#18 (May 1988) “Will”

Cover corner box features: Blackthorn

The Story: Scatterbrain’s mind is consumed with thoughts of his telepathic conflict with the monster Morituri last issue, as well as the implications of that experiment for Paideia-Morituri interactions. Scaredycat has an idea for how to get his mind on more pleasant matters:



Commander Pogorelich defends the Morituri’s actions last issue to his superiors. “If we sent them on more missions against the Horde, they wouldn’t get into so much other trouble!” Scatterbrain is becoming obsessed with death. He reaches out telepathically to a hospital ward, hoping to enter the mind of a dying patient to feel vicariously what it’s like to die. But his probing is cut short by a new mission: the Morituri are going to attack the main Horde base in South Africa! Just like the last mission of their predecessors the Black Watch! Try not to think to hard about that “last” part, though.

Gentle Inquirer challenges Thundercrush for leadership of the Horde. Some sort of conclave is in progress as the two make their respective cases for leadership.



The Horde palaver is cut short by the unexpected arrival of Hammersmith, who was presumed dead by the Horde in issue #11 when the Morituri hijacked his spaceship. He’s been traveling by boat from Louisiana to Capetown, South Africa since we last saw him in issue #14.



The Horde “court” is reconfigured into a three-way conflict between Hammersmith, Thundercrush, and Gentle Inquirer.

Just then, the Morituri aircraft arrives, crashing the Horde party. Scatterbrain, surrounded by dead and dying Horde, seizes the opportunity to enter a dying mind and experience death. The experience overwhelms him, and he broadcasts a stun wave that temporarily fells friend and foe alike.



Thundercrush enters the battle and is killed by Shear, at which point Pogorelich instructs the Morituri to withdraw. They do so, but Scatterbrain has been quite traumatized by his vicarious death experience. Gentle Inquirer, meanwhile, seems delighted to see his competition killed by his enemies. D’Cheir the Melldar cat-creature is running around the base but doesn’t enter into the plot.

Dr. Tuolema has been cut out of Paideia research ever since he refused to sanction the “monster Morituri” program. His access codes have been revoked, but by using a secret back door password, he enters the computer system anyway and deletes all data related to the Morituri project.

My Two Cents: Quite an eventful issue! This whole series makes the reader feel like it’s all going somewhere, not just spinning its wheels to keep the publication going forever. The title of this issue refers to the real name of Scatterbrain: Will DeGuchi. There’s probably some entendre about the human will lurking in there somewhere, but I can’t tease it out.The next issue is advertised as being titled “Death, Thou Shalt Die!” This is a quotation from the final line of the John Donne sonnet whose first line was the title of issue #1. This might give us the impression that the story is about to conclude. However, when the next issue arrives, as we’ll see, it has a different title, derived from Thoreau.

Thanks! It does help to know. I am planning to continue into the James Hudnall era of writing that begins with issue #21, but I think I'll start a new thread for that since this thread has Gillis' name in the title, and the series changes substantially on Hudnall's watch.

I just wanted to pipe up and say these reviews have been great... one of these days I have to pull these out and re-read them... I think I have up to 16 or so.

#20 (July 1988) “Salute You!”

Cover corner box features: The Paideia symbol

The Story: The six Morituri still with Commander Pogorelich pair off for a wrestling match/dance party and flirting: Silencer with Backhand, Toxyn with Hardcase, and Brava with Shear. Throughout this issue runs a series of green dialogue boxes which transcribe the essay that Vyking was writing back in issue #5 after the death of Snapdragon. Vyking is effectively the narrator.



Dr. Tuolema is impressed that Blackthorn has survived over 13 months after taking the Morituri treatment and hypothesizes that her pregnancy is staving off her demise. (This is the first hint we’ve had as to how much in-story time has passed during the 20 months in which the comic book has been published.) Once the baby is removed from Blackthorn and safe in an artificial uterus (where Tuolema got this, do not ask), Blackthorn succumbs to the Morituri effect.



Guy Harding and Tuolema activate an interstellar beacon brought back from the Jupiter raid, hoping it will bring some sort of alien aid against the Horde instead of a compounded threat.



The Horde launch a simultaneous attack on numerous world capitals. Which one do the Morituri rescue? Washington, D.C., duh! It’s a bitter battle that includes a detonated bomb hidden inside a human, but all the Morituri survive, and despite widespread property damage, they earn a cheer from the civilian populace.

