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As a result of the New 52 in 2011, the entire line of DC characters was relaunched, incorporating properties belonging to the company's imprints: Wildstorm, Milestone, and Vertigo. As such, elements of this character's history have been altered in some way from the previous incarnation. For a complete list of all versions of this character, see our disambiguation page. |
- Good guys. Bad guys. Whatever they are, they are all just one thing to me: assets.
- ā Amanda Waller src
Amanda Waller is a U.S. Government agent renowned for her brutal methods and ruthless approach. She was director of the government agency A.R.G.U.S. but still maintains her leadership over Task Force X, otherwise known as the Suicide Squad.
History
Early Life
At some point, Amanda married Joseph Waller and they had a large family together. They originally had five children; Joe, Jr., Damita, the twins Martin and Jessie, and Coretta. Their lives were a financial struggle, but they were happy together, until Damita and Joseph were killed. So Amanda swore that the streets would take no more of her family and began working hard to put all of her other children through college, then she put herself through college and earned a political science degree.[3][4][5]
New 52
Team 7
During the Parademon invasion which led to the creation of the Justice League, Amanda Waller was an NSA operative, seconded to the Army to assist Military Intelligence in its campaign against the Basilisk terrorist group.[6] Soon afterwards, however, she was recruited into a field team of the secret government research effort called Project Majestic. The team, codenamed "Team 7", was tasked with finding tactics to counter aggressive metahumans, and securing related technologies and knowledge.
Waller served with aplomb, as various of her teammates developed metahuman abilities from their improbable missions. However, on their final mission, the truth was revealed - the team was intended as a means for the U.S. government to gather what it would need to create a metahuman on par with Superman. The newly activated metahuman sank the island nation of Gamorra, which had supported Basilisk, and the team disbanded.
Not reporting back to the government out of disgust with the lie of her previous assignment, Waller wound up in Malaysia, spending her days playing pinball in a bar. However, she wound up getting recruited by a CIA team led by Lawrence Duren, who asked her to help them fight a nearby Basilisk operation. Waller agreed, but in the end, she alone walked away from the mission. This tragedy, coupled with her Team 7 experience and the anger of the Duren family, led her to pursue a radical plan - to recruit bad people to do bad things, so that good people would be safe.[7]
Forming the Suicide Squad
Taking control of the metahuman prison Belle Reve, Amanda Waller learned of Task Force U, and the two specialist task forces that succeeded it.[8] She began profiling the super-criminal inmates. Those that she chose were put through her initiation process and whoever made it through to the end were assigned to Task Force X, which was informally called the Suicide Squad.
Early in the Suicide Squad's development, Waller caught the thief Catwoman in the process of attempting to access her files. Waller allowed her to leave unharmed on the condition that she voluntarily join the Squad for one mission at a later date.[9]
DC Rebirth
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Infinite Frontier
War for Earth 3
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Council of Light
Amanda Waller's time on Earth-3 instilled in her a fear of the potential threat posed by superhumans, and when she was eventually returned to her own Earth, she dedicated herself to working against them.[10] At the conclusion of the Dark Crisis, Waller approached the Council of Light with a proposal to incarcerate the Earth's metahumans for the danger they posed to humanity. Finding her scope too narrow, the Light instead tasked Waller with the eradication of the superpowered community.[11] Seeking to obtain a meteorite fragment that could neutralize the powers of the being known as the Void from the nation of Vilnaya,[12] Waller deployed her operatives Peacemaker and Peacewrecker to put down a coup in exchange for the stone, held by the local government. However, it was destroyed by Spartan, an android sent by the Void, before it could be secured.[13]
Waller contracted the shape-changing supervillain Everyman to attack and strengthen her nephew, a metahuman A.R.G.U.S. agent known as Deadeye. During a battle between the two, the villain's powers were altered by the Lazarus Resin storm, and Deadeye mentally contacted his aunt to demand an explanation. From Earth-3, Waller revealed her motivations and the nature of the Lazarus event, encouraging Deadeye to kill Everyman.[14] In months of apparent inactivity after the war for Earth-3,[15] Waller provided Malcolm Merlyn with time-travel technology, which he put to use in a scheme to divide the Arrow Family as revenge against Green Arrow,[16] who Waller hoped to bait into pursuing her for her involvement and lure into a trap. At the same time, however, she had Merlyn implanted with an explosive and tracking device.[10] Waller dedicated herself to gathering resources:[17] she had Peacemaker, Peacewrecker, and Gunsmith retrieve an artifact known as the Helmet of Hate from Lazarus Island, while she met with a gathering of supervillains to offer legal pardons in exchange for the killing of heroes.[18] Few villains took Waller up on her arrangement, however, suspecting a trap.[19]
