Secret Six: The Darkest House by Gail Simone and J. Calafiore (graphic novel review).
Secret Six: The Darkest House is essentially a duplicate of part of the later fourth collected volume, reprinting Secret Six #30-36 and Doom Patrol #19. If you’re after the Doom Patrol crossover and the end of Gail Simone’s original Secret Six run, this is probably easier and cheaper to get than the later fourth volume, which tends to be a lot harder to find. Such is the strange archaeology of collected comics, where the same bones keep turning up in different boxes.
These issues bring Simone’s band of damaged villains, mercenaries and moral escapees towards their final reckoning. The team’s appeal was always that they were not quite heroes and not quite monsters, although several of them were clearly applying for both jobs. Catman, Deadshot, Scandal Savage, Bane, Rag Doll and the rest had become one of DC’s odder little families, which naturally meant betrayal, violence, grudges and emotional trauma rather than Sunday lunch.
The Doom Patrol material fits better than you might expect. Both teams live at the stranger end of the DC Universe, where being broken is practically a membership requirement. In the middle of it all, there is the lingering business of the “Get Out Of Hell Free” card, a plot device from earlier in the series that finally gets its due. If you haven’t read the earlier volumes, some of the emotional weight may go over your head, but the momentum is still there.
What makes this final stretch work is Simone’s ability to make horrible people matter without pretending they are secretly cuddly. Bane, in particular, is used with more intelligence and melancholy than usual, becoming something more interesting than just Batman’s back-breaker with a gym membership. The rest of the team are also given their moments, even when they are doing terrible things for reasons that only just scrape against nobility.
Just to prove I didn’t merely scan it, the indicia appears to give Suicide Roulette two second parts here. Whether that is a printing oddity, an editorial hiccup or a small cry for help from the production department, I leave to DC historians with stronger magnifying glasses than mine.
As a closing volume, The Darkest House does what it needs to do. It gives the Secret Six a suitably bruised send-off, full of violence, damaged loyalty and the sort of black humour that made this run stand out from DC’s more polished team books. If you’ve followed Simone’s series this far, this is not optional. If you haven’t, start earlier. These people are bad company, but they reward commitment.
GF Willmetts
June 2026
(pub: DC Comics, 2011. 176-page graphic novel softcover. Price: varies. ISBN: 978-1-4012-3362-4).
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