3. Secret Six: Unhinged
Do you know what my favorite episodes of every superhero cartoon were? The ones where the villains realize that if they pool their resources, they could kill their shared nemesis by just bum-rushing him. Usually this doesn’t work, oftentimes due to internal bickering or a Deus Ex Machina device that separates the sinister team-up forever. Gail Simone and Nicola Scott take the super villain team up trope one step further with Secret Six. This is the story of six B-list super-villain strangers, picked to live in a mansion and have their missions followed, to find out what happens when rogues stop being evil — and start getting badass. The Secret Six is essentially The Real World of the DC Universe, however instead of the bootless banter of troglodyte coeds, you get wrist-mounted handguns and a talking bipedal shark that calls himself King Shark.
While the other tales on this list feature recognizable characters, Secret Six banks off of the lesser-known foes of the DC universe, proof that you don’t need a bat in your name to be interesting. That being said, Secret Six’s field leader is The Cat Man, which is exactly what it sounds like– a guy in a feline themed Batman costume, but an internally-conflicted badass guy at that. Cat Man is supplicated by recovering venom-addict Batman-back-breaker Bane, walking trigger finger Deadshot, gothic Lolita banshee Jeannette, nigh-immortal daughter of a caveman Scandal Savage, and the comic-relief triple-jointed Ragdoll, who is a cross between Gollum and Glenn Quagmire. Though the sobriquets might be unrecognizable at first, I assure you that reading just one issue of this dysfunctional team turns them into instant household names.
In Unhinged, the Secret Six are tasked with recovering a magical demonic artifact that is a spiritual Carte Blanche — a “get out of Hell free” card. Though some members of the team doubt the existence of the afterlife — somewhat absurd given how commonplace resurrection is in comicdom — while other team members secretly pine for it themselves, the theological debate between the Secret Six is put on hold as a twenty million dollar bounty has been placed on the head of each team member (netting a cool 120 million USD for the entire team), garnering the attention of nearly every antagonist ever, from Wonder Woman nemesis Cheetah, the aforementioned bipedal shark King Shark, to a new incarnation of The Crazy Quilt (a batman villain whose “power” is seeing colors so bright they made him crazy), resulting in the rarely seen super-villain team-up versus super-villain army, whose aim to kill the team or simply snatch up the card for themselves.
No doubt if given the original animated movie treatment, Secret Six: Unhinged could give more life to these D-list villainous antagonists in addition to letting the perfectly crafted personalities of these six villainous protagonists shine as they battle the horde of DC’s obscure rogue gallery in a stolen ice cream truck. Yeah, the most recognizable character in it is Bane, likely sans The Dark Knight Rises’ Romani accent, but in a world where someone thought it was necessary to make Superman vs. The Elite, which was based on what is essentially a big F-you to Mark Miller’s The Authority, perhaps shifting the spotlight isn’t such a bad idea.
If you can’t figure it out, I’m a fan of King Shark