Waller covertly assembled a new incarnation of Stormwatch to recover items chosen to target specific members of the Justice League,[20] resurrected her deceased agent Emilia Harcourt to hunt the supervillain the Weapons Master under the pretext that he had been her killer,[21] and had federal agent Nuri Espinoza recruit the Penguin for a plot to take over the Gotham City underworld.[22] During Insomnia's nightmarish assault on the waking world, Waller took advantage of the chaos and had her underling Bright retrieve the magical Nightmare Stone. Waller turned it and the Helmet of Hate over to an ally within the heroic community, who was thus empowered as Doctor Hate.[23] When an immortality-granting meteor struck the Gotham Observatory, Waller sent government assets to study its effect, the creation of a Lazarus Pit.[24]
Dawn of DC
Beast World
Waller clashed with the superhero team the Titans over the death of the King of Vlatava with their headquarters, Titans Tower,[25] and later sought to engender public distrust of the team over their international operations[26] and refusal to collaborate with the United States Government,[27] just as trust in the Justice League had been eroded by Insomnia's attack.[23] When Titans member Beast Boy took on the form of the psychic alien conqueror Starro in a bid to save the Earth, Waller had Doctor Hate repress the hero's mind, giving his bestial nature control and driving him to spread mutagenic spores across the world.[28]
At the same time, Arrow Family member Arsenal, who had hunted for Waller at Belle Reve for her part in separating him from his daughter,[15] was led by the criminal Cheshire to an underwater safehouse of Waller's, from which she surveilled Hate and the Titans' response. Taking the intruders by surprise, Waller shot them both,[16] though Arsenal survived and was forced into her service for his crime.[10] Waller was then betrayed by Hate, who attempted to use resources stolen from her and the other-dimensional realm the Kingdom to summon the Lords of Chaos to dominate the Earth. In response, Waller sent a reluctant Deadeye into the Kingdom, tasking him with destroying it with a psychic explosion to deny it to Hate, though with the aid of the superhero Vixen he was able to sever the doctor's access to the realm without harming it. Decrying her callousness, Waller's nephew turned his back on her, and joined with a group of heroes dedicated to protecting the realm from her machinations.[29]
Though she was disturbed by the scope of the chaos he had wrought, Waller resumed working with Hate, and requested that the President of the United States activate the Bureau of Sovereignty, granting her further authority to resolve the crisis.[30] Waller also took advantage of rogue Suicide Squad member Afterthought's planned assault on Belle Reve to assess the suitability of Naltorian hero Dreamer as an operative. Threatening to expose Dreamer's hidden hometown of Parthas to the world, Waller set the precognitives against each other while, unbeknownst to the hero, she massacred Afterthought's hired men. Dreamer defeated Afterthought, satisfying Waller that she would cooperate when those she cared for were used as leverage.[31] Waller ordered Sarge Steel of the Amazon Extradition Entity to gather the foes of Wonder Woman to address the threat she and the Amazons were perceived to pose to the United States,[32] and was escorted by Peacemaker to Stryker's Island Penitentiary, in which Lex Luthor was incarcerated, to obtain from him a stolen[33] Justice League Teleporter.[34]
Waller performed additional spore mutations in captivity on members of the superhuman community such as Black Manta and Dolphin, and enlisted Captain Boomerang to covertly sabotage Deadeye and Vixen's efforts to reverse Manta's transformation. Though Boomerang was unsuccessful, he learned of her nephew's opposition group and reported on it to Waller.[35] On Waller's behalf, Peacemaker abducted the black hole-generating metahuman Chester Runk, while Sarge Steel publicly announced the Bureau of Sovereignty and their intent to take on Beast Boy themselves, claiming that the Titans were protecting their one-time teammate at the expense of the human race. With grudging assistance from Lex Luthor, Waller used his teleporter to insert Runk into Beast Boy's brain, bypassing his defenders in the superheroic community and seemingly killing them both with a black hole.[34]
