Not to be outdone by X-Men ’97’s “Motendo” episode, DC answers with Suicide Squad Isekai. Inheriting much of the narrative setup and character roster of James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, SSI has none of the dirty fun of Harley Quinn: The Animated Series. “Motendo” was relentlessly meta but didn’t announce itself as belonging to the genre; SSI puts a running genre metacommentary in the mouth of the character Clayface. I don’t want to get in the way of work of Anthony Lee, a terrific grad student whose PhD on isekai and the Japanese animation industry I’m advising, and I haven’t done the actual work to know how DC, WB Animation, and Wit Studio put the project together, so I’ll just say that superhero fatigue can’t hold a baseball bat to isekai fatigue. In conclusion, we are now in the omnisekai era and you should not be surprised when the gang from The Bear suddenly end up working at the Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place pizza place.
