Hey everyone, welcome to another exciting edition of the Number One Comics Podcast. This is the only podcast dedicated to first issues. I'm your host Jonah, and with me again is Bill. Bill, how are you doing? I'm great, Jonah. How are you? I'm doing well. Thanks again for joining me. Always appreciate this. Always love your take, especially on series like this, which are a little different than your typical Batman, Supermans, because this is a more eclectic group of characters. And I really am interested in your take on this one too, because this is a series that, while it is a first issue,
it is of sorts a continuation of previous things that had already been established. Okay. So we'll talk a little bit more about that. The issue we're talking about tonight is Secret Six, number one, by DC Comics. This was published back in November of 2008. Had a cover price of $2.99. Writer on it is Gail Simone, and the artist is Nicholas Scott.
This is the third volume of the title, as I kind of just alluded to. So the characters, the concept first debuted way back in 1968. There was a Secret Six title back then. It ran for seven issues. There was a revival of the team in Action Comics Weekly 601 back in 1988, and that ran through issue number 612. That was much different than what we have here. Gail Simone introduced us to a modern version of this team in a lead-in to the Infinite Crisis, and that was in a mini-series called Villains United. Did you read that by any chance? I did not.
I did read Villains United. It's almost kind of what got me back into DC Comics, between that and Day of Judgment and then Infinite Crisis itself. That's kind of really what got me back into DC Comics in a big way at the time. This team that Gail introduced us to consisted of members Deadshot, Catman, Cheshire, Ragdoll, Scandal Savage, and Parademon. It was led by a character called Mockingbird. Now, in that series or throughout that series, it was revealed kind of towards the end that Mockingbird, who was the de facto leader, was actually Lex Luthor.
and was sort of kind of playing them all. This series also reveals that a member of the Secret Society of Supervillains that was kind of pitted against the Six, was called Knockout, was actually a mole for the Secret Six and was Scandal Savage's lover. All of this is, or a big part of this, is alluded to in this series, which is why I mention it here. So following Villains United, there was a six-issue limited series in which Knockout officially joined the team to be with her lover, Scandal. Knockout, however, was killed during the Final Crisis event. And again, I mention that because her absence is heavily referenced here. Her death happened in, I believe, Birds of Prey number 109. So it wasn't in the Final Crisis book itself, but it was one of those spinoffs. This particular series hit shops back in September of 2008.
We're going to dive into the issue itself. The first thing I want to talk a little bit about is the cover art by illustrator Cliff Chang. It features four of the core cast. We've got Scandal, Savage, Ragdoll, Catman, and Deadshot. There's two others that are at the back that are currently hidden in shadow. As we get into the issue itself, we're going to open up this issue outside of a gay all-nude nightclub slash bar called The Bear Trap, which I think is probably the perfect name for such a club. A meek, ponytail-looking gentleman named Mr. Shelton is being led by two...
pretty large dudes wearing overly bright plaid suits, in to see their boss. Mr. Shelton is terrified that their boss is going to kill him, despite their less than believable reassurances that, no, he's not. He just wants to talk to you. It's noted that no one has ever even seen their boss. He's simply called Junior, alive, not even the twin goons that are in his employ. They put blindfolds on Mr. Shelton. They put blindfolds on themselves, rather, as Mr. Shelton is preparing to meet with him.
So Mr. Sheldon finds himself in a room with a large chest in the very center, and there's an old rotary phone and a notepad on a stool next to it. A voice from inside this chest slash crate thing accuses Mr. Sheldon of helping someone steal something from him. Mr. Sheldon pleads for his life as a hand reaches out from the chest and grabs him by the ponytail.
Another hand grabs his face, and Mr. Shelton's given a choice, his life or the lives of his wife and daughters. Either they die or he dies. Mr. Shelton chooses to live, and that they should be the ones to die. Real heroic. Despite this, he's actually pulled into the chest and devoured.
We cut to Deadshot and Catman now. This is in a different part of town, perhaps. They're driving. Catman's telling Deadshot that something bad had happened to him while he was vacationing or off over in Africa. And we quickly cut to some quick images of a very naked Catman holding two bloody knives surrounded by several dead bodies. Deadshot isn't too sympathetic to Catman's quandary, stating that people die all the time.
They stop at a convenience store for some ice cream while it's in the process of being robbed. The robbers think that they've got to drop on the two men who just ignore them and continue discussing Catman's recent moral values. Back in the basement of the bear trap, a few hours later, Junior's finished with Mr. Shelton. He orders his guys to get a new crate and some cleaning supplies. He also gives him instructions, you know, what to do with the remaining parts of Mr. Shelton and deliver a message to the family, essentially. Junior also states that he knows where the woman who stole an object from him is going to be and that it'll be six individuals transporting her.
