Issue(s): Super Soldiers #8
Cover Date: Nov 93
Title: "Sell out"
Credits:
Lee Stevens - Writer
Mike Ratera - Penciler
Robin Riggs - Inker
Gary Russell - Editor

Review/plot:
The previous Super Soldiers arc set up the group as the UK's answer to X-Factor and it introduced some fun new characters. This issue drops that set-up. Due to budget cuts, the Super Soldiers are privatized and sold to the Mercy Corporation.

Two of the three new characters - Xantia and Andre LeRoux - leave the team. Xantia is assigned to another government agency, and LeRoux decides to go back to the United States. Small print in their contracts prevents the rest of the Super Soldiers from protesting the new arrangement.

Mercy already has an army of super-soldiers, some of whom have been protecting a dictator in a Caribbean country called Yaritagua. The dictator had been a target of the Punisher thanks to his involvement in drug trade. But at the end of this issue, Mercy gets a better offer from the dictator's enemies. Mercy decides that instead of getting involved directly, they'll just let the Punisher kill him.

And that's how the issue, and the series, ends. It's not even a cliffhanger, exactly. The Super Soldier characters never even get formally assigned to the Yaritagua mission, so we can just assume that the Punisher does go ahead and kill the dictator and probably kills the guys that were conspiring against him too. The Super Soldiers probably just languished in obscurity at Mercy Corp. Mercy was actually conspiring to dissect them to try to find out how they stay stable unlike their homegrown super soldiers, so maybe they're all dead (the main Super Soldier, Joseph Hauer, will be mentioned in a Civil War handbook, though).

This issue's plot doesn't get started and it doesn't have the artist that was on the rest of the series, and it feels kind of dry compared to the rest of the series. It's missing most of the characterization and humor. But this issue aside, it's a shame that the series was cancelled. A lot of the first wave of Marvel UK books had potential but weren't executed very well. This series came a little later. If anything, the concept of the series was a little more generic, but it more than made up for it with fun writing and pretty good art. So i'm actually more disappointed by the cancellation of this than, say, Warheads.

It's not clear from the timeline what was causing Marvel UK books to get cancelled. It's not like they were cancelled all at once, and they were continuing to launch new books. So this getting killed mid-story doesn't make immediate sense. It seems the priority was to keep launching new #1s, either in the hope that something would immediately hit it big (like Death's Head II did, i guess) or just because #1s themselves would sell. At least for the most part new books were launched as mini-series, sometimes just 2 issues in length, which would avoid scenarios like this.

Quality Rating: D+

Historical Significance Rating: 1

Chronological Placement Considerations: N/A

References: N/A

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A