The problem with any comic book sourced film ESP if it is successful is that the publishing house looses it's mind and goes crazy printing books from those characters.
Suicide Squad is not an exception.
The series has been fairly solid for the last several years and the increased spotlight has only given DC
more pressure to turn out a great book.
The cast of Task Force X is in constant rotation since they keep getting killed.
A shockingly clever use for the MANY D grade villains that have piled up over the last 90 odd years.
Grim and dark in ways that Marvel can only hope to be there is reason the book has been around for so long.

Suicide Squad is finished. But Amanda Waller has other ideas. Looks like you can’t keep a bad guy down.

It’s no secret Task Force X gleefully operates outside the realm of truth and justice. They simmer in moral ambiguity and controlled chaos to sidestep anything resembling honor to get the job done. Of course, things go boom and bodies hit the floor.

Suicide Squad Vol. 1: The Black Vault is a spectacular opening shot to the DC Rebirth storyline. Heavy hitters like Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Killer Croc, Katana, Enchantress, and Deadshot get the band back together. “Criminal filth. Be proud. Your country needs you.” The mission seems higher-than-normal stakes for the team, especially one that’s been on the sideline for so long. I suppose that’s how they earn their illustrious title.

For a team that is more wrecking ball than precision, it was a trip to see Jim Lee and writer Rob Williams drop the squad into cosmic high stakes. At first pass it might seem proper to call this a job for Superman. That goes double when a bombshell foe is found in the Black Vault. Thankfully we see a fresh face join the squad, Hack- a young, African-American woman who can turn matter into digital information.

The squad barrels through their mission with the wonderful absurdity that one would expect from this iteration of Suicide Squad. The stakes are high but the chill is low.

Origin side-stories for Katana, Boomerang, and Deadshot rounded out the story and offered depth, a welcomed rebirth roadmap.

This graphic novel collects issues #1-4 and the SUICIDE SQUAD: REBIRTH one-shot.

There is just too much going on here. We rush into the whole concept of a Suicide Squad and throw them all in ridiculous situations. Yes, that is the point, but we don't cover any of the characters backstories until the end of this volume. We don't care if any of the Suicide Squad does end up dying because we don't know who they are other than Harley Quinn. Sure, they are the same cast that appears in the 2016 movie, but that movie doesn't give much backstory, other than Deadshot and Harley, either. They end up having to face against General Zod and a Russian version of the Suicide Squad. Like, let's just pick a super powerful alien and then throw in a bunch of Russian-controlled villains to fight. It didn't need both, one would have been enough of a threat, and nothing really compares to a Kryptonian anyway. A bunch of Suicidal humans would not be enough to defeat one. Add in the fact that the journey to and the setting itself were pretty deadly, nothing was particularly believable, just ridiculous.

The suicide squad is good at a really limited set of goals. Y'know, knocking over China's supersoldier program, mucking with low-power terrorists/agitators, pissing each other off and/pr pie-ing each other in the face, street level stuff with a layer of your dad's technothriller. In this installment they open up the most recent box General Zod got locked in. He's not happy about that, and not happy about being let out. The crew has to deal with with rampaging Kryptonian without prep or backup, also his jailers are shooting at everything. Harley manages to be pithy around all this chaos and the rest fo the crew manages to be laconic about it throughout. Katana and Dr Quinn have a future as a comedy team. 

Verdict: Get it. Jim lee draws some good action, and the sheer fustercluck of this scenario is great for the Squad to tackle.

Thank you for allowing me to read and review this book. I am just not interested in this book anymore. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Didn't finish it before my time ran out. Sorry I didn't get it finished for a review.

A solid trade that any fan of DC Comics can pick up and enjoy. Rebirth continues to be just that for DC and a breath of fresh air for the superhero genre.

In Suicide Squad Vol. 1: The Black Vault, Rob Williams does well by the Suicide Squad, leavening the situations with comedy without lampooning the characters. Harley Quinn is a particularly difficult character to get right in this context, and I thought Williams did particularly well balancing Harley's prattling on about neoliberalism while slaughtering foot soldiers and then also running away at the first sign of real danger.

This book i DNF at pg 20 even though I love this series really sorry.

ARC from Netgalley.
Pretty straightforward story here, much like the Suicide Squad movie, except with amazing Jim Lee art and not such a convoluted plot.
In DC Rebirth, the Suicide Squad consists of Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Killer Croc, Captain Boomerang, Kitana, Rick Flag, and Enchantress. Waller sends them on their next mission, to retrieve "The Black Vault" from a Russian base. Due to heavy security, they must take a dive from space, plunge into Arctic deep water, escape into the base, and then retrieve it. When they reach it, however, they find that the "Black Vault" is a Negative Zone prison for General Zod. LET EPIC BATTLE BEGIN! With the help of new member Hack, Zod is put back and the Vault is retrieved.... but not without the loss of Captain Boomerang. (Pretty violent death, all things considered)
Good start to the series, but very interested to see where they go next. Recommend.

Didn't really enjoy this reboot. Not much depth to the characters, and really didn't grab me like the older stuff.

This was fun but seemed short. I always enjoy the way these villains work together. Ended on a funny way.

Definitely well timed as a companion to the film starring Jared Leto and Margot Robbie. Having read this and seen the movie, I find it very difficult to remember what happened in which, as the makeup of the team is pretty much identical. I could take or leave Killer Croc -- he just seems dispensable at all times. Harley Quinn is clearly the star of this book, as she was of the film. The Joker is more fun to read than Jared Leto is to watch, though.

