End of Life, with Benefits

Like Ka-zar, Strikeforce: Morituri also had a limited influence on subsequent comics.  Created by Peter B. Gillis and Brent Anderson (of Ka-Zar the Savage fame), it did not cross over with the mainstream Marvel universe (although a dimension-hopping villain in X-Force 4 and 5 (2014) does steal a superpower-producing technology that is obviously from the Morituri world).. Perhaps fittingly for a series about mortality, Strikeforce: Morituri is also a rare example of corporate IP that has not been subject to resurrection; though a television series based on the comic has long been said to be in the works, Gillis's claim to ownership of the property had likely contributed to Marvel's tacit decision to leave it alone.

Nonetheless, Strikeforce: Morituri had a stronger connection to the traditions of mainstream corporate comics, even as it subverted generic expectations.  In point of fact, the book's innovations are legible precisely because of its relative proximity to the superhero world that was Marvel's bread and butter.  Men with guns and grenades in Vietnam (or any fictional representation of a real-world military conflict) can be heroes, but rarely pass for superheroes.  With no superpowers, secret identities, individual sense of mission, vigilante status, or eye-catching costumes, they belong to a genre of their own.  The Nazi-fighting Captain America and Wonder Woman were huge successes, but they were costumed, superpowered paragons who acted in concert with allied force but with a great deal of autonomy. Their very presence in the European theater pushed their military adventures into the new genre that Timely (Marvel) and National (DC) were developing in real time.

Strikeforce: Morituri was a much more conscious amalgamation of superhero and military tropes than could be found in the comics of the Golden Age. The entire series was structured around an ongoing war--with aliens.  The protagonists enlisted or were drafted--to gain superpowers that would kill them within the year. They were subordinate to the military, but wore colorful outfits with snappy codenames to match. And, of course, the series was set nine decades into the future, throwing science fiction into the mix.  The 'Nam was a war comic for readers who did not necessarily read comics; Strikeforce: Morituri was a war comics for comics readers who did not necessarily read war stories.

No, really, they’re all going to die

Anderson's visuals certainly did more than their fair share to sell the premise and the characters: the mastery of facial expressions, body language, and action he already displayed in Ka-Zar the Savage were an excellent fit with Gillis's writing (although the design of the alien Horde, whose bulbous pink chins bore an unfortunate resemblance to a human scrotum, was not destined to be a classic).  As for Gillis, though he never achieved the fame of Strikeforce's co-creator, he had spent the Eighties writing intriguing, underappreciated comics that tended to play in a minor key. Gillis put his characters through emotional crises involving psychological and physical loss, sometimes pushing them down dark paths.  His Doctor Strange loses an eye and apprentices with a black magician, while his treatment of the psychically-powered, pathologically arrogant Moondragon rescued her from years of one-dimensional characterization while nonetheless chronicling her descent into villainy. [1] Even his two issues of Super-Villain Team-Up were an exploration of physical and psychological torture, focusing on Israeli Shin Bet Commandos trapped in a latter-day Nazi concentration camp run by the Red Skull and a clone of Adolf Hitler. 

Those two issues happened to be the last ones in the series, a reminder of Gillis's mixed fortune at Marvel:  again and again, he was the one to close out an ongoing comic.  His two years on The Defenders were the book's last, while his four years of writing the Doctor Strange character spanned three different series.  Gillis inheritedThe Micronauts after Bill Mantlo left, writing all 20 issues of the second volume. But his start, with the last issue of the previous one, meant that he wrapped up their adventures twice in two years.

Curiously, cancellation and reboots played to Gillis's strengths.  Gillis displayed a true affinity for the elegiac, perhaps inadvertently specializing in farewells.  When he was handed the final issue of the first volume of Micronauts, the team had just killed their archenemy, Baron Karza, for what seemed to be the last time, but only after he had committed global genocide on Homeworld. Gillis's debut ("Homeworld," Gillis and Kelley Jones, Micronauts 59, August 1984) is virtually action-free, as the entire team struggles to mourn the dead.  They decide to record their stories for a telepathic beacon to be left on Homeworld, culminating in two pages of melancholy poetry. When it is time to end the second volume, Gillis had already established that the wreckage of Homeworld was somehow destroying the entire Microverse (the realm in which the Micronauts lived). The only way to save it was for each Micronaut to jump into the Prometheus Pit (an interdimensional portal) and imprint their life force onto a section of Homeworld. Gillis foregoes the (literal) poetry this time, but once again, each Micronaut is allotted a few pages to catalogue their regrets and make peace with their deaths.  The Defenders ends on a similar note: every member of the team who is not a former X-Man (and therefore potentially valuable IP) dies in the last pages.  In order to stop their possessed teammate Moondragon and the soulless, corrupted version of the Gargoyle, Valkyrie and her teammates give up their lives. [2]

Eighties Marvel saw more than its fair share of death: the end of the X-Men's Dark Phoenix Saga, Elektra's murder at the hands of Bullseye, the Mutant Massacre (X-Men again), and the first in the series of Marvel Graphic Novels: Jim Starlin's The Death of Captain Marvel (which delivered exactly what it promised).  Phoenix's death was operatic, Elektra's gorey, and Captain Marvel's portentious; J. M. de Matteis (the subject of Chapter 4) killed off his Marvel characters right and left, with a combination of drippy sentiment and New Age "wisdom" (Aunt May, various supporting characters in Defenders and Moonshadow). But Gillis's protagonists faced death with reluctant, stoic acceptance and deep sadness at leaving their world behind.  In Gillis's comics, a quietly heroic death, devoid of histrionics, retroactively confers heroism on his characters.  Again and again, Gillis teaches a master class in death with dignity.

Or at least he does when he is not writing Strikeforce: Morituri, a comic that turns Eighties Marvel's death obsession on its head. 

Next: Heroism as Hospice

Notes

[1] Created by Jim Starlin as part of his Thanos saga, Moondragon proved difficult for subsequent writers to characterize after Starlin's departure.  Steve Englehart emphasized her sense of superiority as a "goddess of the mind" in the last issues of his Avengers run, while Jim Shooter made her progressively less sympathetic over the course of his two terms on the book. When The Defenders underwent an editorially-mandated sharp change of direction during J.M. de Matteis' last year as writer, Moondragon, now a somewhat repentant murderer, was forced onto the team by the Valkyrie as part of Odin's attempt at her rehabilitation. Gillis retconned her backstory to explain that she was intermittently possessed by a cosmic force known as the Dragon of the Moon, who took advantage of her vanity to slowly eat away at her soul.  Moondragon's plight provided much of the plot and nearly all of the emotional resonance of Gillis' work on The Defenders.

[2] Gillis's sole contribution to the Tomb of Dracula magazine ends as a ballerina who has been turned into a vampire stakes herself onstage, applauded by an incognito Dracula sitting in the audience.