Major Suicide Squad Character Returns

Just two issues into the “hope and optimism” DC Rebirth era, the Suicide Squad lost one of its longest-running members as General Zod reappeared and blasted Captain Boomerang into pieces.

At the time, we speculated that it was possible Harkness had been “transported somewhere,” since it’s not as though comic book deaths are always all they’re cracked up to be — and we were right.

Ultimately the key to defeating Zod — seemingly shorting out his brain — was to “hack” him using Captain Boomerang, whose consciousness had been trapped inside of the computers at Belle Reve.

It’s arguably not all that surprising for Boomerang to make his way back to the land of the living — he appears on the cover of The Flash in March, as we revealed earlier today.

Digger Harkness had been with the Suicide Squad from the very beginning, and when we spoke to him recently, Squad legend John Ostrander referred to Boomerang as one of the team’s ‘unholy trinity,’ along with Waller and Deadshot. Killing him off early in the new run not only shook the team to its core, but on a narrative level, it re-established that Ostrander-era feeling that anything can happen and anyone is fair game. It’s debatable whether that feeling remains in place now that it turns out he’s not quite as dead as promised.

This isn’t the first big Rebirth death to turn out to be a little less “dead” than previously expected: around the same time Boomerang bit the dust, Krypto — Superboy’s dog — was seemingly consumed by the energy-based villain known as The Eradicator. When The Eradicator was defeated, Superman and Superboy were able to retrieve Krypto from his stasis.

The next issue of Suicide Squad will tie in with the big Justice League vs. Suicide Squad storyline — for which today’s issue of Squad has a pretty big spoiler in the back pages.

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