Category Archives: Prehistory

May 29, 2012 · 12:56 PM

I Was a Teenage Sunbow Intern

The story of how G.I. Joe got me into comics may need a rest for now, so here’s a different story:

I Was a Teenage Sunbow Intern title card for Tim Finn blog

I WAS A TEENAGE SUNBOW INTERN

In college at RISD I majored in Animation.  It was a great four years.  While the Alumni and Career Services office did have some 3-ring binders of information on companies offering jobs and internships, I barely spent any time looking.  And while our professors did give us much in the way of problem solving, technical skills, and creative thinking, landing an internship was not stressed.  That’s not a complaint.  (It’s a recent requirement for upperclassmen at my school, and I assume RISD Animation has moved in this direction.)  It’s not a complaint because at the time it did not seem like a deficiency and because I stumbled into an internship anyway.  Here’s how.

Summers in high school were a mix of wasted relaxation and real art productivity.  A portfolio class helped prepare me for college admissions.  The summer after that first year of college I vacationed with my family, drew comics, and attended BotCon.  No job, but something would coalesce.  In the fall of college sophomore year I took Animation I class, and worked weekly in the Film Animation Video equipment lock-up office.  There I gabbed with J. Gaston (Hi, J.) and tried not to do any work, instead letting J. fetch all the Bolexes and tripods while I doodled.

Someone who may have been Dee Boyd (Hi, Dee), my TA from Animation I class, mentioned someone else in our department had had an internship the previous summer at a studio in New York.  I don’t know how this came up in conversation, but as sometimes happens during the exchange of equipment and a liability signature, someone will talk about some project they’re up to, or some accomplishment a friend has made.  And while I don’t think I was talking about G.I. Joe and Transformers that day, I was starting to be known as a G.I. Joe and Transformers crazy person.  (Freshman year I had hosted a screening of Transformers: The Movie and 15 minutes of Transformers toy commercials in a dorm lounge with a big screen TV.  For the next three years I hosted it in the RISD Auditorium, where I sold shrinkwrapped VHS episodes I had imported from Canada since they were long out of print and unavailable in the States.  I also made a half-hearted attempt to secure a film print of TF:TM since we were equipped with two 35mm projectors, VHS looking only so good on the big screen.)  So Dee or Unnamed Upperclassman mentioned Sunbow, and probably something about how it wasn’t impossible to get the internship, or how it was interesting, or how I might follow up and try myself.

An internship at the studio that had produced my favorite cartoons ever?  And also such notable shows as My Little Pony, Visionaries, and The Tick?  Wow!  But how could I ever reach out to such an institution?

Tune in next time to find out!

[Click here for Part 2] 

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March 19, 2012 · 10:47 AM

The Comic That Changed Everything – Part 15

Part 1 – [2] – [3] – [4] – [5] – [6] – [7] – [8] – [9] – [10] – [11] – [12] – [13] – [14]

In our last episode, Tim and his brother Kevin placed their biggest mail order of G.I. Joe comics yet, and the excruciating wait began…

My grade school had half-day Fridays every single week, so I would have lunch at Roy Rogers with Betty, my family’s housekeeper/nanny/second mom, on the way home.  And my brother, in 9th grade at a different school, didn’t get home until 4 or 5pm, whereas I was already playing Dig Dug on our IBM XT and watching Dennis the Menace at 1.  On a Friday after what felt like months, where every day I longed to see a package awaiting me at my front door, Betty and I pulled into the driveway, my neck still careening for an angle on the screen door in case THIS WAS THE DAY.

Indeed the screen door was just a tad ajar, but in no way the amount needed to make room for an eight-foot tall box of comics.  And there had been a few false alarms — small packages for my mom, or all our regular mail bundled together with a rubber band, so I wasn’t going to get my hopes up again on the short flagstone walk to the front stoop.  But there it was anyway, another modestly sized, tightly taped East Coast Comics box!

I have no recollection of getting it inside, or forming half-words to Betty to express its significance, but soon I was kneeling on the bed in my parents’ room, an odd place for the unpacking operation, but one that makes its own sense.  Betty watched soap operas downstairs in the family room, and from an early age my brother and I knew we weren’t allowed to join in.  (At the time soap operas showed the occasional sex scene, all tastefully under the covers, really nothing more than prone kissing – tame by today’s standards.  But nonetheless we were chased out of the room if we lingered too long while fetching an action figure or an afterschool Pudding Pop.)  So that room was out.

My room was too narrow for stacks of loose comics so large they threatened to asphyxiate me should they topple over.  What I needed was a big space to spread out so I could take in all the G.I. Joe goodness at once.  We watched TV on our parents’ bed, and sometimes read for school there, so it was atop the brown 1970s bedspread and before the orange, brown, and white tulips of Vera Wang’s wallpaper that I gingerly dumped 40 new G.I. Joe comics out in front of me.