My Two Cents: For his final issue of Strikeforce: Morituri, Gillis chooses a title drawn from the meaning of the Latin phrase which gives the series its title. However, the more significant literary allusions in this issue lie elsewhere:



Vyking paraphrases early 20th century Irish fantasy author Lord Dunsany. Who is this man? Edward Plunkett, the eighteenth Lord Dunsany (1878-1957) is a forgotten yet towering figure of early 20th century fantasy literature, bridging the gap between George MacDonald and J.R.R. Tolkien. He was a popular Broadway playwright and was one of the first to write a large number of fictional stories set in the same fantasy universe, a place which he called The Edge of the World. He was spoken of highly by H.P. Lovecraft and William Butler Yeats, and Neil Gaiman cited him as an influence more recently. He took a bullet to the head in World War I yet survived another forty years, albeit with reduced literary output. In later life, reflecting on whether the work of a fiction writer made any difference in the world, he had this to say:


Surely this serves as a mission statement not only for Lord Dunsany but for other writers like Vyking and Peter Gillis. But where Lord Dunsany reflects on what he is giving the world in the act of his writing, Vyking is more concerned as to whether he gets a measure of immortality in the process. That's selfish but forgivable, given the way his Morituri looms over him like the sword of Damocles.

But that’s not all! As Blackthorn lies in beg after delivering her baby, she reads Dylan Thomas’ “Under Milk Wood,” a 1954 BBC radio drama released after Thomas’ death in 1953. The play deals with the thought lives of the people in a Welsh fishing village, and the section which Blackthorn reads describes sleep coming over the village, a mere respite from labor before the coming dawn. So she too is experiencing the beyond-the-grave effects of eloquent writers. You can see her own eyes growing heavy with sleep as she reads about the town getting drowsy:



But wait, there’s more! Gillis clues us into another literary reference: Early protagonist Harold C. Everson (a.k.a. Vyking), the second Morituri to die, was named in honor of “Harold or Humphrey” Chipden “Earwicker” (Chipden is his surname and Earwicker his nickname, but he is known as simply HCE), the protagonist of the legendarily impenetrable and nonlinear dream novel Finnegans Wake by another Irishman, James Joyce, published posthumously in 1939.

The book is cyclical, inasmuch as its first line is the end of a sentence, and the end of the book is the beginning of that same sentence, which when assembled as a whole reads:

“A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”

This sentence has inspired no end of debate from luminaries including Ezra Pound, Anthony Burgess, and Joseph Campbell, but it appears to link HCE and his family with the Dublin landscape (Howth Castle and Environs), with his wife as the river, he and his wife representing Adam and Eve, but also a Dublin church known as “Adam and Eve’s,” and a “commodious vicus” can mean a spacious neighborhood but also a “vicious circle,” meaning a causal loop like the one connecting the last page of Finnegans Wake back to the first page…



So yeah, there’s a lot going on in Joyce's book, and I am way down on the list of people who ought to be trying to explain it, so I’ll stop there. The point is that no one really knows what Finnegans Wake is about, or if indeed it is about anything in the usual sense of narrative, but Gillis’ choice to link Morituri to both Dunsany, Joyce, and Thomas is an intriguing tip of the hat at the very least. The common thread is that all three works (At the Edge of the World, Finnegans Wake, and Under Milk Wood) were published after the death of the author. This parallels how Tuolema and Pogorelich are listening to the thoughts of deceased Vyking.

Brent Anderson delivers an especially lovely shot of Blackthorn as she prepares for her death. Nice art, dude! He must have wanted to go out with a bang, since this is the final issue of Strikeforce: Morituri for both him and writer Peter B. Gillis. Anderson did little comic book work after Morituri until 1995, when he began the long, fruitful, and much-celebrated “Astro City” collaboration with Kurt Busiek that continues to the present day.



This series seems like such a personal auteur project, the obvious question is “What led Peter Gillis to abandon his baby?” He had a few other projects wrapping up at Marvel in 1988 including work on Dr. Strange and Black Panther. Also in 1988, Gillis wrapped up a 14-part indie digital comic book (yes, a digital comic in the mid 1980s) called “Shatter” that he has been writing intermittently for the previous four years.



But by the end of 1988, Gillis was at DC Comics, working on two new series: The European-flavored dystopia of Tailgunner Jo and the dystopian post-apocalyptic Gammarauders, a tie-in to a science fiction role playing game called Gamma World from Dungeons and Dragons publisher TSR. So the most likely explanation is that DC simply gave Gillis an enticement (better working conditions and/or better compensation) which induced him to abandon Morituri mid-stream. Those would be Gillis’ last works in comics to date except for a six issue run for IDW in 2010, adapting Peter S. Beagle’s 1968 fantasy novel “The Last Unicorn.”

Gillis wrote a Black Flame graphic novel in 2017, Everyone Knows This is Nowhere, drawn by Alex Nino and Kelley Jones.

I can’t think of any Gillis comic I didn’t enjoy.

He was the one who wrote What if Dr. Doom was a hero, right? That was both one of the best What if? stories ever, and one of the best Dr. Doom stories too.

(edit... Chaykinstevens corrected me: that brilliant story was actually written by Don Glut).