Suicide Squad: Kill Arkham Asylum #1 Prequel Comic To The Game

[superfangirl1]

Comments

[thezmage]

Wait, that's Amanda Waller? I thought that was Murn from the Peacemaker series.

[superfangirl1]

Apparently, this, Amanda Waller is model after the actress that voice her in the game. Debra Wilson. Who also voice Amanda waller in My Adventures with Superman.

[blues32]

It is NOT a good look for Waller.

[deh_tommy]

Maybe it’s just because she’s fantastic but I disagree (though it never gets easier seeing her be skinny).

[deh_tommy]

That’s Debra Wilson, she both plays and serves as the face model for Waller in the game. Funnily enough she keeps popping up in different unrelated games.

[superfangirl1]

I will always remember her from Mad tv.

[blues32]

Yeah, no. I don't think I'll be purchasing the game. It sounds a bit rubbish and this isn't convincing me otherwise.

[knight_moves]

Is the logo on Waller's jacket supposed to be a sideways A for Arkham or ARGUS? Because it just looks like a K. Maybe a K and an O. OK? Is she really proud of being from Oklahoma?

[super_fly]

Well you know the line: Oklahoma, okay.

[lbd_nytetrayn]

I thought it was a tilted L for LexCorp, since I think that's where you get all your weapons in the game.

Or a C for Cadmus.

[scorntx]

Has any writer ever thought about having Waller consider, rather than conscripting and blackmailing inmates who she treats in an appalling fashion, getting together a team of actually willing volunteers who are treated with, I dunno, the bare minimum of human decency?
Just for the sake of variety? Or to be ironic?
I know "Volunteer Squad" just doesn't have the same alliterative appeal, and it'd mean writers would have to do something different with her, but still.
Couldn't they give it a try?

[beyondthefringe]

The sad thing is that under Ostrander, Amanda Waller was tough but fair, and actually did give at least some small amount of consideration for "her" people. Back in the original run, the team was fairly evenly split between incarcerated supervillains offered a chance to work off some of their sentence, and volunteers using the Squad's resources for their own ends (Nightshade, Black Orchid, Bronze Tiger, Nemesis, Psi...) If you fucked up or abused Waller's trust, she'd come down on you like a sack of bricks (like with Boomerbutt's shenanigans) but she was decent.

It's just that well... after Ostrander's run, there was a steady slide towards the Squad being misused and its members treated as truly disposable. The New 52 reboot was particularly heinous in the early days for this. And at some point, someone decided that Waller was just as much a villain as the ones she exploited, leading to stuff like this.

I'd love a return to the original vibe, and a team perhaps populated by supercriminals who genuinely desire to make something better with their lives instead of being punching bags of the month for various heroes. I think Thunderbolts had the right approach several times over the years...

[john_drake1964]

My guess is that Waller has come in time to be representative of two things that in general people are becoming more and more aware and critical of, namely the shady shit that the alphabet agencies of the intelligence community have gotten up to in the past (CIA, NSA, FBI, etc...), as well as the issue of the fact that even though these are known super-criminals, she is involved in the prison-industrial complex which seeks to use criminals as a source of labor with little care for their health (physical/mental.) So Waller becomes less and less noble, and more and more reflective of the sort of mentality that would consider using a bunch of dangerous, often unstable or even full-on sociopathic as deniable field fodder.

[phantomfo]

Kinda like Henry Peter Gyrich, who somewhat followed the JJJ path (irritating obstacle to heroes, later humanized by other writers) before going full Orchis super-villain.

[john_drake1964]

I think with Waller, the changeover really was going to happen once the War on Terror began after 9/11. We entered a different world, and we saw in the immediate furor years this mentality that to stop another 9/11, we had to be willing to use any means necessary to protect ourselves. But after that furor started to shift towards war weariness and then distrust of the government after we began learning how badly the whole charge to war had gone, that sort of shifted to representing the "security at any cost" mentality was in fact actively harmful and dangerous.

Now you have characters like Waller and Gyrich who, while often debating and arguing with superheroes, still could work with them. But now, in an era of increased cynicism and distrust, this began to shape their relationship with caped heroes, and seeing them as either someone who now had to get in line or be removed entirely. For someone like Waller, whose original backstory (her family torn apart by the violence and life in the Cabrini-Green projects) saw her take that tragedy and use everything she had to regain control over her life, damn whoever or whatever if need be. So that desire for control, and adding in the increasing level of chaos that life in a superhero universe has become in recent decades (alien invasions, demonic incursions, supervillain acts of terrorism, being way more common,) presumably see an increasing entrenchment of her worst control aspects in reaction.

Add in how again, the increasing recognition of issues such as government agencies committing a variety of actions of very dubious morality, and add in now how given her control of Belle Reve and her usage of its prison population for basically a slave mercenary/deniable ops force (using subdermal explosives as the stick and less and less offering a carrot of pardon or reduced sentence or the like) and its unfortunately easy to see how writers have shifted her more and more into an uncompromising authoritarians who sees everyone as pawns to manipulate.

It doesn't help of course that for many, their first introduction to Waller was either her appearances during the Ostrander run or the Justice League/JLU animated series where, while she did morally dubious things, she still was capable of recognizing at times she crossed lines that she shouldn't have or was not "exploding head parade". Having her act as a foil to the Justice League, and some of its members (Batman in particular due to sharing some similar personality and backstory) and sometimes having a point. For example, the government creating a superhero team of its own in the DCAU because there is no guarantee the JL will always be there or another mind-control situation, isn't entirely wrong, it's just their methods are...well, problematic. Now, the issue is that Waller is only redeemed when compared to even worse people than her (Lok in the 2019 Suicide Squad series, for example,) which is basically a version of "do you want a punch in the head or a punch in kidneys?"

[knight_moves]

She's kind of done a reverse Loki (or reverse Magneto, if you prefer) over time--going from nuanced and multilayered to "my solution to the trolley problem is multitrack drifting so that I can kill everyone on both rails."

[mastermahan]

I feel like a need a nickname to distinguish original flavor anti-hero Amanda Waller - who was tough and unscrupulous but ultimately sane and well-meaning - with villainous lunatic murderer Waller. Call this one Wamanda Aller, maybe?

[lbd_nytetrayn]

Play the Mario/Wario card: Amanda Maller (pronounced like "mauler").

[mastermahan]

Dang, that's way better.

[shadur]

Thirded.