By Larry Hama, Herb Trimpe, Steven Grant, Don Perlin, Mike Vosburg & various (IDW)
ISBN: 978-1-60010-345-2 (TPB)
Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Nostalgic All-Action Romps… 8/10
Toys have always been a strong and successful component of comics output, and have frequently been amongst the most qualitative. For people like me, the distress experienced because DC’s Hot Wheels (by Joe Gill, Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, Alex Toth, Neal Adams & Dick Giordano) or Captain Action (Jim Shooter, Wally Wood & Gil Kane) tie-in titles will never be reprinted because intellectual properties lawyers can’t get their acts together is practically existential. I’m pretty sure that feeling is universal in my field and everyone has their own title to add to the list…
The problem has been the understandable tendency to include proprietary characters (such as Spider-Man in Transformers and the entire Marvel Universe in Rom, Space Knight and The Micronauts) for their immediate cross-selling potential with no regard for who actually owns what. Merchandise-driven comics are of necessity fully negotiable whereas such team-up combinations are by definition short-term and non-binding.
Publishers got a lot smarter and far-sighted in the 80s and – as a rule, but not always – stopped mixing and matching imported/temporary stars except for special events.
During that era Marvel’s biggest successes – driven by Jim Shooter in his role as the company’s Editor-in-Chief – were those aforementioned Transformers and another: one of the oldest toy brands in existence, and since the property was hived off the franchise into its own superhero-adjacent sub-universe, current license holder IDW was able to reprint the run of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero in its entirety…
It didn’t hurt that the stories were superbly crafted and didn’t insult the intelligence of the target readership (presumed to be kids of toy-buying age) and perfectly picked up the macho America tone of the times…
Arguably Marvel’s biggest success in merchandised publishing (even outdoing Star Wars and Conan), the triumph of the phenomenon convinced Marvel to create their juveniles and licensed titles imprint Star Comics, and the continuity of this series was carried over in its entirety when the property eventually landed at IDW. In 2009, writer Larry Hama (Wolverine; Elektra; Nth Man) simply picked up where he left off in 1994 and the series even continued the numbering…
This initial compendium collects the first tranche of Marvel’s output issues #1-10 spanning June 1982-April 1983: a hugely successful mini-franchise that encompassed three regular titles plus many specials at one stage.
I’ve no real interest in the film, or toy, and TV cartoon, but the comics phenomenon reached way more impressionable minds that most modern comics could even imagine and many of the strip adventures (both US and Marvel UK’s) were highpoints of sequential narrative at a time when innovation and imagination were highly regarded – and rewarded – so it’s great to see some of them finding a fresh audience.
In case you came in late: GI Joe is the operating name for an American covert, multi-disciplinary espionage and military intervention force drawing its members from all branches of the military. At the time of these tales the Joes and terrorist secret society Cobra Command are well known to each other and engaged in a full-on but clandestine global war…
Under Shooter’s reign Marvel became a hugely profitable home for businesses with properties to licence. The comic versions sold by the truckload and have become part of the nostalgic fabric of a generation. They still are.
The Marvel series ran 155 issues (ending with its December 1994 issue), plus numerous spin-off series such as GI Joe Special Missions: specials and overseas analogue such as Marvel UK’s Action Force (the British toy was branded as Action Man since the 1960s)
We begin at the start with ‘Operation: Lady Doomsday’ as Larry Hama, Herb Trimpe (Ka-Zar; Phantom Eagle; The Defenders; Iron Man; Machine Man) & Bob McLeod introduce the squad and their foes when a whistleblowing US atomic scientist is kidnapped by Cobra Commander and his deadly assistant the Baroness, and the Gung Ho Joes are assigned to rescue her traitorous, unpatriotic ass. The all-American heroes are successful but fully exercise their democratic right to complain all the way home…
Whilst namechecking dozens of characters and vehicles, the series was always intoxicatingly high energy and deceptively sophisticated in dealing with social and geopolitical issues. The next mission details ‘Panic at the North Pole!’ – by Hama, Don Perlin (Werewolf By Night; Ghost Rider; The Defenders; Solar, Man of the Atom; Bloodshot) & Jack Abel – as a small squad investigate the extermination of a US research station, uncovering a prototype Soviet secret weapon and clashing with “eskimo†(hopefully we’d say Inuit or something else less charged these days) mercenary Mighty Kwinn to keep the deadly device out of Cobra’s clutches…
Crafted by Hama, Trimpe, Abel & Jon D’Agostino, ‘The Trojan Gambit’ in #3 then delivered a thrilling countdown thriller as the Joes’ secret underground citadel is infiltrated by a deadly modular robot programmed to send back a signal and make it a target for Cobra assault…
For over a decade Herb Trimpe had been synonymous with the Incredible Hulk, making the character his own, and daily displaying a penchant for explosive action and an unparalleled facility for drawing technology – especially honking great ordnance and vehicles. With #4’s ‘Operation: Wingfield!’, he added story plotting to his creative dossier, as Hama scripted and D’Agostino & Abel inked a tale of infiltration wherein a squad joins the private army of a survivalist nutjob and his private militia – in a tale more relevant now than ever…
In #5, Hama, Perlin, Abel & Mike Esposito’s ‘“Tanks†for the Memories…’ adds notes of bellicose slapstick as Cobra attempt to steal the Joes’ super-secret Mobat (Multi Ordnance Battle Tank) during a parade in New York City, and our heroes had to fight without ammo…
As now, Afghanistan was a hot button topic in the mid-1980s and #6’s ‘To Fail is to Conquer… To Succeed is to Die!’ by Hama, Trimpe & Abel sees a select team despatched to aid mujahideen fighters against Soviet invasion and recover a downed experimental Russian spy-plane. The three horse race between the Good Guys, Cobra and Soviet Special Forces team the October Guard sees both tech and training stretched to the limit in the hostile terrain and makes for an unlikely alliance in #7’s explosive conclusion ‘Walls of Death!’ by Hama, Trimpe & Chic Stone.
G.I. Joe #8 was an all-Trimpe treat as ‘Code Name: Sea-Strike!’ sees the heroes valiantly defending a satellite launch and thwarting Cobra’s scheme to weaponise space from their floating subsea fortress, after which Steven Grant, Mike Vosburg & Stone explore the lives of top Joes Clutch, Scarlett, Snake-Eyes and Stalker as they draw tedious and unwanted protection duties for an unsuspected traitor in ‘The Diplomat’ and find themselves in more trouble than they can (probably) handle…
This initial collection closes on a foreboding and portentous note of gathering doom as Scarlett, Snake-Eyes and Zap are captured during a mission and end up in a suburban nightmare. In #10, Hama, Vosburg & Stone expose anonymous everytown Springfield as Cobra’s most sinister development: an ultra-immersive company town designed by vicious Dr. Venom and dedicated to mind-bending, brainwashing and overruling hearts and minds in ‘a little town like ours…’
Thankfully resistance and rebellion are everywhere and an extraordinary boy named Billy is able to orchestrate their narrow escape…
To Be Continued…
The ten tales gathered here are very much the basis of all successive comics merchandising and nearly 40 years later prove that the secret is in the comics themselves, not the product, No one there is republishing Marvel’s Inhumanoids,Popples or Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos adaptations…
I’m never sure of the social value of stories where secret government operatives act beyond the law or the constraints of Due Process, but the kid in me adores the pure satisfying simplicity of seeing a wrong and righting it: so on those terms this book of clever, witty action-packed adventures of honourable warriors doing their job is a delight worth sharing.
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