Marvel G.I. Joe.

[inflatable dalek]

Bollocks, will spoiler in future. If it's any consolation, it was probably less underwhelming hearing it that way.

Oh don't worry about that, it's a going on thirty year old series of comics, plus just from the TF stuff I know a lot of the later details (I think TFUK got at least as far as the fake Cobra Commander storyline, not sure how much longer it went on after than but the whole business of this guy just putting a mask on and claiming to be the original did stick with me at the time. Even beyond that, it was actually surprising how many bits and sods I remembered reading the original comics about various characters and their set up from those reprints despite never reading them all that closely).

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But yeh, the out-of-sight rocketing was the end of it for the other three in that car - the Soft Master (? - you lose track, there are something like eighty zen ninja mentors in the damn series) did indeed sacrifice himself in a completely pointless way, the bloke in the car was just arbitrarily weird. Where I'm at, Billy's basically disappeared as well.

I'll keep the spoilers as comparison of real world killings to a silly kids comic may be a bit offensive to some, don't read if it's likely to seem OTT peeps:

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Well, I'm at least glad the Soft Master's dead, his whole "Hey, if you don't let people have guns they'll just do even more lethal stuff" just pissed me off. That seems to be the standard response from whenever a guy who's sold the gun to the most recent spree killing nutter makes (and indeed, most recently the chap in charge of Derek Bird's gun club was saying the same...) despite the lack of mas killing made by people with axes or baseball bat. What does a taxi driver, regardless of any menatal health/drink issues that should have gotten the guns taken off him earlier, actually need with a sniper riffle anyway? [tangent ends]

It's difficult to judge compared to Transformers as i've never been able to separate the UK/US stuff in my mind - even just reading the US issues my brain automatically fills the gaps. So I'm not really sure if this is badly written compared to Transformers or not. I genuinely don't think Transformers was as boring or up itself as Hama is though - at least not in the Marvel days, anyway.

An excellent point, I must admit, I've mostly blanked out the exposition * boxes (except when I genuinely didn't recognise the term used, though my military know how is zero) in the same way I do all the *THE HOME PLANET OF THE TRANSFORMERS accompanying just about every first mention of Cybertron in each issue of the TF comic.

But, if we take the GI Joe title to be aimed at about 14 year olds (in terms of teen pleasing violence plus not being mature enough to be a proper grown up comic) most of them should be more than familiar with a lot of standard army terms already, if only just from things like MASH or Rambo, be they regular readers or not. That's Vs. Transformers which was (supposedly, as far as the American comic went anyway) aimed at a younger audience and featured a lot of made up terms that any new reader wouldn't recognise straight away.

Mind, if it was a Marvel House Style forced on Hama, I'd take the needless exposition boxes if it was what allowed the soldiers to be using roughly accurate jargon throughout.

[Hound]

Was it?

Of course it was. Now I wasn't working at Marvel in 1982, I was a 5 yr old then, but the book's main purpose is to get it's audience excited enough to get their parents to buy the toys for them. That's a reasonable assumption right? Just like it's cartoon counterpart and Transformer cousins. So, the comic is aimed at whoever the toys are aimed at.

To me that just seems obvious in the way that Hama scripted the book. It seems to me that he's trying to use, at least, semi-real dialogue that you'd hear in a military unit, then he does what he can to make sure that it's still understandable to the young audience. You get new characters explaining who they are and whatever new vehicle they might pilot because you want the kids to want to go out and get the toy.

I guess you could argue that that's just the way that Hama writes a comic, it has nothing to do with the comic having to advertise the toyline and appeal to the toyline's target age group he just always writes that way, but I have several Wolverine comics that don't really support that argument.

There's lots of moralising on the realities of war, and lots of generics being blown up and headshot. If it was a kids' book (as, I believie, most mainstream comics basically were at the time) it wouldn't have such lurching mood changes, would it?

Well, many comic series jump from light-hearted to being more serious from issue to issue, sometimes from page to page. Again, I'm just making suppositions, but I imagine that with having to write a comic who's purpose is to get kids to buy toys Hama is still trying to write a comic that he might enjoy reading, just like any writer would be. There's nothing in the series that didn't pass the comics code, so nothing that was considered unfit for a child to read.

The problem is that it can't decide if it's a kids' comic or not, and Hama seems to have his head up his arse in this respect. And then there's all the pretentious ninja shit - the issue where Snake Eyes and the rest of the Ninja Superfriends are busting some Joes out of Fakeeasterneuropeanrepublicavia is painful, there are whole pages wasted in navel-gazing fortune-cookie philosophy toss.

Again, just me supposing but I imagine that while he's writing for the kids he's also doing his best to make a book that would also appeal to an older audience too. That happens all the time right? You see that with Pixar films and such. Not an unreasonable assumption.

