From the longboxes: Strikeforce Morituri, or another look at a comic I bought 20 years ago and recently pulled out and re-read

Their backs against the wall when facing a powerful invader with superior force, the resistance turns to a last-ditch strategy - attacks that are guaranteed to end in death.
That narrative is both classic (think the Battle of Thermopylae with the Greeks setting out to slow the Persian advance) and timely (think the suicide bombings that have become commonplace in the Middle East or the Japanese kamikaze attacks in the waning days of World War II). And it was fuel for one of the more intriguing comic book concepts of the 1980s, Strikeforce Morituri.
A Marvel series that ran from 1985 to 1989, the monthly book started with a science fiction concept - mid 21st century Earth under invasion by a race called the Horde - as the stepping stone for a superhero concept - genetically engineering people to become supersoldiers with super powers. Those Strikeforce Morituri members, with their costumes and with a major merchandising effort behind them, are to serve as a big morale boost as well as a weapon. The trade off is that the genetic engineering work done to them is guaranteed to kill them within a year. Pretty somber stuff for a mainstream comic book, and SM milks it constantly. Issue six of the series sees the character who had been the chief protagonist for the book killed when his powers burn him out. And a constant theme in almost every issue of the first 20 is some character or another ruminating about how they're guaranteed to die fairly soon (or, in the case of the science and military folks behind the project, how they've condemned the SM volunteers to death).
The series was created by writer Peter B. Gillis and artist Brent Anderson (well known for his stellar, detailed work on Astro City, which you also see here). And during their 20-issue run, the two created a well-regarded book that, despite the comic book conceit, was fairly brutal in its treatment of war (in the first issue, we see one terror tactic of the Horde is to kidnap large groups of people, take them into low-orbit space and shove them out airlocks, while people on Earth see the streaks of light in the sky as those kidnappees burn up on re-entry). It also had interesting ruminations on the moral complexity of the main concept - when the Horde convinced one SM member it had a cure to the one-year lifespan problem, he then had serious contemplation about whether it was suicide, and thus a sin, not to pursue that even if it meant possible betrayal of humanity.
(And reading the issues today in 2011, it's an occasional hoot to play the 'This is What They Imagined the Future to be Like' game. For example, cars that drive themselves (score one point), video cassettes still in use (one point off))
After the Gillis/Anderson run, writer James Hudnall took over to more mixed results. The war with the Horde came to a quick end as another alien race came in and the book shifted to more political intrigue as we saw parts of the one-world government were manipulating the war to maintain their personal wealth. The quality became spottier as the story fell apart in consistency and major plotlines were started and then dropped (like the SM member who was forced to enlist at gunpoint and was intensely bitter for one issue).
The series fell apart, however, with the five-issue epilogue, Electric Undertow, that ran in 1989-1990. Taking place 10 years after the SM series, it revolved around a few surviving SM members taking on a vast conspiracy put together by the new alien race that had seemingly saved Earth from the Horde. But gone was the strong characterizations, replaced by mysteries and revelations that ultimately are silly.
Instead, what's left is an interesting cult favorite that is ripe for rebooting someday.

The first round of Yo-Jo Cola is on me.

The 1980s were a golden era for toy/television synergistic marketing crossovers like He-Man and the Masters of the Universe or Thundercats. And the granddaddy of them all was G.I. Joe.
It started as a Hasbro toy line of 12-inch action figures in 1964. (I remember having one in the late 1970s with a bristly sort of beard, though in terms of toy technology it was primitive compared to my Steve Austin with a small crummy magnifying glass built into his skull you looked into a small hole at the back of his head through the magnifying glass and out his bionic freakin' eye.)
And then in 1982 Hasbro rebooted the line with 3.75-inch action figures, playsets and vehicles and put the characters in these garish proto-military costumes and gave each one of them funky nicknames and a weird terrorist-like enemy called Cobra whose members had their own nicknames and '70s Studio 54 looks (I mean, Destro had a shiny metal headcovering mask and wore this leather outfit open to the navel, what was that all about aside from partying with Kristy McNichol and Norman Mailer) and the whole thing was obviously very superhero influenced. And thus was born the modern G.I. Joe line It was popular enough that in 1985 came the cartoon series. That reboot also spawned a Marvel Comics series.
And sales of that were good enough that in 1986, Hasbro and Mavel put together a second G.I. Joe title (the same kind of marketing notions behind the multiple Batman, Superman and Spiderman titles that are forever on the shelves at your local comic store, which is probably not all that local as they are fewer and farer between). G.I. Joe Special Missions was billed as telling the stories of "some missions so secret, so sensitive that even the Joes who go on them are told only the bare minimum."
Which brings us to G.I. Joe Special Missions vol. 1 (2010, 182 pages, $19.99, IDW), which reprints the first seven issues of the series and a prequel that was part of G.I. Joe issue 50.
First, the pluses. Writer Larry Hama is insane. A Vietnam vet, martial artist and longtime writer/editor in the comics world, he's been attached to numerous G.I. Joe products for years. And he clearly has a ball with this stuff, with most every story in the collection focusing on a small team of Joes on some kind of mission, some of which are amazing in their outlandishness - like disabling a toxic payload in an old Nazi bomber that never made it on its original mission to NYC and ended up frozen in a Greenland glacier but now is about to fall out of the glacier and into the sea and maybe kill millions and meanwhile Cobra troops also are after the bomber and meanwhile a SEPARATE Joe team is in Brazil to secure the help of an old Nazi who can disarm the toxic gunk bomb in the bomber but he's also being pursued by a squad of Israeli intelligence, oh and by the way one of the Joes is descended from Holocaust survivors and do you see what fantastic melodramatic fun this guy is having with all these plates going at once? Or there's this piece of primo dialogue from a group of terrorists who take over Cobra's consulate (!!!) in NYC - an incident the Joes use as a distraction to also break in: "Cobra must withdraw all support from the neo-conservative party hardliners that have turned Sierra Gordo over to the illiterate peasantry so that a Menshevikista intermediate regime can take custodianship of power until the masses can be elevated to the level at which they can rule themselves ..." I mean, even Joe leader Duke would sympathize with the Baroness as she slaps her forehead in tired exasperation at that moment.
And alongside Cobra, there's also a constant Soviet threat that creates either antagonists or the plot device that gets many of the stories going.
Artist Herb Trimpe - whose work with Marvel dates back to the Silver Age - does a decent job capturing the sort of cartoon nature of what is going on in this universe where a Joe hides in bushes in a snowy Eastern European mountain range wearing only his boots and boxer shorts as he uses his clothes and chicken blood as a decoy for the helicopter of Soviet bloc thugs chasing him.
And the Mike Zeck covers reprinted in the collection are, like everything Mike Zeck has ever done, a comic art wonder to just study and stare at, with his lines really capturing great splashes of action as well as intensity on the faces on the cover. He might be the master of guns blazing.
Some issues are stronger than others. "Burn Out," featuring the Joes in some Middle Eastern nation with a parallel story of an American pilot working for the regime there falls flat, and the artwork at one point becomes confusing in terms how one of the main characters actually looks, thus creating a speedbump in the reading enjoyment.
And the $19.99 price tag is a bit hefty (though obviously there are places like instocktrades.com where pricing is less withering.)
To be sure, Special Missions is not a place to look for character development or messages or insight into anything. It's over the topness can be draining after a few issues in a row, kind of like eating too much chocolate. But for big stupid fun, it's a good read.