Red Hood and Harley Quinn are hunting down Joker with Task Force X, and they just discovered he's secretly being funded by the Russian government.
Warning! Spoilers ahead for Suicide Squad: Get Joker #1
DC's new Black Label series Suicide Squad: Get Joker! turns the Clown Prince of Crime into a walking Russian weapon of mass destruction. While Jason Todd and Harley Quinn have joined forces with a new iteration of Task Force X to kill Joker, it appears as though they've gotten much more than they bargained for. Not only did the Suicide Squad's director Amanda Waller omit details of Joker's latest operations, but she also neglected to share that Joker has Russian partners that have made any attempts to kill him that much harder.
Aside from Jason Todd's Red Hood and Harley Quinn, Suicide Squad: Get Joker! #1 features a variety of criminals and metahuman villains being recruited in this new miniseries from writer Brian Azzarello and artist Alex Maleev. Firefly, Silver Banshee, Pebbles, Meow Meow, Wild Dog, Plastique, and Yonder Man join Jason and Harley, and they soon head to Gotham to meet with their contact Toyman, who has the alleged coordinates for Joker's last known location in Gotham City.
However, before any kind of plan can be formed, Harley barges into the bar Joker is supposed to be in. While the Squad quickly follows her, it's soon revealed that they've walked right into a trap with a fake Joker decoy. They're then shot at by expert operatives and professional killers (not the usual thugs and clowns Joker usually rolls with.) As a result, Toyman fills in the gaps that Waller neglected to: Joker is secretly funded by Russia, not in order to carry out missions on the country's behalf, but just to ensure he keeps up his chaotic, disruptive activities in America
Essentially, Russa just wants chaos and disruption to be maximized in the US, and they've decided that Joker having all the resources he wants is a good way to accomplish that. It's certainly effective, especially combined with the fact that the end of the issue sees the real Joker attacking Amanda Waller herself. Not only does he potentially kill her after beating her with a crowbar (just like he did when Joker killed Jason Todd), but he also takes her trigger box, allowing him to set off the bombs in the Suicide Squad's heads. After setting off Firefly's bomb and burning him alive, it quickly becomes apparent that Task Force X is now under Joker's control.
While Joker having Russian backers is certainly an interesting development, it does fly in the face of multiple comics where Joker has refused to work with other countries against the USA in the past. Joker rejected the Red Skull in Batman's crossover with Captain America, refusing to work with the Nazi and declaring the belief that,"I may be a criminal lunatic, but I'm an American criminal lunatic!" However, that same thought process doesn't seem to be present in Suicide Squad: Get Joker!, a story happy to use Black Label's flexible relationship with continuity to engage with modern-day politics, even casting Suicide Squad member Wild Dog as a Capitol Insurrectionist. Whatever his motives, Amanda Waller's Task Force X are now under the control of the Joker - exactly the sort of development that ensures his Russian backers are getting their money's worth from the villain.