Talking of Ace, though, the issue which is just him and Lady Jaye having a big ****-off dogfight with Wild Weasel and the Baroness is super stuff.

That's probably my favorite of the series.

The way Hama forgets about plot threads and then resolves them out of the blue issues down the line is pretty irritating too - like that thing with Ripcord's girlfriend, where the thread is just left for ages, and then he's brought in for one frame to be told she's dead. Don't get me wrong, closure's good, but could that not have been fitted in a bit earlier if all they were going to do was that?

Well it is Larry Hama, he's definitely no Warren Ellis, he's not even a Peter David. I guess there's an argument to be made that he had so much to juggle with this series that it excuses some of that, and I think he was writing Wolverine too by the latter part of it all but there's also that he's just a mostly ok, sometimes good writer. They certainly weren't going to pay for someone like Alan Moore.

It's difficult to judge compared to Transformers as i've never been able to separate the UK/US stuff in my mind - even just reading the US issues my brain automatically fills the gaps. So I'm not really sure if this is badly written compared to Transformers or not. I genuinely don't think Transformers was as boring or up itself as Hama is though - at least not in the Marvel days, anyway.

I'd like to say that of course it is and leave it at that as if it's obvious and nothing else need be said.

Let me just say that I haven't actually completely finished the series. I have the TPBs and the rest of the series downloaded and the first couple of times I tried to get through it I always started from the beginning and would get a few issues past 100 and get burned out. Plus I really don't care for reading scans and 70 issues is a lot to get through that way. I'm trying to finish the series now because IDW is going to continue it and I'm up to 127 I think but I started at 100. Anyway, I can't speak to the last 30 or so issues is the point.

The way I see it, the TF comic gets pretty ridiculous and really, really awful on many an occasion. G.I.Joe just doesn't get that bad, or at least not with the frequency that you see in the TF comic. Now I will say that if you compare the best of each series TF is going to have the better stories especially taking the UK comic into account, imo. Though I am much more a TF fan than I'll ever be a G.I.Joe fan so I tend to take into account that I'm biased and that maybe that wouldn't be the case with someone who was a fan of niether.

Also I haven't read the old TF comics in a really long time now so my memory of them is fuzzy while G.I.Joe is comparatively fresh in my mind. So take that into account also.

[Heinrad]

I haven't read many G.I. Joe comics(mainly the storyarc that sees a SAW Viper take Cobra Commander's orders a bit too literally and the frenzied aftermath thereof, and the G2 crossover featuring Snake Eyes and the Day-Glo ninja squad), and they just never grabbed me.

Say what you want about Budiansky burning out, no matter how weird he got(Spacehikers, wrestling, and space carnivals included), the writing still grabbed me when I read them, made me want to read on, if only to see whether or not Bob's sanity had finally snapped by the end.

Hama's writing style, at least on G.I. Joe(which, I admit, is all I've read of his stuff), just never grabbed me that much. One thing I'll give him credit for, though. He was able to take everything Hasbro threw at him and keep going.

[Cliffjumper]

Not sure if it's just a hundred and odd issues bludgeoning me into submission, but I'm actually starting to enjoy this a bit more. Destro and the Baroness have suddenly started to get interesting, and it's cool to have

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Cobra Commander back, even if the explanation for him surviving was incredibly dumb ("No, when I was shot and buried I just wasn't dead and I've been building an army with the same name and same cover names for X years without anyone noticing").

The endless flow of new faceless Joes seems to have largely stopped as well. There's still a bit too much cod-zen toss from the ninja brigade, though, and the SAW Viper bit was crap though.

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Some random Cobra trooper comes from nowhere and just kills half a dozen Joes who've done basically nothing for fifty-odd issues, and then we're back to 'none of the named characters die' once more...

Well, many comic series jump from light-hearted to being more serious from issue to issue, sometimes from page to page. Again, I'm just making suppositions, but I imagine that with having to write a comic who's purpose is to get kids to buy toys Hama is still trying to write a comic that he might enjoy reading, just like any writer would be. There's nothing in the series that didn't pass the comics code, so nothing that was considered unfit for a child to read.

I can't think of many that do it this clumsily, though. The moods clash rather than change. Which is why the Pixar comparison doesn't really work for me - this isn't a kids' comic with a few well-aimed bits for the adults, this is a kids' comic that has pretentions of being more adult than it actually is.

I think GI Joe gets just as terrible as Budiansky ever does, and is often more pretentious with it. I don't recall Transformers having anything as shit as this in it: -

[Hound]

I think GI Joe gets just as terrible as Budiansky ever does, and is often more pretentious with it. I don't recall Transformers having anything as shit as this in it: -

That's probably some real martial arts belief/philosophy or whatever though. We know Hama studied a martial art (judo, I think) so it's more probable he injected some real aspect of what he learned there rather than having made all that up.

