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Today, we look at when a member of the Suicide Squad first had their head blown up for betraying the team.
In “When We First Met”, we spotlight the various characters, phrases, objects or events that eventually became notable parts of comic lore, like the first time someone said, “Avengers Assemble!” or the first appearance of Batman’s giant penny or the first appearance of Alfred Pennyworth or the first time Spider-Man’s face was shown half-Spidey/half-Peter. Stuff like that.
My friend Loren asked me to do a bit on this, and he pointed out that my pal, Alex Jaffe, already did a bit on this topic, but Loren thought that there was an option that was perhaps not within Alex’s specific discussion so that it was still worth doing my own bit on this topic.
Initially, the villainous members of the Suicide Squad (as in, not the folks who were on the team just to do some good, like Rick Flag, Bronze Tiger, Nightshade, Vixen and Nemesis) were equipped with explosive bracelets on their wrists that were set to explode if they betrayed the team. The bracelets didn’t really factor in into a story until Suicide Squad #9 (by John Ostrander, Luke McDonnell and Bob Lewis), when new member of the team, Slipknot, asked his friend, Captain Boomerang, what his thoughts were about the bracelets. Boomerang told him to not to worry, that it was just the Squad trying to pull a bluff and that they would never really blow up their arms…
Well, during their mission, which was to blow up a base by the evil alien androids known as the Manhunters, Slipknot quickly determined that he was pretty much useless fighting against robots with his strangulation skills, so he decided to just get the heck out of there…
Unluckily for him, it turns out that those bracelets were NOT a bluff, and Slipknot lost his arm….
He somehow didn’t die, though, which is nice for him.
Amazingly enough, that one demonstration that the bracelets were legit was enough for that volume of Suicide Squad. No one ever tried testing it again.
The next time that explosives got involved with the Squad was when Cameron Chase led the Squad on a mission in Chase #2 (by D. Curtis Johnson, JH Williams III and Mick Gray) and here, for the first time, instead of bracelets, they were collars…
The Squad then betrayed Chase and explained that they had a field blocking the signal to the collars, so they were leaving now…
In the next issue, a postscript noted that before they actually got their collars deactivated, there was a moment where Amanda Waller sent the signal to blow up their heads, but the main villain of the story, the Construct, had blocked the signal…
This brings us to 2007’s Suicide Squad: Raise the Flag #1 (by John Ostrander, Javier Pina and Robin Riggs), and here, we discover in a flashback set AFTER the Slipknot incident but before the Chase story, that Waller now had access to bombs hidden in people’s heads and when a prisoner called the Puma tried to break out of Belle Reve prison….boom goes the dynamite…
Waller then reveals that there was an explosive planted in the brains of most superpowered prisoners at Belle Reve, but she also had one implanted in her own skull, with Rick Flag being the only one who was entrusted with the code (to be used if she was ever turned)…
In the finale of the series, the villain known as the General was on the Squad, but he betrayed the team and Waller was insistent on using the bomb in his head…
But The General had earlier revealed that he had a trigger command that allowed him to control Rick Flag’s mind, so he revealed that he knew that there was a bomb in Waller’s head and he told Flag to blow it up…
Luckily, Flag had blocked his ears so that he couldn’t hear the command (as he had earlier learned that the General had the ability to control him) and so he blew up the General’s bomb instead…
The General was in the body of the Shaggy Man, making him pretty much indestructible, so he would eventually heal from the injury, but that is the first time that a Suicide Squad member had their head blown up from a bomb.
Thanks for the suggestion, Loren!
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