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Post by DocQuantum on Jun 30, 2019 2:34:07 GMT
The Suicide Squad
The Profit of War
by Bejammin2000, Christine Nightstar, and Doc Quantum
Arms manufacturer Darius Helstrom has profited from numerous civil wars and military coups in countries across the globe! When Commander Steel suspects that Helstrom is also behind the theft of a top-secret biological weapon he plans to sell to the highest bidder, he is forced to work with his counterpart in the Bureau of Special Projects, which means placing a new, untested super-agent in the Suicide Squad! But who is the sinister figure manipulating events from afar, and what connection does he have to the past? Introducing Mister Marvel, and reintroducing Deadshot’s grandsons, the Trigger Twins!
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Post by DocQuantum on Jun 30, 2019 2:49:07 GMT
It took a lot of work to get this done! So many edits (50+) and rewrites, and even whole passages cut to focus on the core story better. I’m not sure it entirely hangs together that well, but I’m proud of the final result.
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Post by jonclark on Jun 30, 2019 5:45:39 GMT
It was an interesting tale indeed.
Since it was destroyed I can live with the Maguffin bio-weapon, though I've never like super=weapons that have blanket effects especially ones that affect Kryptonians and meta equally. Were we supposed to know who that third person was- the one who died from exposure so they could develop the antidote years ago?
Loved seeing Mister Marvel, even if I wished he could have had some redeeming moment rather than seeming like something tacked on the a Suicide Squad tale as an after thought, It really seemed like if you eliminated the ties between Barton and Miodwarp you could have cut Barton, Stanley and their whole Bureau out of the tale and lost nothing. It's probably the result of having to edit out other portions but thoer role felt a bit too tacked on with the family connection being used to justify their inclusion rather than actually adding something to the events
The final fate of Mindwarp seemed a bit suspicious as I'm not sure if I'm supposed to take the assumptions of what happened to him at face value. Any idea if this thread will come back somewhere?
Your editing skills and effort are appreciated, despite my nit picking comments. Lord knows we don't need this site counting down to some rebirth. Much better to have people putting in an effort to make the past tales work for the continuity,
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Post by DocQuantum on Jun 30, 2019 7:28:03 GMT
Thanks for your insightful comments, Jon. Yes, I admit Mister Marvel was sort of tacked on. One of the reasons it took me so long to edit it was that I only realized quite recently that I needed to remove a lot of the scenes that I'd added in to this story. Those scenes that were left on the cutting room floor should really only appear in the flashback portion of the Mister Marvel/Miss Terrific story that I'm working on, since they're focused more on Mister Marvel. I debated with myself how much of it I should cut and how much I should leave in, and finally settled on a bit of middle ground, just enough to "introduce" the character on the timeline, but not every single moment needed to be there.
I should mention that this story began as three separate efforts:
First, the original unfinished "Profit of War" story by Bejammin2000, whose author had abandoned the story, and it needed to be completed and fleshed out a bit more, since it was mostly just a showcase of the Trigger Twins and their battle against HellCorps.
Second, a team-up story by Christine Nightstar that teams up Commander Steel's Suicide Squad and a group that the author created called C.R.I.M.E. starring Stretch O'Brien. Now, the story was really rough, but had a general structure to it that I thought was worth preserving, even if I didn't think Stretch was being used very well. This was the bio-weapon/Mindwarp story.
Third, I wanted Stanley Beamish/Mister Marvel to have a history with Commander Steel and the Suicide Squad, as seen in flashbacks from the Mister Marvel/Miss Terrific story.
I originally tried to shoehorn MM in to the existing unfinished Suicide Squad story by Bejammin, but it was still too thin a story to work all that well. And I figured it would be better to finish Bejammin's story and get it published before I went back to the main MM story. Famous last words...
Anyway, long story short, I decided to combine the above two stories along with my Mister Marvel/Indigo scenes and finish it.
But as I mention above, I was never really satisfied with it and spent a lot of time editing, but only lately took out a lot of the Mister Marvel scenes that I'd originally included, since they belonged more in the flashbacks in the main MM story. Yes, Stanley Beamish still seems a bit shoehorned in, but hopefully not as much as he was in the original effort back in 2016.
I do plan on rewriting the first C.R.I.M.E. story as well, and it will also feature Mister Marvel in a bigger role, as well as the Minstrel (nephew of Molly Maynne Scott, the original Harlequin) but I haven't figured out how much of a Suicide Squad story it should be. I really would like to focus on some of the Helix members who got short-shrifted in this story, and catch up with them a bit more, as well as a few others. I'm just not sure how long it would take to flesh it out.
P.S. The final fate of Mindwarp and/or Arnax is completely left up in the air. If another writer has a good angle on the character and wants to bring him back, they're welcome to do so. But they might just never appear again.
As for the agent who died back in the 1960s, that's something I hope will be explored at some point, though at this time I haven't thought much about it. I think it would be cool to see how different Operation Liberty has been over the decades, since it's been around since World War II and continues to this day. But the actual name of the Suicide Squad is technically new as of 1985/1986 on Earth-2. Commander Steel's own history is murky, since we don't really know how many times he traveled from Earth-1 to Earth-2 and vice versa, only that he apparently acted as a liaison for the U.S. governments of two Earths. (Sounds a bit like that TV show, Counterpart, which has a similar premise.) I'd really love to see that explored a bit more, as well as see what events in his past made him into the ruthless spymaster he is today, but I may not be the right writer to do that.
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