The Suicide Squad is set loose in the Arctic Ocean in an undersea Russian base controlled by a rouge faction. Except not is all as it seems. The rogue faction may not be so rogue and the alien device seems to be an entrance to the "Phantom Zone", or so it appears when General Zod works on ripping his way into the base. The Suicide Squad managed to survive Zod and the Russians plus nasty guys that interfered, but not without a loose. A question is whether Amanda Waller will survive as head of Task Force X much longer. Since this was a quick adventure, included also are several short individual team member adventures - Deadshot, Boomerang, Katana, and Harley Quinn.

First off....how many times can a thing be rebooted/rebirthed in a handful of years? Because I think I've read like at least 3 of SS alone.

That said, I enjoy these dumbasses, so I'll probably keep reading them as they keep rebooting instead of continuing stories.

There's a phrase that I have been accused of overusing, but one that I enjoy nevertheless: Profoundly stupid. SUICIDE SQUAD, VOL. 1: THE BLACK VAULT is exactly what I'm talking about when I use that phrase....a book, TV show, or movie that goes beyond stupidity, but runs with that stupidity until it is writ large, until the stupidity becomes a thing unto itself, the entity's prime reason for being. The book/TV show/movie almost becomes a stupidity-delivery engine, perpetuating itself with its own dopiness and preposterousness.


That's not to say that something that is profoundly stupid can't be entertaining. The SUICIDE SQUAD movie was a prime example....it had a stupid story, terrible editing, it was murky and hard to look at, it was horribly written, had clunky dialogue...yet, I had a ball watching it. The cast sold me, and you could tell that people had a good time making this movie. It wasn't GOOD, I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, but....I had fun.


SUICIDE SQUAD, VOL. 1: THE BLACK VAULT was not as much fun, but it was every bit as profoundly stupid. I reviewed a few of the issues that are collected here last year, but the few measly pages of the main story that each issue contained made me give up on the individual issues, and wait for the collected edition.


The collected edition has the exact same problem.


This volume collects SUICIDE SQUAD: REBIRTH and SUICIDE SQUAD #'s 1-4. Jim Lee, who was my sole attraction to this book, only pencils issues 1-4, and only about 14 pages of those issues, with the remainder being a back-up solo story. So, in essence, what interested me about this volume could have been published as a 48-page one-shot, instead of a 161-page collection.


The entire collection is written by Rob Williams, who is a terrible writer. Williams is British, and keeps having briticisms worm their way into the dialogue, which takes me right out of the story. (Someone like Harley Quinn, an American, would say "tastes like", rather than "tastes of"....there are a lot of instances like that, where an Editor should have stepped in and suggested changes.) Williams' idea of characterization is to give a few of the Squad members gross quirks, such as Killer Croc smelling like vomit, or afflicting Captain Boomerang with Irritable Bowel Syndrome, so he poops his pants constantly during missions. Hilarious....


The main story finds the team sent to invade a Russian military installation to retrieve a "cosmic item" that he being held there. Williams has the group sent there with no extraction plan, but, luckily, they find another prisoner being held there who can teleport them home as soon as they get what they came for. SUICIDE SQUAD has never been better written than when John Ostrander and Kim Yale were at the helm (Hell, I'll go you one better and say that it has NEVER been written well other than the Ostrander/Yale team...), and the lack of actual, intelligent, espionage-driven stories REALLY hurts this title. Williams tells a stupid tale, filled with pants-shitting and vomiting and grievous bodily injury, and it's slightly buoyed by Jim Lee's detailed art, but that's just 48 pages. And it ends on an abrupt stop, which makes me feel like DC could have included a few more issues to A)- Round out the storyline, and B)- Give you a little more value for your money. The SUICIDE SQUAD: REBIRTH issue is a done-in-one that is equally stupid (Mongolian terrorists kidnap an American scientist who has created a "Meta-bomb", which can give/take away super-powers when it is detonated. They kidnap the scientist, force him to build the bomb, which they detonate, but never have the guy, I dunno...WRITE DOWN HIS PLAN FOR THE BOMB, so they can build more in case he gets killed....? Stupid.)


The four back-up stories center on Katana, Harley Quinn, Deadshot, and Captain Boomerang, and they range in quality from decent to dopey, but here's my main problem with this collection: Take away the copious amounts of covers, variant covers, credit pages in the beginning of the book, and tons of original art pages, and you only get about 80-something pages of actual story content for your

$16.99. There was a certain amount of dopey fun to be had from this book, but, much like the floppies that are collected here, there's not enough there to justify the price.


SUICIDE SQUAD, VOL. 1: THE BLACK VAULT earns five out of ten Killer Crocs:

🐊🐊🐊🐊🐊


DC Comics provided a review copy.

This is just passable, and no more – we've seen the 'birth' of the Suicide Squad so often now another bunch o' reprobates being told what's what is a little tiresome, to be honest. And the drama of their first story here is just so-so, as they infiltrate somewhere and find something and struggle to get out, all with mediocre artwork. Beyond that there is a bunch of very short stories focusing on Waller trying to introduce the characters to us – sorry, give them their own space and psychoanalyse them. And beyond that is about 50pp of cover gallery and sketchbook. All of which means possibly the least bang for your buck in any SS trade, ever.

This book is way better than the movie that was released last year. Wish I could read some more.

3.5 Star-Review

At first I didn’t really understand where the Suicide Squad came from. Then, last year, I went to the movies and saw the movie (which was okay, but not the best DC has to offer) and I got a little more curious about the background stories. So I decided I wanted to start reading the comics, and what better way then to start with the Rebirth series?

When I picked this volume up I didn’t know what I was getting into and didn’t have very high hopes. But the story actually turned out to be very interesting. Especially, I enjoyed reading those reintroductions of the characters so well known as the Suicide Squad! Except for Harley Quinn, I didn’t really know any of these characters very well so it was nice to get to know them a little better.

This volume had a lot of humour to offer and that sorted it all out, in my opinion. I’m interested in where this is going and hope that I’ll like it better with time.