We don't know how he knows this at this point in time, other than we allude this to something he'd learned from devouring Mr. Shelton or whatever he did to Mr. Shelton. Back at the convenience store, the crooks are still trying to get the attention of the two men, even threatening to kill a woman that one's holding at gunpoint. Deadshot blames Catman's conundrum on his infatuation with the Huntress. We then cut to the Secret Six's mansion, which is appropriately called the House of Secrets, where Bane and Ragdoll are trying to get Scandal Savage out of bed after a pretty severe bender. She is taking the death of her girlfriend very hard.
We then cut back to the convenience store where Deadshot finally acknowledges the robbers. He elbows one in the face while taking his gun and then slamming the guy's head through a glass countertop. He's going to show the other would-be bad guys how it's done by actually robbing the place himself. So he takes the cash, he steals some cigarettes. As they exit, Catman admits to thinking about going straight. And Deadshot doesn't believe it because that means he'd either have to kill him or he just left defenseless witnesses in the store with a gang of humiliated, you know, armed bad guys still. So before the...
Before the bad guys can do any harm to the witnesses in the store, Catman rushes back in with his razor-sharp cat claws ready to strike. There are these cool brass knuckle things with little blades on them. Deadshot sarcastically remarks from the parking lot that the Justice League ought to be calling him any moment now. Later on at the House of Secrets, Deadshot continues to berate Catman about his acts of heroism. The team does get Scandal up and ready to celebrate. It's her birthday.
A woman dressed like and looks very much like her dead girlfriend, Knockout, pops out of a giant cake like the Miss July from Under Siege. You remember that fantastic scene? Oh, yeah. Bane, which is weird to see Bane would be sort of the voice of reason. He notes that this does not seem morally defensible, which Deadshot agrees with. They plop a scandal into a chair for a lap dance. The drunken scandal begins seeing and talking to her, Knockout, in her delusions.
In those delusions, Knockout gives her the okay to find comfort in this imitator. But Scandal pushes the dancer away. Deadshot is sure she's going to kill them for this. Instead, she acknowledges that they're all idiots and tells them that they've got a briefing. So they head down to the briefing room where Scandal tells them of the mission that they were hired for, and that is to break a character called Tarantula out of Alcatraz. Alcatraz is now a metahuman prison, and they're going to transport Tarantula across the country from San Francisco to Gotham.
She also mentions a new member will be joining them at a checkpoint in Vegas. Catman is interrupted by a phone call, and he steps out to take it. It's the Huntress. The Huntress warns him that he cannot take that mission. He's not sure how she even knows about it, because he literally just learned about it, but she continues to warn that a bounty has been placed on their heads for $10 million each, and she warns that everyone wants in on that payday. And also, the bat knows, is what she tells him. She hangs up the call, revealing that she actually made it on behalf of the bat. Batman is perched behind her, and he states, A bloodbath is coming, Huntress. What's on that card means that none of us are getting out of this with clean hands. Least of all, Thomas Blake. That's Catman's name.
And that's the end of the issue. That's where we leave off. And then the next issue is sort of a Catman versus Batman type showdown that takes place. Before we talk about kind of the thoughts on the issue, I want to real quickly run down through some of these characters because were a lot of these characters new for you? A few of them were. Of course, I know about Deadshot. I heard briefly about Huntress. A couple of other names were mentioned. Bane, of course. Everyone knows who Bane is. But yeah, Catman was kind of a surprise one for me. Yeah. He was a surprise for me when I first met him way back in that Villains United book. So Thomas Blake is Catman, as I mentioned. He debuted back in Detective Comics 311 back in 1963. Oh, wow. So he's not a new character by any means, but I don't know if D-list would even have been an appropriate...
level for him. He did serve mostly as a Batman villain and also in Green Arrow. But there in Green Arrow he was shown as more of like kind of a luckless, overweight guy and he was like clean to pass glories. And it wasn't really until Gail Simone took the character and turned him into this anti-hero of sorts. And this is really when I learned of him and kind of when I became a huge fan of him as a character because he's badass. Right.
He's Catman, and that's so stupid, but I love everything about it. I mean, the brass knuckle claw things are pretty cool. Yeah, those are dope. Yeah, and that'll mess your day up. Yeah. We then have Deadshot, or Floyd Lawton. So he first appeared in 1950 back in Batman 59. So again, he's been around for a very long time. He's an expert assassin favoring wrist-mounted machine guns. Another, you know, quote-unquote anti-hero. He's been a major player in the Suicide Squad and was even depicted by Will Smith in that horrendous first Suicide Squad movie.
