Review: Suicide Squad: Dream Team trade paperback (DC Comics)

I think Suicide Squad: Dream Team is a good turn for writer Nicole Maines and the Dreamer character. Coming off primarily CW TV Supergirl appearances, I think there was a danger of Dreamer seeming too wholesome — a character borne of one-hour misunderstandings solved with hugs — and therefore too easily dismissed. Now, as Maines has begun to write Dreamer outside of anthologies and into dedicated miniseries, “Suicide Squad” here and “Secret Six” next are exactly the right venues. Anti-hero capers are not where we’d expect to see Dreamer, based on Supergirl, and I think Maines is right to intuit that’s exactly where Dreamer should go.

I did think — somewhat late in the Dawn of DC era, when Amanda Waller’s villainy is mostly already revealed — Dream Team didn’t have a lot new to say. Waller and Dreamer Nia Nal’s final argument as to whether sometimes good people have to do bad things is the same argument just about every other hero has already had with Waller. Harley Quinn as the crazed but sympathetic “Squad mom” is the role that Harley always plays; conversely, I thought Maines stayed too surface level with Black Alice, presented as the “teenage queen of mean” (literally) despite her heroic role in Lazarus Planet.

All of which is to say, Dream Team is not a “Suicide Squad” revelation, but it is perfectly passable “Suicide Squad,” with some smart uses of Dreamer’s powers. I’m pleased to see Maines taking some big swings and writing perhaps against expectations, and I’m eager to see how she handles what I hope will be a real tribute to Gail Simone’s Secret Six.

[Review contains spoilers]

The occasion of Lazarus Planet has allowed Maines to tweak Dreamer’s powers in ways both fascinating and terrifying; again, we’re not used to seeing Dreamer in the guise of someone you might be afraid of, so in that way Maines charts new territory. There is Nia’s ability now to teleport herself between locations through someone’s dreams, though — when forced by Waller to transport the whole team — that results in the person’s death. Toward the end, we’re in distinct horror movie territory when Dreamer’s dragging bad guys into the cornfields around her home of Parthas, able to be “everywhere” by dropping in and out of the dreams of the gathered unconscious.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

Dreamer remains a hero and the protagonist of the story, but in that latter scene, Maines exits Dreamer’s perspective to focus instead on how unsettled the Squad is by Dreamer’s actions. That’s wise in many ways; for one, Dreamer doing scary things is obviously scarier when we’re watching her in the third person instead of in the first. Also, insofar as Maines as actor originated the role of Dreamer and has guided the character in fiction, it’ll surely benefit Maines' comics-writing career to not only write Dreamer but to at the same time increasingly show she can write characters other than Dreamer, too.

Another effective use of Dreamer’s powers is in the final pages, in a scene where it seems Dreamer is killing Amanda Waller, before we understand it’s just one of Nia’s visions. I was convinced; hardly, of course, did I think Waller was dead, but I’d certainly have believed Dreamer pushed Waller out a window and that Dreamer’s family had been murdered as a consequence. It’s an illusion, but one that demonstrates a sophisticated way Dreamer can affect the narrative, again perhaps more so than one might expect.

Letterer Becca Casey¹ gives some physicality to the word balloons here in a way I felt I hadn’t seen before. When focus shifts from a background character to a foreground character, the background balloons are obscured behind physical objects; when Dreamer stops listening to Harley, the dialogue goes behind Dreamer’s body; and later, a panel split in two seems to trap the balloon within. The comic might not be much different if the balloons were simply “normal,” but to me it contributed to the “dreamlike” ethos — reality (including the dialogue) indeed being just another layer that can be stepped on and over and left behind.

Artist Eddy Barrows is tonally perfect here, reprising good work he did in Suicide Squad Vol. 3: Burning Down the House. On occasion — and I don’t know if we’d attribute this to writer, artists, or both — I wasn’t quite sure what the characters were doing, as in a second issue sequence where Harley … knocks away Dreamer’s powers? There’s a few things happening too with Task Force X’s trademark brain bombs that I didn’t quite understand — Dreamer says hers “already went off” (when her head is still quite unexploded) and I wasn’t sure if that was meant to be metaphorical? Dreamer supposedly disarms Bizarro’s brain bomb, but then later when his head explodes, that’s equally more confusing than it needs to be until it’s revealed Deadshot played a part.

I appreciated that the Suicide Squad: Dream Team collection is more than complete, including not only the four-issue miniseries but also the Beast World and Action Comics lead-in stories. We’ve speculated here on a comprehensive compendium of Dreamer’s DCU appearances by Nicole Maines, but between Superman: Son of Kal-El, Lazarus Planet, and here, there’s not much that’s tough to find. I did note a few passing items here that seem to reference Maines' YA graphic novel Bad Dream, which itself features characters from Jadzia Axelrod’s Galaxy: The Prettiest Star. I’m not sure my reading list quite has time for going down the further rabbit hole of connected DC YA OGNs, but I’m not ruling it out, either.

[Includes original and variant covers]

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1. And/or the editor laying out the word balloons. Or artist Eddy Barrows. Sometimes it depends.  ↩︎

Rating 2.25