Suicide Squad. Trial by fire / John Ostrander, writer ; Luke McDonnell, Bob Lewis, Karl Kesel, Dave Hunt, artists ; Carl Gafford, colorist ; Todd Klein, Albert DeGuzman, letterers ; cover art by Luke McDonnell, Karl Kesel.

Contains material originally published in magazine form as Suicide Squad (1987) #1-8 and Secret Origins (1986) #14.

"Task Force X, a secret government program designed to neutralize super-powered threats, has gone through many transformations since it was first created during World War II, but one thing has never changed: its members call themselves the Suicide Squad, and they live up to their name. Faced with a rising tide of meta-human crime and terror, the program’s hard-headed director Amanda Waller sold the president on her vision of an updated Task Force X: a covert action team composed of incarcerated super-villains who earned time off their sentences for every mission they completed. Deniable, disposable, and deployable to any spot on Earth, this new Suicide Squad would be the perfect weapon on last resort—as long as they could be kept under control"—Back cover.