No compromise. No mercy.
Strikeforce is a Darker and Edgier 2019 antihero comic book series that launches as part of the Marvel: A Fresh Start initiative. It is written by Tini Howard and drawn by German Peralta.
A new threat is taking over the planet, and the more people who know about it, the more powerful it becomes. Blade dealt with this threat once before and hoped to never have to again. He can't bring The Avengers in on the mission and instead enlists a team of heroes accustomed to darkness — a strikeforce. Blade is joined by Angela, Spider-Woman, Wiccan, the Winter Soldier, Spectrum and Daimon Hellstrom to fight the fights that no other team can take on.
The series ran for 9 issues.
Also see Savage Avengers, another Darker and Edgier comic that's very similar to the point where some were confused when Strikeforce was announced. Also unrelated to the '80s comic Strikeforce: Morituri.
No relation to the videogame Marvel Strike Force.
Strikeforce provides examples of the following tropes:
- Actually a Doombot: At one point the Wiccan finds the Vridai holding Doctor Doom captive... only to discover they snagged a Doombot by mistake. He plays the mistake for all its worth and destroys one of their nests.
- Anti-Hero Team: The team consists of various anti-heroes, some more anti than others.
- Breaking the Bonds: Having torn through his restraints in a moment, Hulkling informs Angela and Daimon that he just let them tie him up to be nice. Would have been Slipped the Ropes, except the captors are friendlies.
- Call-Back: About halfway through the series, the team clinks their wine glasses the same way their Vridai copies clinked the vials they stole in the first issue.
- Changeling Tale: Introduces the Vridai, fae from Svartalfheim that learned how to shapeshift into others but need to capture them first. They were unleashed onto Midgard when the Black Bifrost was destroyed and the story started because they committed a crime after assuming the identities of the main cast.
- Dark Age of Supernames: The team name Strikeforce sounds like something you would see during the early '90s, being a lethal name that combines two words into one for edge factor.
- Darker and Edgier: The entire Strikeforce comic is advertised this way, promising a dark and violent story, as opposed to other superhero works aimed at general audiences.
- Electromagnetic Ghosts: At one point the team runs across Moonstone running experiments on separating spirits from their bodies, rendering the bodies comatose until death. Spectrum figures out that because spirits are electromagnetic imprints, she can use her powers to control them. She uses it to keep them from crossing over until they can be restored to their bodies.
- Five-Token Band: They're a pretty diverse group of secret agents.
- Blade, a Black Englishman that's half-vampire.
- Angela, a lesbian Asgardian.
- Spider-Woman, a Struggling Single Mother born in England and raised in Eastern Europe.
- Wiccan, a gay mutant.
- Winter Soldier, a white man who's lost a limb.
- Spectrum, a black woman.
- Hellstrom, a white man who is half-demon.
- Grand Theft Me: What the Vridai do; they steal your life.
- Hotter and Sexier: For one, we have Angela being Angela. Two, Spider-Woman reverts back to the classic skin-tight design as opposed to her modest redesign. Three, Satana makes an appearance. Need we say more?
- I Have Your Wife: The reason Ghost helps her is that Moonstone has his girlfriend trapped on a USB drive.
- Lame Pun Reaction: Wiccan and Daimon lose track of count Ophidian, but locate him in the basement. Wiccan comments that he should have expected to find him somewhere moist and warm. The vridai begs Wiccan not to kill him, to which Wiccan says the pun wasn't that bad.
- Let's You and Him Fight: Double Subverted. Blade successfully averts an attempt to misdirect superheroes predisposed to dislike each other from fighting and skip straight to the teaming up to face the priority threat. But he and Winter Soldier end up duped into a bar fight with Spider-Woman anyway.
- In the final arc, the entire team is pitted against each other in the ring.
- Memetic Loser: Invoked. Bucky claims the reason the Vridai fear him is that they take over your life — and no one wants his life.
- Memetic Mutation: In-universe how the Vridai spread, according to Angela, who claims they spread by being talked about. Daimon refers to them as "memetic mushroom men".
- No, You: When an audience member shouts a Your Mom insult at Winter Soldier, Bucky shouts back that that is in fact true about his mom.
- Once More, with Clarity: In the final issue, we finally get some clarity in how the Strikeforce members got to where they were in the first issue.
- Snap Back: Spider-Woman is back to her classic skin-tight outfit as opposed to her 2014 redesign.
- Something Only They Would Say: Played for laughs when Bucky asks Blade how they can know Spider-Woman really is her. Jessica declares that they scared her so hard her guts punched her in the brain and fell out her butt, convincing Blade that it's her and not a Vridai.
