all of the people on his mission dying.
He returned to discover that the rest of the team had lost one of team members, Nemesis, on a mission in Russia. Nemesis was one of the few heroic members of the team, so Flag was adamant that the team rescue him, even if they needed to go rogue to do so. Batman, meanwhile, was also friends with Nemesis, so he was similarly trying to get the Justice League to help spring Nemesis. When both teams arrived at Nemesis’ jail, though, Batman changed his mind when he saw the Squad, telling Flag that if Nemesis had thrown in with the Squad, he obviously wasn’t worth saving. Flag lost it and he and Batman had another epic fight, which Batman won decisively.
A frazzled Flag then discovered that the Squad’s National Security Council liaison was blackmailing Amanda Waller into helping get a Senator re-elected or else he liaison would expose the Squad’s existence to the world. Waller had secretly come up with her own blackmail on them to counter theirs on her, so she had things worked out, but she didn’t tell Flag that, so Flag felt that he needed to kill both of the men to protect the Squad (again, he wasn’t really thinking straight at this point in time). Waller sent the Squad after Flag, telling them to keep him from killing the Senator by any means necessary (Flag has already killed the liaison and, ironically, his murder of the liaison exposed the blackmail material anyways, as a crooked cop leaked the material that the liaison had on the Squad for cash).
As it turned out, Deadshot’s reading of that order was for HIM to just kill the Senator instead of Flag. Deadshot told Flag to then run as he confronted the police who were arriving after the Senator’s murder.
The first villain team that the Suicide Squad fought in their regular series was the Jihad, a team of Middle Eastern villains from the DC Universe stand-in for Iraq and Iran, Qurac. Their headquarters was in the tall structure called Jotunheim. That’s the same place the bad guys are headquartered in in the new Suicide Squad movie, only that Jotunheim was in South America while this one is in Qurac. Rick Flag’s father had ALSO led a version of the Suicide Squad during World War II, so Flag knew from his dad that one of their missions was to disable a Nazi-made atomic bomb that was built in Jotunheim. They succeeded, but ha to leave the bomb buried instead of taking it with them. So Rick knew that it was still there.
In Suicide Squad #26 (by Ostrander, Grant Miehm and Karl Kesel), Flag wrote a letter to his teammate, Nightshade, one of the other heroic members of the Suicide Squad, to tell her that he was going to break into Jotunheum and set off the nuke, destroying the Jihad once and for all.
He succeeded, but the leader of the Jihad, the villain known as Rustam (with his magical flaming scimitar), caught him and the two fought as the bomb exploded…
As you can see, the two were ground zero at the atomic bomb exploding, which is pretty definitively dead, right?
Well, almost exactly twenty years later, in 2007’s Suicide Squad: Raise the Flag #1 (by Ostrander, Javier Pina and Robin Riggs), we learn that Flag did NOT die in that explosion!
In the second issue, we learned that Rustam had cut a hole in time and space and the two ended up in another dimension known as Skartaris (the same world of the Warlord comic books from Mike Grell at DC).
The two men were forced to work together to find a way home, but once they found the way, Rustam insisted that they finished their fight to the death. Flag killed him and returned to Earth…right back into Qurac! He was arrested and held captive in secret for years until Amanda Waller discovered he was alive and she sent Bronze Tiger to break him out…
Flag returned to his Suicide Squad duties and the rest is more or less history.
If anyone else has a suggestion for a future Death is not the End, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!
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