Then you've got Ragdoll, who is a very creepy villain slash anti-hero. Now, Ragdoll, and you don't really see it much in this first issue, but he's had all of his biological joints replaced by artificial ones that allow him to bend and contort into superhuman ways. So he had first appeared in that Villains United miniseries that I mentioned. He can move and get himself in all twisted kinds of shapes, and it's really unsettling. Between the way that he can move and his speech patterns, he's a very unsettling character. He's scary. You then got Bane. Now that's, of course, the man who broke Batman's back.
right uh in the nightfall storyline he offers up some alternative points of view uh on the subject of love in this which again i think is kind of very funny for to see bane because i think what so many people are familiar with bane is like either from even like whether it's the animated cartoon a little bit where he didn't i don't think said much the batman and robin movie yeah uh where he's he's like the stereotypical like roided up jock yeah with poison ivy kind of you know pulling his strings i don't think he said much there either no um and so it's it's interesting to actually see bane as a character versus a prop see and my thing with bane is i've always seen him as more of a you know, yeah, he's the guy that, you know, takes venom, he's the guy that broke Batman's back, but he also has some very, very, like, calculating, very, like, level of intelligence to him. We do see a bit more of that in the Nolan Batman trilogy. We see a bit more of that. It still is not, I mean, there's still some things about that Bane I didn't care for, necessarily, but I think that was much closer to what I would want to see in a comic book page, which is a lot of the other previous.
versions. The last character I want to mention is Scandal Savage. She's the daughter of Vandal Savage, who is, he was, he's kind of like a, he's a caveman or a Neanderthal essentially, but he's also immortal. So he's been around for a very long time. And I think actually in like current DC continuity, if I'm not mistaken, he's the current mayor of Gotham. Sounds about right. Because comics. But Scandal's an expert in hand-to-hand combat. She's got some cool wrist-mounted blades. Despite her, you know, deep drunken depression that we see here, she's also the team's leader.
There's a lot of questions posed here with this issue. Who is Junior, aside from being pretty damn scary in his own right? Who's the one that hired them to retrieve Tarantula? And what was stolen, essentially? What was taken, and why is it so important that it does Batman's attention? This is where I really want your thoughts on this, because as I mentioned up front, this is...
A first issue of an ongoing series, but it is led up to by essentially two different miniseries, Village United and then a Secret Six miniseries. So based on that, what was your take on this? Well, of course, I didn't know any of that coming into it. So if this was a jumping off point for a brand new series without knowing any of that, I was intrigued by it. Two things that would want to hook me into this. One is Junior, because that's like...
I got to know more about this guy. Yeah. And the second one is the just the interaction between Catman and Deadshot. Yep. The whole scene in the convenience store, I thought was hilarious because all this chaos is going on and they're just having a conversation. And then finally, Deadshot's just kind of like, you know what? Let me show you how it's done. Yeah. And I love that part. I love the the dialogue in particular between the two of them is so natural in that I can see people actually speaking this way. Yeah. And it's not.
we'll see it in other comics and we see it all the time where it's very static. This is what I'm trying to say. I want to go straight. This is how I feel. But it's not that simple. There's more illusions that are giving. It's, hey, this is kind of how I'm feeling. I'm trying to internalize this. I'm trying to share a little bit with you, but you're an asshole. And so I don't know how much I can tell you, but I consider you my friend. And you really get a good sense of that dynamic between the two of them in the dialogue. And I think that that's fantastic. I also love scenes where I think especially a lot of less seasoned writers will do this where they...
when you are dropped into a scene, it is like the very beginning of that scene. It's the very beginning of that conversation. When in reality, if you're dropped into a scene, you might be in the middle of somebody's conversation. And you get a bit more of that with somebody like Galen. I mean that as a compliment because I love that style of storytelling. I just think it's much more naturalistic. It's much more realistic. And you get a lot of that even when you've got...
you know, outlandish characters like Ragdoll and Bane, just the way that they talk, it's done in such a way that it makes them feel very real. And so I think that that's fantastic. So, you know, I was familiar with most of these characters, you know, just based again on the Villains United miniseries. I quickly grew fond of all of them. Even, you know, Scandal became one of my favorite characters. I think she's awesome. Like I said, Catman quickly became one of my favorite characters. The friendship he has with Deadshot is great. Ragdoll is often portrayed as like comedic offense.
