I finished rereading the entire run of the Secret Six today. It was obvious Simone had big plans for the series if it had continued. Nothing comes of the team working for Waller. In fact, the last year is mostly spent involved in crossovers as an attempt to boost the readership.
Paul Cornell had been given the title Action Comics to write. Normally, I'm sure he would have been thrilled but this happened to be a year where he couldn't use Superman in DC's flagship title. Cornell used Lex Luthor as the main character and made a compelling read for the villain in the short term. During Blackest Night, Lex got a taste of wielding a Power Ring (like Green Lantern's Green Ring) and wanted to regain that power for himself. The whole year was a pretty fun read until the very last issue, where Superman had to come back and salvage the plot. Deus ex machina as a plot device kind of bores me.
At any rate, the Secret Six crossover with Action Comics so that Scandal Savage and Vandal Savage have another chance to work out their family issues. Then, the Six turned up in Birds of Prey so that Catman could con Huntress into not being attracted to him anymore. Finally, the Six crossed into Doom Patrol for a kind of pointless crossover.
It is always fun to see which visiting authors actually read the characters they are trying to write. The main trick is Ragdoll. If you nail his perverted sense of humor, you pretty much have the character. Everyone else, you can script normally. Simone herself writes Birds of Prey so no issues there. Cornell seemed to actually get the Six pretty well and might have one day been a decent replacement for Simone. Keith Giffen, who wrote Doom Patrol at the time, keep making jokey references to Ragdoll's genitals (he has none) and basically couldn't nail the tone of any of the Six except Deadshot.
Late in the game, King Shark joins the team and adds a delightful level of absurdity to the dialogue. Some of his lines make me laugh. The roster kept growing until the Secret Six became the Secret Eight. The cast was starting to get unwieldy. It was at this point that I think Simone knew she had to wrap things up or pull in a ton of new readers.
The Get Out of Hell Free card from the first arc comes back into play as Scandal finally decides she needs to free Knockout from Hell. Black Alice quits the team and one of the other members reveals that he has stolen the card from Scandal and wants to live in Hell as a ruler.
Weird things happen and the team comes out of Hell with an extra member to take Alice's place. There is some dark stuff and a guest appearance by the Demon (in full rhyming mode).
The final issues amount to a bottle rocket rather than any real fireworks. Bane gets a bug up his ass to break Batman again by killing all of the Bat's friends and allies. Before any of that can happen, Bane leads the Six to attack the Penguin for some reason. All plot lines kind of stop dead in issue 36 as every super hero in the DCU shows up to put down the Six. When Deadshot referenced Butch and Sundance early in the series, he was foreshadowing this last issue. There is a moral conundrum (again) and the villains prove themselves to be honorable (again). But they still get the hell beaten out of them.
The whole thing ends with Bane separating himself from the Six so he can go back to his evil ways. None of this would matter because the whole universe was rebooted a few months later in Flashpoint and then in the new 52. After the 52 reboot, the Suicide Squad was relaunched with Deadshot as the main character. Of course, none of his character carried over when the universe reset. He did end up banging Harley Quinn quite a bit. But I don't think that counts as character. King Shark was also in the new Squad. Scandal, Ragdoll, Jeannette and Catman have yet to resurface. Honestly, I don't think Bane has either. So any character work Simone did was wiped away.
Why didn't this series succeed? Well, it had a marked lack of marquee names, of course. The sex and violence content was very high for such a mainstream book and superhero comics are a conservative medium. Maybe people wanted the political intrigue of the Suicide Squad back (Simone nailed the character interaction, which I think was far more important). The biggest drawback I saw in the writing was that each arc essentially represented the same emotional journey for the characters. They would be hired by someone unscrupulous, one or some of them would decide to fight against the person who hired them (and thus the rest of the team). By the end, they would all learn that they like and need each other. Awwww.
In the last issue, Catman says, "We are always outgunned and we always lose." But he says it with pride. This is kind of a sad truth. I don't think we ever see the team successfully complete an assignment except in the last issue. They are referenced as jokes and losers when they show up in Action and Doom Patrol. With a rep like that, I guess readers didn't want to tag along.
Going back through, I am a little disappointed. This may no longer be my favorite series of the 2000s but it was damn fun. There are plenty of moments I enjoyed and I realized the thing this series most resembles is Firefly. You have a group of criminals and lowlifes who need each other and form a bit of a family.
Seek it out if you like villain stories and can handle some rough stuff in your superhero comics. I'll be back with something completely different soon. So, Catman, are you mad I kind of ran out of gas on this series?
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