Suicide Squad #19

It's not all of them, but still too many people seem to doing these foldout covers completely wrong. The shocking scene on the other half of the image should be something that sets up the issue, NOT A REVEAL OF WHAT HAPPENS AT THE VERY END. It spoils a major twist for the end, and it makes you spend the entire issue waiting for the moment in question to happen. Suicide Squad is another victim of this misconception of how these things should work, Unknown Soldier not making his appearance until the second to last page of the issue, bringing that whole 'new leader' thing with him. It's a shame because this cover's pretty good overall.

This issue pretty much regurgitates everything that's been wrong with this series, stirs it together into an even more confusing blob, and then lurches along in a daze. We've got Amanda genuinely caring about people, a sentence that hurts me to think about as I type it, and Regulus continuing to drag out his story. This issue it doesn't even go anywhere! Amanda's there, suddenly, to rescue Kurt from Regulus. So they chase Regulus into the sewers and.... dick around for 15 pages. It's just a whole heaping mess of crap happening just to happen, and no sign of Regulus whatsoever, you barely remember he was the plot. I kid, of course, how can I forget about Regulus when this series spends every possible opportunity shoving him down my throat?

The only possible positive qualities to this issue are the solace in knowing this is the last of Adam Glass's issues, and the quality of the twist along with it's implications. The twist may be ruined in execution, but it's still VERY shocking, and quite interesting. It's nice to see The Unknown Soldier back so soon, and putting him in charge of the Suicide Squad is a choice rife with story potential.

In Conclusion: 1/5

This issue is, at best, a mess. Amanda being..... compassionate, sets off a chain of events that meanders about with absolutely zero direction or pacing. And then there's a weird tangent where soldiers of some completely unknown capacity find the body of OMAC, or maybe a different OMAC because the mohawk is FAR closer to classic OMAC. WHAT DID THAT HAVE TO DO WITH ANYTHING!? I mean, I get that scenes set up future stuff, but this is so... Who were the people there? Why were they there? Are they Basilisk soldiers? Government soldiers? Independent Soldiers? And why have such a detached hook like that on your last issue? Oh, and then there's Harley's multiple personalities, which this issue shows how terrible that idea is. I was ok with it before, but now it's just getting dumb. Don't bother with this issue. Just wait and see how the new writer works out, all you need to know about this issue is on the cover. Oh and that last cliffhanger lacks any tension because we know several times over that Deadshot's now functionally immortal due to the nanomachines.