Listen, if you didn't like it, you're right for you. But I not only loved Suicide Squad for what it is, but I also love it for the experience it gave me, and for the almost out-of-body time-travel experience while watching it with my 14 year old daughter. Bear with me, this post does come around to the novelization. I promise.
As a DC geek the idea of a Suicide Squad movie with the likes of Deadshot, Harley Quinn, and Killer Croc among others had me at 'Harley Quinn.' I have been excited for this movie since day one. My daughter is also a geek like her daddy, so she pretty much gets excited about the same things I do and we try to see all the superhero and Star Wars and similar movies together (yes, I sat through Divergent.) But my daughter doesn't live with me full time, so often we don't see a movie together on it's opening night, or one of us may have seen it already when we get the chance to see it together a week or so after it's released, or we rent it. Fortunately our summer schedule worked out so that we were able to see Suicide Squad on it's premiere date, so we got tickets for the first showing on Thursday night.
We were both excited to see it and that was great, but as the release date approached I watched something happen to my daughter that pulled me back to when I was 14 and Burton's Batman hit theatres.
Before Batman was released in '89, I knew about Batman and superheroes and comics and all that stuff, but I wasn't a Batman fanatic yet. Then I saw the movie (an imperfect movie too) and it changed my life. Big words I know but hey, it's 2016 and I'm 41 and I'm writing on a blog that's devoted to toys that are mostly Batman themed and about to tell you about the Suicide Squad novelization so...yeah. you could say it had an impact on me.
Anyways, in '89 as the Batman movie approached I read about it in movie magazines and bought merchandise and comics and the novelization and had high hopes for the movie. I saw it about 9 times in all in the theatre by the end of that summer, and the rest is history.
Back to 2016 - as Suicide Squad approached, my daughter, very familiar with all the characters from years of cartoons and comics exposure but not a fanatic for any of them, began to focus her fandom on Katana. She started asking about Katana toys, she got a Katana Funko POP, she wants to be Katana for Halloween, she re-read a bunch of our comics that star Katana, she drew pictures of Katana. I watched as she went from someone who just thinks this stuff is cool to a real Katana fanatic. And it was like looking in a time-mirror. I saw me at 14, and how incredibly cool it was to see Batman brought to life on the big screen, 'real' and 'serious' and blockbuster sized! Suddenly it's 2016 and here is my daughter getting to see Katana as no one has ever seen her before and she's as excited as any proto-geek finding their idol.
It's a moment that we all had at least once, and maybe we remember and maybe we forgot, but how often does one get to have an almost out of body experience and see it from the perspective of our older self as if we are watching our younger self as it happens, again, for the first time? I suppose being a parent means this type of thing can and maybe will happen and can take many different forms, but here it was happening in correlation to the Suicide Squad and of all things, Katana.
So to cut to the chase, we saw the movie, my daughter loved it, I loved it, Katana was awesome and I'm so happy for the experience we were able to share over a silly superhero(villain) movie.
And now to the point of the post: The Suicide Squad novelization. My daughter and I were talking a few days before the movie about how it was 'in my day.' In my day, we didn't get the DVD/BLU-Ray three weeks after the movie hit theatres, or get to watch clips online, or get to buy merchandise off eBay until we were drowning in it ten minutes after a movie was announced, or even have an internet for that matter. We had to wait until a store stocked something, anything, if it stocked anything at all. We read movie magazines and stared at little black and white behind the scenes photos for hours. We might have had a poster, or a newspaper clipping taped to our wall. If we were lucky there was an action figure line and maybe it made it through one release of five figures and a vehicle. And we had to wait months if not years to rent a VHS to see the movie again (if we're not talking about the pre-VHS days, which was also 'in my day.')
And we had novelizations. THAT'S how we revisited our favorite movies in my day!
Not only did we revisit movies through their novelizations, but due to publishing/editing/release schedules, sometimes we'd get a super cool exclusive scene or two in our book that never made it on to the movie screen. Novelizations were the 'director's cut' or 'extended version' of our childhoods. AND WE LIKED IT!
My daughter got excited about the idea of reading a novelization of Suicide Squad. So naturally, we hopped online (hey, it's 2016, not 1989!) and found out a novelization for Suicide Squad did indeed exist...but wasn't set to release until the Tuesday after the move came out!
Tuesday finally arrived, and my daughter is spending this week with her grandparents (my parents) and thankfully, since they are my parents, they know how important this kind of thing is. So when the book came out my Mom called around and they traversed three cities to find a copy (FYI: In 2016 it isn't as easy to get a movie novelization at a physical store as it was in 1989. Hell, for that matter it isn't as easy to find a damn bookstore in 2016 as it was in 1989!). In the meantime I called my local bookstore and they brought in a copy for me as well. My daughter is now about twenty chapters in and I'm about ten (hey, I have to work!) and it's already delivered on the extra scenes, AND it's written by Marv Wolfman!
The last time I bought a new movie novelization was in 1989. I was 14 and the novelization was for the Batman movie. It's 2016, I'm 41, my daughter is 14, and we're both reading the Suicide Squad novelization. Who says you can never go back?
I still have to see it.
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