3 out of 5

Look – take it for what it is: a 90s Image comic.  Moore wrote some of these, Ennis did his Darkness bit, Morrison dabbled with Spawn… several big names were roped in over the years and given their chance to do what they could with the big muscled, big boobed, art-first lookalikes of the then Image universe.  And the stories aren’t generally great, but if you read it through screwed up eyes with set expectations, you can see where these blokes tried to make their mark.  Interestingly, you don’t have to read too much of this short Strykeforce run with that same askew vision – Gerber immediately lightens the tone within the first few pages and tries to keep things hustling along between Black Anvil’s yuks (the group’s required gigantic character) and battles with kooky villains and run-ins with Gerb’s lil’ Image universe of characters.  It all gets wrapped up a little dashedly, but that was to make way for a Cyberforce crossover, so whatcha’ gonna’ do, comic fans.

Joe Benitez’s art is exactly what you’d expect, poor anatomy and all, and then Michael Turner steps in for issue 14 and continues to draw women with impossible waists but at least has that McFarlane sense of identity to his work that a lot of the Image crew seemed to lack.

So again – it is what it is.  There are other Steve runs I’d rate three stars that are more required reading than this, but I’d tossed aside Gerber’s Image stuff a while ago because I was reading it with bias.  He did right by the book – he didn’t try to change the overall run-and-gun vibe, he didn’t try to royally shake things up, he just did what made him such a great fill-in writer in the 70s – identified the qualities that worked or were desired, then ran with his ideas for the issues allotted and said so long.