One of the most exciting DC movies on the horizon isJames Gunn’sThe Suicide Squad. Not quite a reboot but not really a true sequel, either, the film — described as a “1970s war movie” by producerPeter Safran— will bring back familiar faces likeMargot Robbie’s Harley Quinn,Joel Kinnaman’s Rick Flag, andJai Courtney’s Captain Boomerang. But besides that, the colorful cavalcade of characters is made up of some mighty obscure DC Comics ne’er-do-wells. One of them is covered in polka dots. Another appears to be wearing a chrome disco ball on his head. Another still is, like, a very amiable shark.
Who are these new members of Task Force X? Below, we explain the backstories, histories, and defining characteristics of this new squad. Also, since Warner Bros. is almost exclusively marketing this film by promising almost all these people are going to die (“Don’t get too attached”), we also predict the odds of each character making it out of this thing alive. You know. For “fun”.
These are all the new characters inThe Suicide Squad, explained.
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Peacemaker (John Cena)
In the first teaser forThe Suicide Squad,John Cenadescribed Peacemaker as a “kind’ve douchey Captain America”, and you can’t really hit the nail any harder on the head. Created by writerJoe Gilland artistPat Boyettefor Charlton Comics' espionage seriesFightin' 5, Peacemaker is Christopher Smith, a fanatical pacifist who believes so strongly in fairness and non-violence that he absolutely will mess your entire day up to defend it. The tagline on thecover ofPeacemaker #1is perfect: “A man who loves peace so much that he is willing to fight for it!” The character made the hop from Charlton to DC in the mid-80s and got a tad bit more back-story, and by that, I mean Peacemaker is straight-up insane. His brutal methodology is brought on by the extreme guilt of having a Nazi for a father, who he sees as a ghost commenting on his every move. (I’m just saying, Gunn hasn’t announced what roleTaika Waititiis playing and it wouldn’t be the first time he played an imaginary Nazi.)
The main thing to focus on here is the fact Peacemaker wears a comically round chrome-dome on his head, and the sight of that thing perched atop John Cena’s indescribably wide shoulders will, ironically, bring peace to humankind.
DEATH ODDS: We’ll See.It’s just historically hard to killanythingwith the general thickness of John Cena, but the character of Peacemaker lends itself to an antagonistic role, especially in a movie that’s bound to be filled with double-crossin'. He’s starring in anHBO Max spinofffor the Peacemaker character, but Gunn won’t reveal if the show takes place before or after the movie.
King Shark
As you can see quite clearly, King Shark is a shark that is also a man, and he is wonderful. Thanks to the behind-the-scenes footage, we know Steve Agee is doing the mo-cap for the character. He’s almost a no-brainer to do the voice as well, but Agee’s name conspicuously doesn’t pop up in the character introduction video. When the film’s first trailer dropped, it was revealed that King Sharkwill be voiced bynone other thanSylvester Stallone.
King Shark first fully surfaced in 1994’sSuperboy #9—written by Karl Kesel with art from Tom Grummet—the son of Chondrakha the God of all Sharks and a human mother. Listen, man, don’t think about it. Real name Nanaue, King Shark is under-the-sea royalty, and for a few years comics portrayed him as a brutal killing machine who tangoed with everybody from Superman to Aquaman. Recently, though, the character has found new life as sort of an affable doofus—shout-out toRon Funches' pitch-perfect voice performance in HBO Max’sHarley Quinn—who also, occasionally, is a brutal killing machine.
DEATH ODDS: Low. This is simply based on the fact that if I have to watch King Shark die with my own two eyes I will handcuff myself to the Warner Bros. water tower until the decision is reversed.
Bloodsport (Idris Elba)
First appearing in the pages of 1984’sSuperman #4—written and penciled byJohn Byrne—Bloodsport is a relatively small-time character with a huge claim to fame: Straight-up shooting Superman with a Kryptonite bullet. Bloodsport’s real name is Robert DuBois, a man who has a nervous breakdown after his brother loses his limbs—like, all of them—in the Vietnam war. Lex Luthor preys on the vulnerable DuBois, setting his sights on Superman and arming him with Kryptonite-fueled weaponry. There is a second Bloodshot, a fanatical white supremacist who kills the first Bloodsport and adopts his name ironically, but I am relatively sure Idris Elba will not be playing that Bloodsport.