I don't know if it's pretentious, it's obvious he has a great love for the ninja characters and that whole aspect of the stories he was telling. It makes sense to me that he'd try to include some real life martial arts philosophy and stuff where he could. Yeah, maybe he is just trying to show off, but I don't know him. I can't speak about Hama's character.

Does Transformers get worse than those two pages? Well yeah, I mean, if you want to use two pages out of context TF US issue one pages 14 and 15 are worse than those two.

[Cliffjumper]

#1 14 & 15? Which ones were those?

And I'm not sure how out of context that is. It's two three-quarter pages of ninja wankery in an apparent kids' comic. I'm not sure how much context boring toss like that needs.

[Cliffjumper]

Just finished the run - hell of a wobbly last dozen or so issues, sadly. Shitloads of plots left unresolved - the cancellation came from nowhere by the looks of it, but at the same time the issues between the TF crossover and the last one are full of puff standalone crap that doesn't really go anywhere - think "End of the Road" suddenly happening after the Micromasters wrestling issue.

Hama, interestingly, does pull the same trick as Furman manages in the later US issues - the toyline (at a guess) seems to have been made up of a lot of recoloured/retooled/redressed old characters by the 1990s, so he can basically keep telling stories about Snake-Eyes, Storm Shadow, Flint, Duke, Roadblock, Destro, Cobra Commander, Zartan, Dr. Mindbender and so on as long as he changes what they're wearing fairly often.

On the other hand, I've spend £30 on GI Joe toys on ebay this morning, so I guess it does manage to sell toys to kids well enough.

[Hound]

#1 14 & 15? Which ones were those?

It's the spread where the autobots pretty much read their tech spec to you.

I just finished 134 last night, almost there.

Which toys did you get?

[Cliffjumper]

Oh, that bit - it's clumsy, but it does serve the purpose of introducing 20+ characters in the first issue. It is basically revelant.

I got me a stack of those "versus" two-packs they did a few years back (10 packs in all, figured they'd do as a 'starter' set even if IIRC most of the figures aren't definitive... If nothing else, I can crib weaponry and go for 'unarmed' toys), an Awe-Striker, Barbecue and Mainframe. Most of it seems pretty cheap secondhand in the UK, at around £2-4 for pretty much any figure, it's just finding it... The Cobra Rattler is the one toy I really want - I don't suppose you know if this Target 25th anniversary one is any good?

[Hound]

I don't. I've never been much into any of the Cobra vehicles. I suppose it's mostly because they, predominantly, don't resemble actually military vehicles. Which is why I got myself a MOBAT (the tank) and want to get stuff like the Skystriker, the USS Flagg and the WHALE (hovercraft). What's tragic is that those are gigantic toys that cost a fortune.

That may account for my affinity for the original cast of characters too, in that they seem to better resemble what a military unit might actually be like instead of what would come later. Hmm...

[Cliffjumper]

I'm pretty much the same - the Rattler's just an A10 with knobs on, and I like that. I'd love to own the Flagg, but no idea if it came out over here - God knows what transatlantic shipping would be on a damn six foot toy. Agree on the figures too - aside from a few characters that grabbed me, I prefer the camo squad or the Cobra troopers before they went a bit too mad - or at least the ones who have some half-plausible reason for wearing something a bit different. Though I'll probably end up getting Bazooka because he was in the UK comic a fair bit from memory... But I can see myself getting a Falcon even if he was a bit of a prat, but I'm not that interested in, say, the Drednoks or Chuckles or Sergeant Slaughter.

[Hound]

I eventually want to have all the original 15 or so figures, but I also want Shipwreck, Baroness, Destro and Gun Ho because between the comic and cartoon those are probably the coolest characters.

It's disappointing that they didn't make any Cobra vehicles in that first set of toys because the comic is riddled with the most awful looking vehicles for Cobra.

[Hound]

I just got the first tpb of GIJoe Special Missions and it is pretty damn good.

It's basically Hama writing whatever he feels like, using whatever characters he feels like. There's 7 issues of it and I've read the first 4 so far and I'm very impressed.

It went for 28 issues, I hope they're all this good.

[Halfshell]

So, basically, we're saying that GI Joe had a quite good Sunbow cartoon and a shit Marvel comic, with toys that looked like their fictional counterparts?

Wacky.

[Cliffjumper]

Aww, "shit" is probably harsh on the comic. There are some cracking issues in there, and a bit like Transformers when it does bother with characterisation it gets it right... It's just often very, very boring, and occasionally colossally stupid (so Cobra's elite troops kill a grand total of no Joes [not counting prop General Flagg, on the grounds that everyone had blatantly forgotten who he was until he walked into a room and let Major Bludd shoot him], and then a SAW Viper wipes out six in one go... Underbase doesn't approach it). The book just takes itself a little bit more seriously than it properly deserves, whereas the cartoon at least realises how stupid Cobra are.