Suicide Squad #18 Review

At this point I'm just coasting along with the current Suicide Squad storyline and waiting for the new creative team to take over in May. Adam Glass has attempted to inject more humor and banter into the series with this arc even as he chronicles the final showdown between the Squad and Regulus. Sadly, the humor is rarely that effective. Even after all this time, the team doesn't have a great dynamic, and it's only certain pairings like Harley/Deadshot and now Harley/Yo-Yo that prove very memorable. As has always been the case, it's really Harley who props up this book in its weakest moments.

This issue suffers from an overload of lousy dialogue. Too often characters spout exposition that seems less intended to move the story along and more to remind readers what happened in previous issues without the need for an editor's caption. Regulus is often the worst offender. He's just far too generic a supervillain in both look and voice. Glass does deliver some cool individual character moments in this issue, including Yo-Yo playing the hero and King Shark having a rare moment of lucidity. But with the way the script keeps bouncing from one focal character to the next, those moments are never explored to their full potential.

Henrik Jonsson's pencils continue to exhibit the same strengths and flaws. The action flows better thanks to is more natural, energetic figure work. That's an especially good thing considering that this issue is almost all action. However, his overly angular and exaggerated faces leave a bit to be desired, and they too often fail to capture the right emotion in key scenes.

For all its woes, issue #18 does end on a real high note. Whether this means better things for Glass' finale next month remains to be seen.

Jesse is a writer for various IGN channels. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter, or Kicksplode on MyIGN.

Source : ign[dot]com