DEATH ODDS: Low.By all accounts, Bloodsport is being positioned as a new main character of this not-quite-a-reboot-but-come-on Suicide Squad.
Polka Dot Man (David Dastmalchian)
Polka Dot Man belongs to the class of criminals that popped up in the first few months of Batman’s crusade on crime, the ones who saw a guy dressed like a bat and said “well, okay, if you want to get weird with it.” No one got weirder than Abner Krill—created by writer Bill Finger and artist Sheldon Moldoff for Detective Comics #300—a thief whose whole thing is polka dots. His suit is covered in polka dots that, somehow, transform into various weapons. (Buzzsaw polka dot!) His crimes tend to be vaguely dot-themed. (His first appearance? Robbing the Spot Carpet Cleaning Company.) InThe Suicide Squad, Polka Dot Man will be played byDavid Dastmalchian, who you might know best as the Arkham Asylum inmate interrogated by Harvey Dent inThe Dark Knightor the truly delightful hacker Kurt in theAnt-Manmovies.
DEATH ODDS:We’ll See. I mean, when you’re teasing a movie filled with 1970s-style war set-pieces, you don’t automatically assume the guy in the polka-dot spandex makes it out alive. But there’s no world where Polka Dot Man doesn’t become a fan favorite, and I’m sure James Gunn knows this. Whether that makes itmoreorlesslikely that the character gets blown to pieces is up in the air.
Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior)
Ratcatcher 2, played by relative newcomerDaniela Melchior, is one of two new characters completely dreamed up by Gunn forThe Suicide Squad. But where there’s a Ratcatcher 2 there was once a Ratcatcher Prime—the behind-the-scenes teaser seemed toshow him in a flashback sequence—and that’s a character that’s been giving Batman grief since the 80s. Otis Flannegan showed his gas-masked face for the first time inDetective Comics #585, written by Alan Grant and John Wagner with art by Norm Breyfogle. Otis was an actual Gotham City ratcatcher who discovered he had a strange affinity for training the little rodents to do his bidding. In Gotham, discovering you have a very specifically-themed talent means only one thing: It’s time to do crimes. If Ratcatcher 2 studied under the original, expect an extremely furry army to feature inThe Suicide Squad.
DEATH ODDS: Low.The combination of casting a fresh-faced actress and giving her an original role suggests Ratcatcher 2 is key to the plot ofThe Suicide Squad.
Savant (Michael Rooker)
Savant, real name Brian Durlin, is truly a villain for our modern times: A spoon-fed heir to a vast fortune who moves to Gotham City because “vigilante” seems like a cool, sexy career move. Created in 2003 by writerGail Simoneand artistEd Benes, Durlin is a genius but a chemical imbalance in his brain causes him to remember events non-linearly. My dude is a walkingChristopher Nolanscreenplay, andMichael Rookeris going to have a field day with it. Savant is most often associated with the Birds of Prey, first as a dangerous thorn in their side—he kidnapped and tortured Black Canary in hopes of getting Batman’s true identity out of Barbara Gordon—and then as an unstable ally. So, fun times ahead for the interactions between Rooker and Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn.
DEATH ODDS: High. Savant is pretty perfectly set in the middle-of-the-pack between very entertaining and very expendable, plus I genuinely believe Gunn would find it funny to kill long-time buddy Michael Rooker on-screen as violently as possible.
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Mongal (Mayling Ng)
Mongal is an alien hailing from the planet Debstam IV, a desolate little ball of mud she shares with her warlord father, Mongul, and equally barbaric brother, Mongul the Younger. An extremely chill family, overall. Mongal first appeared inShowcase ‘95 #8—written byPeter Tomasi, penciled byScott Eaton—making quite a splash alongside her brother by picking a fight with Superman because they heard he was talking shit about their father. (A fight that spanned all of Metropolis and was eventually broken up by Krypto, an extremely good dog.) InThe Suicide Squad, Mongal will be played by actress and black belt Martial ArtistMayling Ng—who also appeared as an Amazonian inWonder Woman—so you know some asses are about to be kicked. Mongal’s place on the team is similar to, say, Enchantress’ role in the firstSuicide Squad, in the sense that it’ll be interesting to see how someone this genuinely powerful fits in next to people who are, like, chucking boomerangs into machine gun fire.
