Written by Mark Gruenwald – Penciled by Bob Hall – Inked by Sam De La Rosa – Lettered by Janice Chiang – Colored by Mark Phillips
War at Home
Issue #4 opens with the most traditional superhero action the series has offered so far.
The Squadron storms a military installation, dismantling tanks, disarming soldiers, and overwhelming a resistance force with astonishing efficiency. It’s the kind of large-scale superhero spectacle readers might have expected from the beginning of the series.
Yet Gruenwald immediately complicates what we’re seeing. They aren’t repelling alien invaders or fighting costumed supervillains. These are American soldiers who believe the Squadron Supreme has become a fascist regime.
From the Squadron’s perspective, they’re preventing future violence by eliminating weapons and ending armed resistance before it can spread.
The soldiers, however, see something very different. They believe an armed population is the last safeguard against an oppressive government.
The Squadron dismisses that fear as outdated thinking. They never consider that they have become the authority those people fear.
The tension between those two perspectives becomes even clearer when Golden Archer questions the team’s non-lethal approach, arguing that the resistance has chosen violence and deserves to be met in kind.
Gruenwald also makes the smart decision to hold Hyperion in reserve. Until now, he’s been defined more by leadership than raw power. When he finally enters the fight, his abilities don’t just impress—they’re intimidating. It’s a subtle reminder that beneath all the talk of building a better society stands a man powerful enough to impose his will if necessary.
In this moment, The Squadron Supreme doesn’t feel like a team of superheroes responding to danger. It feels like an institution enforcing its own vision of order.
The Illusion of Connection
After the battle, the issue slows down. We find that Gruenwald isn’t simply writing continuity. He’s writing consequences.
Dr. Spectrum continues struggling with the emotional fallout from Nuke’s death and can’t bring himself to participate in combat.
During the fight with the military, Golden Archer thought he was about to get killed. That made him take stock of his life and convinced him he should marry Lady Lark.
Lady Lark has already begun questioning their relationship, something Golden Archer never seems to recognize. He imagines a future together without ever stopping to ask whether she’s imagining the same one.
It’s a pattern that extends beyond their romance.
His attempts to comfort Spectrum are sincere but superficial.
It’s a subtle flaw, but one that runs throughout the issue.
Again and again, Gruenwald shows characters acting on what they believe is best without first taking the time to understand the thoughts, feelings, or desires of the people they’re trying to reach.
The Limits of Free Will
Tom Thumb unveils his newest invention: the Behavior Modification Machine, a device capable of altering someone’s personality.
Most of the team immediately embraces the idea. If criminal behavior can simply be removed, then crime itself can be eliminated, bringing them one step closer to the utopian society they believe they’re building.
Rather than creating conflict through explosive speeches or dramatic betrayals, Gruenwald once again chips away at the Squadron from within.
First Nighthawk walks away when he can no longer support the team’s mission. Then Nuke suffers a personal tragedy that goes unnoticed until it ends in his death. Now Amphibian becomes the latest voice to question the direction the Squadron is heading.
Gruenwald uses these moments to remind us that the team is not a monolith. It’s a collection of individuals with different moral boundaries and values.
Amphibian questions whether anyone has the moral authority to rewrite another person’s mind, no matter how noble the intention.
Arcanna reaches a similar conclusion for different reasons. Her concern isn’t only ethical. She also worries what the public will think if the Squadron begins altering people’s personalities.
It’s one of the strongest debates the series has offered because nobody is arguing for cruelty. Everyone genuinely believes they’re making the world better.
In doing so, however, they begin to justify methods that require taking away another person’s right to choose who they become.
The Wrong Lesson
While discussing the Behavior Modification Machine, Tom Thumb casually remarks that it arrived too late to cure Nuke’s insanity. It’s a line that could easily be overlooked.
In the context of everything Gruenwald has spent the past three issues building, it’s one of the most revealing moments in the series so far.
Whether Tom is protecting himself from his guilt or genuinely believes Nuke’s suffering could have been engineered away is left deliberately ambiguous.
What’s not ambiguous is Hyperion’s response.
He accepts the explanation without question.
Neither man stops to ask whether Nuke was ever insane in the first place. Neither suggests that what he needed wasn’t conditioning, but compassion.
Instead, Nuke’s tragedy is reframed as a problem that simply lacked the proper technology to solve it.
