Janus Directive

The crossover storyline ran through the following titles: Checkmate! (#15-18), Suicide Squad (#28-30), Manhunter (#14), Firestorm (#86), and Captain Atom (#30). Checkmate! and Suicide Squad were published biweekly for the duration of the event.

The storyline focused on the covert operations super-teams and organizations that existed in the DC Universe at the time.

Suicide Squad leader Amanda Waller began to send her agents on missions in the apparent pursuit of her own private agenda, the so-called "Janus Directive", one that brought the Squad into conflict with other metahuman villains and government agencies. All-out mayhem broke loose among these groups, involving various metahumans associated with the United States military and civilian agencies.

Eventually, it is revealed that Waller had not gone rogue, but had been nearly assassinated by the cult leader Kobra. Kobra had tried to murder Waller and replace her with a subservient doppelgänger in order to manipulate and mislead the various government agencies to keep them from stopping his own plan: to activate a massive space-based microwave pulse cannon that would fry all electronic systems (not to mention human nervous systems) in the eastern United States, unleashing the Kali Yuga, the age of chaos he thought it was his destiny to commence. Waller had murdered her double instead, but decided to play the role of the double in order to ferret out the true mastermind behind the Janus Directive. Eventually, the truth was revealed and the groups united and stormed Kobra's space ark, capturing him and destroying his weapon.

The fallout of the Janus Directive resulted in an irate President Bush reorganizing the various agencies to bring them under executive control; he dissolved Task Force X, the umbrella organization under which both Checkmate and the Squad operated (the component agencies becoming autonomous), and made Sarge Steel a Cabinet-level official with overall control of all governmental metahuman activity on the civilian side. General Wade Eiling was made his equivalent in the Department of Defense. Waller was put on probation by Bush because of her "lone wolf" tactics, much to her displeasure.

Waller would soon thereafter be imprisoned for taking matters into her own hands one time too many, after she led an assassination team to personally liquidate the Vodou-oriented drug ring called the Loa. This led to the shut-down of all Suicide Squad operations for one year.

While individual operatives like Firestorm (Ronald Raymond), Firehawk and Manhunter (Mark Shaw) did play a part in the storyline's resolution, they were nowhere as important as the characters in this chart.

• Part 1: Checkmate! (vol. 1) #15 (May, 1989)
• Part 2: Suicide Squad (vol. 1) #27 (May, 1989)
• Part 3: Checkmate! (vol. 1) #16 (May, 1989)
• Part 4: Suicide Squad (vol. 1) #28 (May, 1989)
• Part 5: Checkmate! (vol. 1) #17 (June, 1989)
• Part 6: Manhunter (vol. 2) #14 (June, 1989)
• Part 7: Firestorm the Nuclear Man (vol. 2) #86 (June, 1989)
• Part 8: Suicide Squad (vol. 1) #29 (June, 1989)
• Part 9: Checkmate! (vol. 1) #18 (June, 1989)
• Part 10: Suicide Squad (vol. 1) #30 (June, 1989)
• Part 11: Captain Atom (vol. 1) #30 (June, 1989)
• Firestorm the Nuclear Man #87

Although not bannered as a part of the crossover, parts of Firestorm the Nuclear Man (vol. 2) #87 were an epilogue to the storyline.

• List of government agencies in DC Comics

• The Unofficial Comics Crossover Index - The Janus Directive