Waller was unveiled by the President as the head of the Bureau of Sovereignty, taking credit for Beast Boy's apparent death and framing Runk's participation as a willing sacrifice. Using the Bureau's authority to bypass presidential approval, she announced a campaign of drone strikes that would kill all those infected by the spores, over one million people. Though the Titans were able to breach the Bureau's headquarters, dispatch Waller's bodyguard Peacemaker, and confront her with the existence of an alternative, non-lethal solution to deal with the spores, she refused to call off the attack, forcing Cyborg of the Titans to hack into and divert the drones himself. Waller promised to use the heroes' intervention in conflict with the United States Military against them, and was defended from an enraged Raven, Beast Boy's partner, by Doctor Hate, who was revealed as an aspect of Raven herself.[36] Though the Titans shared their suspicions of Waller's complicity with the President and were able to defuse the crisis by drawing the spores out of their victims, Waller portrayed them as risk-takers lacking in accountability in a Bureau of Sovereignty press conference at the Justice League's one-time headquarters the Hall of Justice, rechristened the "Hall of Order," to condemn the Titans and the rest of the superheroic community.[37]
In Cairo, Egypt, Waller put together a new Suicide Squad to steal the ornamental beard of Pharoah Hatshepsut from the neighboring nation of Kahndaq. She was approached by Catwoman, finally making good on her agreement to serve, who was implanted with an explosive device and given a place on the team. Although Catwoman and the Squad successfully recovered the artifact, it was of little value to Waller, and her involvement in the heist was revealed in the process. In retribution, Waller detonated Catwoman's implant and killed her, though her newly-acquired divine powers restored her to life and allowed her to teleport away.[9] Waller put her forces to work cataloguing the Justice League artifacts left behind in the rechristened Hall of Order for transport to a secure location off-site, and reconfiguring the Hall's defenses to keep out its former occupants. During this effort, Waller's trap for the Green Arrow bore fruit, and he was captured in an attempted break-in. She brokered a deal with him: she would turn over Arsenal, reunite the Arrow Family, and lead them to Malcolm Merlyn, in exchange for his theft of the personal files of Sanctuary, a mental health facility for the superhuman community.[10]
Powers and Abilities
Abilities
- Deception
- Firearms
- Hand-to-Hand Combat (Basic)[38]: Amanda is a good fighter and was able to hold her own for a while against Green Arrow.[39]
- Indomitable Will: Amanda was able to resist the mental persuasion of Maxwell Lord which was previously unheard of.[38]
- Interrogation[38]
- Leadership
- Tactical Analysis
Notes
- Amanda Waller was created by John Ostrander and John Byrne, first appearing in Legends #1. However, in the Prime Earth continuity, Amanda Waller first appeared as part of the New 52 DC Universe in Suicide Squad (Volume 4) #1 by Adam Glass and Federico Dallocchio.
Trivia
Related
- 368 Appearances of Amanda Waller (Prime Earth)
- 92 Images featuring Amanda Waller (Prime Earth)
- 41 Quotations by or about Amanda Waller (Prime Earth)
- Character Gallery: Amanda Waller (Prime Earth)
Footnotes
- ā DC's Year of the Villain Special #1
- ā Lazarus Planet: Next Evolution #1
- ā Suicide Squad (Volume 5) #10
- ā Suicide Squad (Volume 5) #40
- ā Suicide Squad Most Wanted: El Diablo and Amanda Waller #6
- ā Team 7 (Volume 2) #0
- ā Suicide Squad (Volume 4) #0
- ā Suicide Squad (Volume 4) #25
- ā 9.0 9.1 Catwoman (Volume 5) #62
- ā 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 Green Arrow (Volume 7) #9
- ā Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths #7
- ā WildC.A.T.s (Volume 2) #11
- ā WildC.A.T.s (Volume 2) #10
- ā Lazarus Planet: Next Evolution #1
- ā 15.0 15.1 Green Arrow (Volume 7) #2
- ā 16.0 16.1 Green Arrow (Volume 7) #6
- ā Green Arrow (Volume 7) #3
- ā Dawn of DC Primer Special Edition #1
- ā Green Arrow (Volume 7) #8
- ā Batman: The Brave and the Bold (Volume 2) #6
- ā Batman: The Brave and the Bold (Volume 2) #5
- ā The Penguin #1
- ā 23.0 23.1 Knight Terrors: Night's End #1
- ā Batman/Catwoman: The Gotham War: Scorched Earth #1
- ā Nightwing (Volume 4) #101
- ā Titans (Volume 4) #4
- ā Titans (Volume 4) #1
- ā Titans: Beast World #1
- ā Titans: Beast World: Waller Rising #1
- ā Titans: Beast World #2
- ā Action Comics #1060
- ā Wonder Woman (Volume 6) #4
- ā Titans: Beast World #3
- ā 34.0 34.1 Titans: Beast World #4
- ā Titans: Beast World Tour: Atlantis #1
- ā Titans: Beast World #5
- ā Titans: Beast World #6
- ā 38.0 38.1 38.2 Justice League (Volume 3) #12
- ā Green Arrow Annual (Volume 6) #2
- ā Batman (Volume 3) #13
Suicide Squad member |
A.R.G.U.S. member |
Justice League member This character has been a member of the Justice League of America, or the Justice League in any of its various incarnations, sworn by a duty to act as guardians of America and the world by using their skills and/or superpowers to protect Earth from the clutches of both interstellar and domestic threats. |
Checkmate Member This character was a member of the top secret government organization Checkmate. This template will automatically categorize articles that include it into the "Checkmate members" and "Government Agents" categories. |
Crime Syndicate/Society member This character is or was primarily a member of the the CSA (Crime Syndicate of America • Crime Syndicate of Amerika • Crime Society of America), in any of its various incarnations, either on Earth-Three, Earth-3, Earth 3, or in the Antimatter Universe. As with all other CSA members, they are an evil version of a hero of the mainstream DC Universe, primarily the Justice League. This template will categorize articles that include it into the "CSA members" category. |