DEATH ODDS: We’ll see.It seems so far that The Suicide Squad is its own contained thing, but Mongal does have cosmic connections that could come in handy if the movie did want to set anything up for the future. However, Mongal’s not exactly a fan favorite, and her general badassery is a prime choice for an early death that plays like more than a joke.
Weasel (Sean Gunn)
In the comics, the Weasel moniker is much more of a…symbolic thing than it appears to be inThe Suicide Squad. Created byGerry ConwayandRafael Kayanan, John Monroe is a Stanford University student driven to madness by the bullying of his peers, chief among them the nickname “weasel”, which, yeah that’s worth a murder or two. After graduating and becoming a professor himself, Monroe made himself a “Weasel” costume, complete with razor-sharp claws and teeth, and killed three of his former tormentors before Firestorm stepped in. The character grew more feral and less human with each passing appearance. His one big stint in the Suicide Squad, during a story by writerJohn Ostranderand artistErik Larsen, ended with Weasel going rogue and murdering the Thinker, only to get killed himself by team leader Rick Flag. Teamwork!
DEATH ODDS: High. Again, Weasel’s history with the team is mostly notable for the way he lost his whole damn mind and tried to kill everyone. However, Gunn seems to have pivoted into a Rocket Raccoon direction—complete with a mo-cap performance from Sean Gunn—and less of a homeless serial killer who thinks he’s a street rat kind of thing.
Blackguard (Pete Davidson)
The #1 most important piece of information by a wide margin that you need to know about Blackguard is that his real name is Dick Hertz.SNLstarPete Davidsonis playing Dick Hertz. What a time to be alive. Besides the Dick Hertz of it all, Blackguard first appeared in the very first issue ofBooster Gold, written and drawn byDan Jurgens, a low-ranking member of Metropolis' underground criminal syndicate known as The 1,000. From day one, Blackguard’s whole thing is that he’s big, strong, dressed like a Medieval Times employee, and kind’ve sucks at his job. Years after his first appearance, Blackguard enjoyed a short stint as a Suicide Squad member, a tenure that ended with the dude getting viciously beheaded in front of everyone.
DEATH ODDS: High. Back when Davidson first signed on toThe Suicide Squad,the report specifically noted it was a “small role”. Blackguard is only going to be alive just long enough for “Dick Hertz” to be said out loud roughly one dozen times.
The Thinker (Peter Capaldi)
The Thinker is a name used by a whopping four different men across DC Comics history, but only two were associated with Task Force X, so let’s start there. The first, Clifford DeVoe—created by writerGardner Foxand artistE.E. Hibbard—was a Gotham lawyer who realized that the city’s criminal underworld was mostly populated by very powerful dumbasses. DeVoe became the brains behind many a nefarious operation, aided by his greatest scientific invention, the “Thinking Cap”, a metal hat that amplified DeVoe’s genius and gave him telekinetic abilities. (It also, in one of the more depressing developments ever, gave him cancer.)
The second Thinker, created by writer Gerry Conway and artist Al Milgrom, is Cliff Carmichael, is much younger, a long-time rival throughout high school and college to Firestorm’s younger half, Ronnie Raymond. In an act of jealous dickishness, Cliff cut the strap on Ronnie’s football helmet hoping for an injury, but a last-minute helmet swap paralyzed Cliff’s cousin, Hugo Hammer, instead. Driven mad by the mistake, Cliff was admitted to a mental hospital, which just happened to be conducting experiments on Clifford DeVoe’s “Thinking Cap”. Because sketchy mental institution experiments have nevernotcreated a supervillain, Cliff Conway ended up with pieces of The Thinking Cap implanted into his actual brain and a new Thinker was born.
DEATH ODDS: High.Due to thePeter Capaldicasting and Thinker’s history of betraying literally everyone he works with, it feels like the Thinker ofThe Suicide Squadmight be more of an antagonistic presence than someone mixing it up with the crew.