But he's still in a very unnerving way, like just the way that he talks. He's very unnerving. Bane, to me, other than, like I said, other than the Nolan movies, Bane was presented to be kind of in a new light here, just from like a comic book reading perspective, which I think is good. So in Scandal, when we see her here, she's at the very low point of her life. And I think it's very sympathetic to us as well. And again, not having read what had led up to it, you knew kind of what her issue was. You knew, now you may not have been, were you able to put together what was real and what was delusion to her with the dancer? Yeah, I think I, I think it was pretty like,
clear for the most part. Um, but yeah, I mean, I think the best way to, to gain sympathy for characters to show them in this, to show their tragedy and show them at their lowest point. And this does that very well. Like I knew nothing about the character beforehand and this makes me want to know more and like, you know, kind of gets another character more. Yeah. And like I was saying before, you know, one thing I really liked about this issue, um, the dialogue for each character is very distinct. I think so often again, whether it's, it's not even necessarily less seasoned writers, I think just writers in general so often have a tendency to
They're just simply writing themselves. So a lot of times the characters will all sound the exact same because that's how the writers write that one person writing. And I've never found that with Gail's writing. Like I think all of the characters that she's presented to us over the years, she's even with she's currently writing one of the X-Men titles now. But all the characters have a very distinct voice. And I think that that's really important.
So I think there's a lot of humor in the book, especially from the team throughout. The fact that they even thought it was a good idea to hire a stripper that looks just like Scandal's deceased girlfriend, the fact that they thought that was a good idea is hilarious to me. Nicholas Scott's artwork is superb. She's always churned out really good work. She did work on Birds of Prey, Wonder Woman, and Teen Titans. She's just a fantastic artist. I will say...
Like I said, I was really familiar with your thoughts on this. I like that we're introduced to this new mystery. You know, the previous stories around the team. it's interesting to see where they kind of go from, you know, we're introduced to them here kind of in this low point of a lot of their lives. And it's interesting to see where they go. One thing I will say is having read this entire series, which, you know, kind of we'll get into that in a moment as far as the rest of the story, because this thing ran for 36 issues. So it had a pretty decent, you know, in today's day and age, I think a pretty decent run. This title still remains one of my top, probably top three of all time favorite DC titles because it just gets better from this issue in my opinion.
When DC launched the new 52, there was a fourth volume by Gale, which featured an almost completely new lineup. Now, I wasn't interested in DC's rebooted universe, and so I had largely gotten out of comics at that time anyway, so I've not read any of that. These stories, so this series, this 36-issue run essentially, is available in a few different trades. There is an omnibus collecting their previous appearances plus the first 14 issues of this series. And so there is some, if you don't want to collect the singles, there are ways that you can go out and read this. It's even probably on the DC app at this point if someone who reads comics digitally. I'm not one of those people, but if you're one of those, you can probably find it there as well. Anything else that you want to add to this series as we wrap up? I will say I'm surprised that Deadshot's been around for as long as he has. My first exposure to him was in...
I want to say it was either in Suicide Squad or in Injustice 2. Okay, yeah. So pretty recently. Yep. Right. But I've always liked the character of Deadshot because he always kind of seemed like, you know, he almost like Taskmaster, which we talked about in our last episode. He does bad things, but he does it for money. So he's not necessarily a bad person. He's just kind of, you know, going with the flow. And this is, you know, I'm not the biggest DC fan. I'll be the first to admit that. But this is one I definitely pick up. Yeah, I highly recommend this series. With, speaking of Deadshot real quick, because it made me think of this, a lot of these characters, not...
Well, not Catman and not some of the newer characters, obviously, but a character like Deadshot, where I first learned of a lot of these characters, just like with a lot of the Marvel characters I learned about it, was the DC trading cards and how cool he looked. And the trading card showed on the back of it his wrist-mounted machine guns. And I thought that was just like, you know, 11 or 12-year-old me thought that was the coolest thing ever. And he had the mask that had kind of the one... The one eye with the crosshair? Yeah, the crosshair. That was sweet. Sweet design. So yeah, that's where I learned about that character. But yeah, I highly recommend the series. If anyone out there hasn't read it, definitely check it out. It's, like I said, one of my top favorite DC series of all time.
Well, thank you again for joining us. I really appreciate it. Be sure to like, subscribe, check out the rest of the Field of Geeks Network's shows. Follow us on Facebook at The Number One Comics Podcast. Feel free to send us an email at the numberonecomicpodcast at gmail.com. And as always, we appreciate it and look forward to seeing you next time. So thanks, Bill, for joining me. Yeah, no problem. And we'll talk to you guys soon. Take care.