John Ostrander: Suicide Squad Rogues

John Ostrander

John Ostrander started his career as a professional writer as a playwright. His best known effort, Bloody Bess, was directed by Stuart Gordon, and starred Dennis Franz, Joe Mantegna, William J. Norris, Meshach Taylor and Joe Mantegna. He has written some of the most important influential comic books of the past 25 years, including Batman, The Spectre, Manhunter, Firestorm, Hawkman, Suicide Squad, Wasteland, X-Men, and The Punisher, as well as Star Wars comics for Dark Horse. New episodes of his creator-owned series, GrimJack, which was first published by First Comics in the 1980s, appear every week on ComicMix.

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6 Responses

  1. demoncat_4 says:

    nice to hear sucide squad is getting some reprinting love from dc. for loved yours and gales run including turning barbara to oracle. as the storyline with flag and Toliver. if i remember right when spoilers when Amanda was asking why deadshot did what he did . deadshots words to amanda was you said to stop flag by any means nessasary which to deadshot ment even resort to shooting flag and toliver. amanda’s learning that deadshot is not playing with full deck any more. plus always wonder if punch and Jewlee were created because dc would not let you and kim have the joker and Harley quin as members. since other bat rogues were on the squad. going to have to pick up the trade .

    • Well, Punch and Jewlee were around quite a while before Harley was a twinkle in anyone’s eyes.

    • mike weber says:

      Steve Ditko created Punch and Jewellee in the original “Captain Atom” book at Charlton. Well, the second run’ 1965 -67.

      I thought the Toonopedia {http://toonopedia.com} might list them, but apparently Don never got ’round to them before his death; i wanted to see if Dick Giordano had a hand in them.

      {For your further edifications and amazement, all of the characters in “Watchmen” are based on characters DC got when they bought all the rights to Charlton’s line after Charlton went Tango Uniform in 1967.

      {Dr Manhattan is, indeed Captain Atom, Silk Spectre is Nightshade’ Night Owl is the Blue Beetle and Rorschach is the Question, but crazier than the Question ever was – all characters wholly or in great part created by Steve Ditko.

      {And the only one DC ever did even halfway right was the Blue Beetle … and they wound up killing him.}

      • Dave Phelps says:

        Also worth noting that Harley didn’t exist yet when Jewelee joined the team. SS #24 was cover dated Feb 89, which means it was probably out near the end of 1988. Harley made her debut in Batman: The Animated Series around 1992 and wasn’t imported into the DCU until 1999.

  2. Mindy Newell says:

    Reading your column…I can picture Kimmy giving you joy and grief! :-)

  3. Mindy Newell says:

    Oh, btw, John, yesterday I was at the Turtleback Zoo (in NJ) with Alix and little Meyer and I heard a father call out to his daughter, “Harley, where’re you going?” as a little girl ran down the path.

    I wondered if he was a comic book reader and if he and his wife had named their daughter after Harley Quinn.

    Just saying.