That moment echoes all the way back to the first issue.
Hyperion gave up his civilian identity and the ordinary relationships that connected him to humanity because he believed building a better world required complete devotion to the cause.
At the time, it felt like a noble sacrifice.
Now Gruenwald begins showing us what may have been lost in the process.
Without those ordinary human connections, even someone as compassionate as Hyperion becomes increasingly willing to see people as problems to solve instead of individuals to understand.
For Her Own Good
That same philosophy finds its most disturbing expression in Golden Archer.
his proposal is sincere.
He never recognizes that Lady Lark has already begun drifting away from the relationship. Or perhaps, more tragically, he does recognize it and convinces himself he already knows how to fix it. If they simply commit to one another, if they can return to what they once were, everything will work itself out.
Lady Lark turns to Arcanna, giving us one of the series’ most earnest conversations between teammates. Arcanna encourages her to be honest with Golden Archer. Ending the relationship will be painful, but pretending her feelings haven’t changed will only make things worse.
Arcanna nearly shares news of her pregnancy before thinking better of it. It’s another reminder that while the Squadron is slowly learning to talk to one another on a deeper level, they’re still hesitant to make themselves truly vulnerable.
When Lady Lark finally speaks with Golden Archer, she does so with remarkable honesty. She doesn’t accuse him. She doesn’t blame him. She simply explains that her feelings have changed, that they’ve grown apart, and that she wants to sing again, even if reclaiming her voice means giving up her powers.
Golden Archer never truly hears what Lady Lark is saying because he can only view this moment from his own perspective. He becomes angry. Jealous. Desperate.
Just as Golden Archer is about to confront Blue Eagle and trigger the kind of misunderstanding that would normally lead to a superhero fight, Dr. Spectrum steps in.
After everything that happened with Nuke, he recognizes Archer’s emotional state and tries to calm him before the situation spirals out of control.
It’s a small but meaningful moment. Spectrum hasn’t simply learned to regret what happened to Nuke. He’s begun trying to recognize the warning signs before another tragedy unfolds.
For a moment, it appears to work.
Unfortunately, Golden Archer never abandons his core belief that he knows what’s best for Lady Lark.
Whether it’s her dream of singing again or the future of their relationship, Archer never really considers that her happiness might look different from his own. He remains convinced that he understands what she truly wants, even when she tells him otherwise.
After tricking Tom Thumb into explaining how the Behavior Modification Machine works, Archer waits until the rest of the Squadron is asleep. He drugs Lady Lark and brings her to the machine.
A lesser story might have Archer transform into a raving villain. Instead, Gruenwald allows him to hesitate.
For just a moment, the enormity of what he’s about to do catches up with him.
Then he begins talking himself into it.
Lady Lark was happier before.
If the machine can restore that happiness, how could using it possibly be wrong?
In that moment, Archer reaches the same conclusion the Squadron has been inching toward throughout the series.
Take away the guns and people will be safer. Take away criminal impulses and society will improve. Take away Lady Lark’s ability to choose, and she’ll be happy again.
Each decision begins with compassion. Each is justified as being for someone else’s benefit. And each assumes the same thing: that one person has the right to decide what’s best for another.
The issue ends not with a battle or a cliffhanger, but with a man convincing himself that taking away the freedom of the person he loves is an act of kindness.
Bob Hall and Sam De La Rosa
Bob Hall and Sam De La Rosa strike an impressive balance throughout the issue.
The opening battle delivers the largest action sequences of the series without losing sight of the emotional story unfolding beneath them.
Hall continues to excel at facial expressions and body language, particularly during Lady Lark’s confrontation with Golden Archer.
The quieter scenes remain just as effective.
Whether it’s Spectrum carrying the weight of Nuke’s death or Amphibian’s visible hesitation during the debate over behavior modification, the artwork consistently reinforces the emotional complexity of Gruenwald’s script.
Final Thoughts
Issue #4 explores what happens when people become convinced they know what’s best for everyone else.
Gruenwald doesn’t give us heroes and villains. Instead, he tells this story through ordinary people making flawed, deeply human decisions.
They do not see themselves as villains. They believe they’re helping. They believe their intentions justify their methods.
The danger, Gruenwald suggests, isn’t found in cruelty or malice.
It’s found in the certainty that someone else’s freedom can be sacrificed for their own good.
Squadron Supreme Entry #5