When I was younger, I was an avid comic book reader. Tales of self-sacrificing heroics, super-powers, mutants with incredible powers and gods come to earth to protect us from ourselves, enthralled my pre-adolescent mind. With no father in my house growing up, super-heroes were the role models that raised me.

By chance one day I picked up a comic book a cousin had, a much more mature type of comic. There was no Captain America or Thor, or Ironman on the cover. It was a group of unknown super-powered characters and the title read “Strike Force Morituri” with the by line “We Who are About to Die”. Wow. “We Who are About to Die”…..and this was already issue four of a series scheduled to end at five. I might have been wrong but I had a mild hunch as to what would happen in the next issue.

The 80’s marked a dramatic shift in the paradigm of comic book heroes. All throughout the roaring twenties — on into the psycadelic 70’s — comic-books did indeed provide children the wholesome right and wrong arguments that parents wanted them to read. Almost like modernized fairy tales of morality, fairness and justice. Self-censored for most of that period, publishers were evolving from a period of time where comics — or the Funnies — were largely consumed by children. Adults didn’t take them seriously and therefore they targeted them towards their children. They wanted to protect them and teach them how to behave through characters like: the regular citizen’s whose choice it is to fight crime (Batman and Robin), or the all-american do-gooder (Superman) or the mighty god who came from Asgaurd to thwart evil with his mighty hammer (Thor). These characters, for the most part, were clearly and unmistakenly good while villains like The Joker, Lex Luthor and Loki, where unmistakenly evil.

Strike Force Morituri, and a number of other comics from the 80’s were different. When I read Batman comic-books from the 70’s I not only felt like I wanted to aspire to be more, I felt those emotions were intended. I was supposed to read them and want to be a better human being….help an old lady cross a street….rescue a couple of puppies from a burning barn. I was supposed to read them and think, “Gee, what would Batman do in a situation like this?!!” But these new comics, like Frank Miller’s Dare Devil run, Christopher Claremont’s X-Men, and Marv Wolfman’s The New Teen Titans, were in sharp contrast.

When you’re reading a comic book with the sub-heading “We Who are about to Die”, you feel a different kind of affinity for the characters. You don’t feel like they were Mighty, Super, Fantastic, or Incredible…you feel sorry for them. You feel like they are the people on the terrorist hijacked Flight 93. Sure they’re still heroes, but you don’t necessarily want to be them. You want to applaud, mourn, cheer for them, but you’d never trade places with them because their heroics are spawned from their own personal tragedies. The plane is going down, it’s going to crash. We know this. The real story lies in what happens while it’s still in the sky.
Similarly, with Strike Force Morituri and the comics that were being published in the 80’s and almost everything thereafter, I learned to read with caution. Any month my favorite character could be taken away from me. In a 1986 comic book the Joker kidnapped Robin and his mother, smacked the holy-hell out him, beat him bloody with a baseball bat, then blew him to pieces with a bomb. I didn’t know a whole lot of things when I was that age but I know for SURE I didn’t want to be that guy!

These conflicted modern-age heroes suffered from realife problems like alcoholism, rape, and drug addiction. They were Shakspearean in their faults. Epic. Tragic. Mirrors of the world I would come to know as an adult. They were the morituri, the truly super heroes because they let their mortality show…and rose above it.