By Chuck Dixon & Robert Atkins (Panini Books)
ISBN: 978-1-84653-424-9
I’ve already admitted to knowing precious little about the forthcoming blockbuster GI Joe movie and I’m prepared to say even less about it. But considered as a memory-drenched toy, cartoon and comics phenomenon of the 1980s it’s probably something that affects most of you ether personally or through family, and certainly doesn’t need any more opinion from me. However the film-promotion machine has generated a couple of splendid new comics adventures (see GI Joe: the Rise of Cobra: Official Movie Prequel) and I’m more than happy to babble on about them…
In case you were wondering: GI Joe is the operating name for an American covert, multi-disciplinary espionage and military intervention force that draws its members from all branches of the services. At the time of these tales it is just setting up, as is a super-secret society called Cobra that appears bent on World Domination. Neither organisation is aware of the other…
This volume collects the first six issues – plus the teaser #0 – from IDW comics and tells a refreshingly straightforward, full-on battle-romp, courtesy of scripter Chuck Dixon and artist Robert Atkins.
As the new ultra-covert GI Joe team are setting up their hidden subterranean desert base The Pit, a new super-technological device in an impenetrable crate is recovered from a mysteriously sunken freighter. Transferring it to the Pit might just be the biggest mistake the strike force ever makes…
Meanwhile high-end arms dealer Nico Mandirobilis finds himself on the run from a teleporting assassin sent by a disgruntled client: the sinister covert cabal called Cobra. As a Joe team is dispatched to round him up, the thing – or things – in the crate break loose, tearing the Pit to Shrapnel and making for the surface where they can transmit all the Joes files to their masters…
And at the same time high-tech and insufferably independent weaponsmith Destro discovers an unwelcome guest in The Baroness, who wants nothing more than to see him die…
This tense, twisty thriller is as high on suspense as action, with chases, battles and double-crosses a-plenty, but everything might just turn on the choices and actions of renegade Joe Snake Eyes, who slips ninja-like into and out of the picture, bent on a mission all his own…
It’s often tricky to transfer the sheer pace and spectacle of a summer blockbuster into a readable comicbook but Dixon and Atkins pull it off with great style in a manner that can be happily enjoyed by all but the very youngest of kids as well as their nostalgia-jazzed dads.
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