That series was a breath of fresh air. I really, teally enjoyed its first few arcs. It read like a novel rather than an unending soap, and despite the short shelf-life of its cast, made us care for them all.

I have this is in digital form as well, but, like codystarbuck, have yet to read it. I've heard good things about it, though.
I should also note that prior to this, in the early 1980s, Anderson had a notable stint as the artist for Ka-zar the Savage (he did the first dozen issues, and then did the breakdowns for another 5 or 6 issues after that).

Read this run several years ago now and thought it was excellent. I'd be curious to see you review the post-Gillis issues as well. I found the transition to be rocky, but after a few issues, while very different, it gets suitably weird. Not as good, but worth the read for me.

Also, I want to mention that while working on this great comic, Gillis was also responsible for writing the excellent Doctor Strange strip in Strange Tales. He had a real good run in the mid-80's doing some very interesting and woefully underrated runs.

According to Wikipedia, Nicolas Bourbaki is the collective pseudonym for a group of French mathematicians. Uirusu may be Japanese for Romanization.

#4 (March 1987) “Media Bash”

Cover corner box features: Snapdragon. However, the corner box on the comic-in-the-comic (see below) features the Paideia symbol.



The Story: The Morituri are thrilled to death (hah, not really, death comes soon enough though) to be the subjects of their very own Marvel Comic. Its cover (pictured above) is a sugar-coated happy version of the group shot on the actual cover of issue #3 (pictured below). Twelve cents! Comics sure are cheap in the future. We get three pages which alternate half (the bottom half in the image below) showing us the comic-in-the-comic and half (the top half in the image below) showing us the team’s reaction to it.





Furthermore, the Morituri are the subject of a hastily produced fictionalized TV action show, and they take the train from their mountain fortress to attend the premiere in New York City, where they meet the actors portraying them. Blackthorn is quite taken with Guy the actor, and vice versa. Commander Nion reveals that before she was a military officer she was a soap-opera producer. Odd job switch, but OK.

The Horde learns of the TV premiere and attacks. First, they use one of their few nuclear weapons as an EMP, knocking out Earthbound communications. Then comes the landing party, clad in shining armor with Wolverine-like claws tippws with poison. Their armor even has little gold bags under the chin for their wattle-like air sacs, so this must be armor actually designed for the Horde, not just stolen by them from some other race. Unless everybody in outer space has scrotum-like wattles dangling from their chins?



Blackthorn gets poisoned; Adept analyzes it and synthesizes an antidote from her saliva, reminiscent of Jesus healing a blind man with his spittle.



At first, the Horde has the Morituri on the ropes, which is quite demoralizing for the humans attending the premiere of a TV show celebrating their battle prowess. The heroes finally prevail, but just as they are mopping up the invaders, Snapdragon has her Morituri moment; her internal forces become very external, and she explodes into vapor and ash, to the shock of teammates and civilians alike.



My Two Cents: Clever wordplay on the meaning of “Bash” in the issue title. The death of Snapdragon was quite a shock and shows that Peter Gillis is not messing around. In TV shows and movies, “countdown to doom” is a frequent plot device. That makes a lot of sense for some dangers (a bomb) and zero sense for others. (“Sam has been infected! We have to synthesize a counter-virus in the next 94 minutes, or else he’s a goner!”) In the case of the Morituri process, I took it for granted that the “one year until death” was a set figure, a deadline against which the team would struggle. Nope; it’s actually the best-case scenario, with any team member liable to go up in smoke long before reaching the anniversary benchmark. By playing against expectations, Gillis brilliantly raises the stakes and makes it all the more puzzling that the Morituri aren’t being sent on an endless number of proactive missions while they still can.

The story is getting pretty meta. We’re not quite to the level of having Peter Gillis and Brent Anderson appear to counsel the team on their image, but we’re getting close. The style of the comic-in-the-comic is quite ham-fistedly patriotic, with the aliens assuring the reader that they are no match for the heroes. This invites us to consider how we too are reading a comic book produced not just as entertainment but as a vehicle for the author’s ideas. (This is where Grant Morrison would add, “And who is reading the comic book about your life, reader? And what is the agenda of its author?" But I digress.) Whilce Portacio once again provides the art to the comic-in-comic.

Everson has somehow acquired a single lock of chin-length hair in his otherwise short haircut. Looking back through previous issues, we can see that his hair was all normal length at first, but since he underwent the Morituri procedure, this one lock of hair has been gradually growing at an enhanced rate, page by page, until it’s now reached a length that’s become a nuisance, inspiring Snapdragon to braid it. I must commend the foresight that went into this minor detail, and now he has something to remember her by.





The alien base in Capetown, South Africa sits beside a statue “Dedicated this 2nd day of September 1989 to the Memory of Reverend Nelson Mandela…” This is a bit of political agitprop appropriate to the theme of this issue. You may recall that South Africa’s British colonizers had refused to give any political power to the country’s black majority, resulting in a “minority rule” system known as apartheid. When this comic book was published in 1987, Nelson Mandela was still in prison, having been arrested in 1962 for his involvement in a series of sabotage actions by anti-apartheid partisans. By the mid-1980s, South Africa was under mounting international pressure to allow blacks to vote, and Mandela had become a symbol of hopeful resistance. The inscription on the monument shows Gillis’ expectation that apartheid would soon end, but that Mandela would not survive. In fact, by the early 1990s, apartheid had been dismantled, and a freed Mandela served six years as President of South Africa.


We’ve been told several times that the aliens have control the skies of Earth for the last four years, shooting down all aircraft with their orbital weapons, but life on the surface goes on relatively unmolested, with passenger travel having returned to land and sea routes, and shipping essentially undisturbed. The loss of satellites hasn’t been explored, but surely those have been destroyed or rendered inoperable as well, which ought to limit the reach of television. If the Horde is short on nukes, shouldn’t they be raiding silos instead of Nestle warehouses? Their priorities remain inscrutable.

Incidentally, Brent Anderson has original inked pages from Strikeforce: Morituri for sale on his web site for between $100-300 each.

This is an interesting series, and seems to actually have more depth than I expected from an unknown series. Thanks for the reviews.