Secret Origins 28 (1988) Nightshade and Task Force X

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This weekend I found this issue in a $1 box and even though it wasn't something I was hunting for it turned out to be a good grab. The issue opens up at Belle Reve with Nightshade talking to father Craemer and basically giving him her life's story starting with her childhood leading all the way up through the events of Suicide Squad 1 - 13. As some of you may know Nightshade is the daughter of a fugitive princess from "The Land of Nightshades" who ended up marrying some up and coming politician who is Nightshade's father. And as we see here Nightshade joined the Squad as an eventual means to an end for some personal matters.

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As far as I know Nightshade never hooked up with either Flag or Nemesis. Like she said here Flag took the Squad way too seriously and Nemisis, . . . well even though she did feel something for him too he was just that "nice guy" and we all know how that goes.

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On the other hand I'm pretty sure she did hook up with Captain Atom given their long history together even though some where along the lines he was also tapping Plastique's ass. But can you blame him I bet that French Canadian action must have been . . .explosive. Captain Atom may be "Nobody's favorite super hero" but at least he gets plenty of tail.

As you can see from the footnote here this story concludes with a lead in to Suicide Squad issues 14-16 which was the Nightshade Odyssey story line in which Nightshade would finally get to use The Squad on the before mentioned personal mission. Interesting enough upon reviewing those issues I now see that there is a footnote for Secret Origins 28 in Suicide Squad 15.

Finally, some newly discovered fan art

Free Comic Book Day was a bust. I didn't see anything that was of any interest to me all the free comics were crap and they were using the back issue bin area for more space so I wasn't able to do my usual foraging there for cool old school shit. Oh well, at least I have some newly found fan art which this blog has been devoid of for a little while now. First up is some classic Nightshade by Brendon Fraim.

Did you know that Nightshade, Peacemaker, Sergeant Steele, Blue Beetle, Judo Master, Captain Atom and The Question were all originally characters from another publishing company that no longer exists called Charlton Comics? Most of you probably did know that already but for the few who don't I thought you might have found that interesting. DC at some point bought the rights to the characters and integrated them into the DC Universe.
Nightshade pretty much became synonymous with both Captain Atom (the DC title of course) and The Suicide Squad. Peacemaker and Sergeant Steele made multiple appearances in both the Suicide Squad and Checkmate (both volumes). So I'm diggin Peacemaker re-design concept but I'm also looking to get some feed back on it from you good people. If you need a quick reference to his costume design as it was in the old DCU: http://suicidesquadtaskforcex.blogspot.com/2012/06/impel-trading-cards-series-task-force-x_21.html

Peacmaker re-design concept by Joe Singleton

You're not afraid of the dark are you?

I'm hesitant to call this sketch art because it has a very finished look to it. However you want to characterize it this is pretty damn awesome fan art by however the unknown artist is. It's pretty much what I would consider to be a perfect drawing and I like the whole "bad ass ninja" like quality to Nightshade in it. Yet another under rated character from the old DCU that we have yet to see in the relaunch.

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 Well I just recently discovered that this 5 issue Hawk & Dove mini-series (1997-1998) featured both the Suicide Squad and Checkmate as a running story line through out the series. I gotta say I did an internet search to see what kind of information and art work I could dig up on it and none of the covers looked even remotely familiar to me as anything I may have seen before.
I did an ebay search and saw that the complete set had just sold for only $8 total with shipping and handling. Damn! that's not much more then I would have paid finding them all in $1 bins at the same time and what are the odds of that? Oh well, ya never know what the future holds I tend to get lucky with these sort of things. But in the mean time here's some links to some of the pages from the mini-series:

  http://www.comicartfans.com/sketchbookPiece.asp?Piece=618474
 http://www.comicartfans.com/sketchbookPiece.asp?Piece=618473
 http://www.comicartfans.com/GalleryPiece.asp?Piece=663439&GSub=101906

January 18 update: Hawk & Dove #4 review with plenty of clip art available here: http://thebronzetiger.blogspot.com/2013/01/checkmate-vs-suicide-squad.html