Comic Book Trivia - The Suicide Squad. According to the generally accepted chronology,
Featured in The Brave and the Bold, the original Suicide Squad team included Rick Flag Jr., his girlfriend Karen Grace, Dr. Hugh Evans and Jess Bright. This team was created by writer Robert Kanigher and artist Ross Andru.
Well, it happens that in 1939
Henry Kuttner wrote a story called Suicide Squad for the magazine '
Thrilling Wonder Stories.'
Now, during the 40s and 50's,
Otto Binder, Edmond Hamilton and Mort Weisinger all worked for DC as writers and Editors, and all three also wrote for the SF market
They would all have known Henry Kuttner, some of them likely knew him personally. They also got a lot of ideas from the Science Fiction magazines. So I'm going to postulate that one or more of them gave the name to Kanigher and he created the genesis of DC's Suicide Squad.
Pity they didn't use Kuttner's original concept, and if you are a creator, its still out there and unused, so you could find it a new name.
Nobody ever comes out of the Suicide Squad alive, you see. I?ll explain. ?Way back in the thirties, when Oberth and Goddard were fooling around with rocket fuels, they were making motion pictures and using air-planes in them. And, to give the audience a thrill, the studios hired stunt flyers to perform aerial gymnastics.
Ever so often one of the stunt men would wash up, because airplanes had a habit of hitting the ground unexpectedly?and hard.
The old-style planes, with their rudders, ailerons, and props, went out when practicable rocket fuels were discovered. But the motion pictures went on. Audiences still wanted thrills, and the studios began to use rockets instead of planes in their air and interplanetary stuff.
At first they stuck to models. That had worked well enough with the old-type planes, with montage, double exposures, and stereoscopic effects; but you can?t make model rockets convincing. Not with the tremendous drive they?ve got in their jets. All hell is bottled up in those reinforced liquid-fuel tanks, and you can do things with rockets you never could have done with a plane.
I?ve seen films that would lift the hair right off your head. Nerve-cracking shots of space-stunting that made me shudder when I thought of the poor devils in the piloting seats. Men are only flesh and blood?even the desperate, tough babies who are the only ones who?ll join the Suicide Squad?the space-stunters. And it?s flesh and blood pitted against? Power!
Can't you just see Jack Kirby's version?
Cheers!
