Some thoughts about Secret Six #1

Who are the Secret Six and what do their organization want from them?

Thomas Blake along with a bunch of strange individuals have been kidnapped by a mysterious group of agents to be part of something that they can't even imagine.

First of all, let's explore a bit of the background of this series and why is so important for some fans including myself. The last incarnation of the Secret Six was created by Gail Simone in the miniseries Villains United and they proved to be popular enough to receive their own miniseries and later a proper ongoing.

There is no doubt that their last book was one of the best series from DC Comics at the time. Simone explored several interesting themes about good and evil along with some really memorable characters and a twisted sense of humour which gained a lot of praise from both critics and audience. I guess you would understand why people have high expectations about this one, so after all the anticipation does this issue delivers?

Well, let's focus on the positives first shall we?

Catman returns to this series and this is a pretty correct decision since he's easily the character who represents most of the last incarnation based on how Simone recreated him from scratch to become a badass antihero. Now, there's more about Thomas Blake than meets the eye apparently since he seems to have a huge problem with being caught and it looks like he's developing some metahuman abilities.

Oh, and he's also apparently bisexual but that's something that was expected.

The rest of the cast are some old favorites from the writer like Strix, The Ventriloquist and Black Alice. There are some newcomers too and all of them have interesting abilities.

The humour is pure Simone as one would imagine, with a really dark tone.

The problem is that I don't feel that the story progressed much in this issue. Sure, we know some of the characters but not enough to make us invested on them, at least not yet, in fact some of them just had a few lines explaining who they are. There's not really much plot either, we still don't know why they were captured nor by whom and overall you feel like the issue was over a bit too quickly.

About the artwork, Ken Lashley is in charge of the pencils and his style is quite appropriate. He's able to depict a very creepy and suspenseful atmosphere as well as really beautiful character models.

In summary, I think this is still a decent beginning but there's a lot of room for improvement and hopefully it will happen in upcoming issues.