I’ve alluded to this a few times before here at Real American Book, the unattainably nostalgic feeling of reading during that first year of collecting comics.  This was when a comic took 45 minutes to finish, when I would read every page three times, and then read the comic again.  When I was legitimately concerned that whatever deathtrap or point blank pistol promised inescapable death to Snake-Eyes, to Ed Marks, to Daredevil on the cover might actually happen.  I was worried Snake-Eyes would step on that landmine on the cover of G.I. Joe #63 even though I had already read issue #s 90-95 — starring an alive and well Snake-Eyes!  (Okay, not always well, since he got hot ash thrown in his face in #95.)  But here now was an almost overwhelming tableau of those images, Marvel’s 1980s cover stock and color saturation popping off that bedspread, yellows that blinded, red that promised of blood, white in the steely eyes of determined heroes, flamboyant purples for villains, dangerous green jungles, ultramarine skies.  Like an amateur card dealer I shuffled the comics around with the palms of my hands, over and over, prepping for a game of Go Fish that would never finish, would never start.  These cover images, most drawn by Mike Zeck and Ron Wagner, are indelibly burned into my brain, and the power they hold, supported by the interior narratives, multiplied by the unassailable guilding of nostalgia make most other comics dissatisfying by comparison.

There would be no buyer’s remorse for this splurge.  Only the satisfaction of having half-completed an entire run of Marvel G.I. Joe in one fell swoop.

I must have spent a half hour just looking at them, moving them around, arranging them, picking some up, flipping through them.  Looking at them.  Looking at them.

While I was still curious how 40 comics hadn’t needed a box bigger than a coffin, that concern faded, and the entire stack went with me into my bedroom.  I sat propped up against two navy blue pillows on my lower bunk bed, Prince’s Batman soundtrack playing on my boom box.  (Oh, how I’ve tried to keep the ‘80s from overwhelming every paragraph of this blog.  Oh, how I failed on that last sentence.)  And there I read comics for hours.

I should note here once again how memory misaligns.  For years I’ve remembered this big order as my second, but the date (12/15/89) on the one I showed in part 14 of this story means this bigger order had to be our third.  And I remember it arrived in the spring of 1989, but the Batman album didn’t street until June 15 of that year.  And I wouldn’t have bought it opening day.  But school got out in early June, and not only did I come from school that East Coast day, I must have told Will all about it the following Monday.  Right?  So how was I listening to an album that I hadn’t bought yet?  Could I be conflating a later reading session with this victorious day of postal receipt?

Regardless of the answer, I have no memory of Kevin coming home later, and me telling him the good news, and him sorting through the stack, taking in the pulp bounty for himself.  But I do remember both of us spent hours that weekend reading, me prone on the family room floor, elbows digging into our soft yellow shag carpet, and Kevin lying on the couch, a tall pile of comics on the coffee table between us.  The coffee table where my father kept his coffee table books, the ones that indirectly seeded the idea for A Real American Book.

And though the dual afternoons offered us much in the way of thrilling narratives, double crosses and death-defying escapes, it doesn’t quite compare to that break in the tension storm when my months-long anxiety at last broke, and that giant East Coast Comics order finally arrived, on a spring Friday afternoon at the end of 6th grade.

I still think about that day when I listen to Batman.

Part 1 – [2] – [3] – [4] – [5] – [6] – [7] – [8] – [9] – [10] – [11] – [12] – [13] – [14]

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January 27, 2012 · 1:15 PM

The Comic That Changed Everything – Part 13

Punisher War Journal issue 19 detail by Jim Lee and Klaus Janson

Part 1 – [2] – [3] – [4] – [5] – [6] – [7] – [8] – [9] – [10] – [11] – [12] – [13]

In our last episode, Tim went on a tangent from describing buying G.I. Joe comics and this week the tangent expands!

The title of this series of articles refers to G.I. Joe issue #90, and how scanning just a few pages kicked off a sequence of events that turned me from a G.I. Joe fan who liked reading into a comic book collector/reader for life.  And how one issue of G.I. Joe became the next one, and then the older ones, and all the newest ones, and then The ‘Nam.

But something had to bridge my brother and I into the Marvel Universe proper, since Joe and The ‘Nam were both in their own universes.  Kevin and I didn’t know anything about super-heroes, which is what most of Marvel and DC Comics publish.  To put this in context, it’s important to remember than in the 1980s, super-heroes had no cultural footprint.  My 2nd grade sticker album had a Colossus sticker (from a junk store or a birthday party favor), but I had no idea who he was.  The Superman films crashed and burned with the embarrassing Quest For Peace.  The Incredible Hulk was relegated to a few made-for-TV movies that were more dramatic than super-heroic.  The 1966 Batman TV series showed up in reruns some summers, but it had little effect on us.  Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends was over, and we hadn’t ever watched it anyway.  I didn’t pay attention to the Amazing Spider-Man newspaper strip, but if I did I would have noticed how little happens.  This is still a decade and a half before Marvel’s live-action films, starting with Blade and X-Men, shook up Hollywood.  It’s still years before Fox’s Spider-Man cartoon, Fox’s Batman: The Animated Series, and any live-action Batman sequels.

So rather than super-heroes plural, we only had a sense of Batman.  Certainly the Batmania of 1989 was enough for our pop culture appetite, but in terms of comic books, there was no entry point.  Whatever was needed to get us into DC Comics hadn’t happened yet.  But in the pages of G.I. Joe and The ‘Nam were checklists and ads for other Marvel books.  And the Marvel logo on the top left corner was familiar, so if we were to try out something super-heroic, it would likely be Marvel.  So as 6th grade was winding down, a full year after we started G.I. Joe, Kevin led the way into the Marvel Universe, tugged by the giant gun and overwhelming coolness of this:

Punisher War Journal issue 19 cover by Jim Lee and Klaus Janson

And what a perfect entre.  The Punisher isn’t a super-hero, but he interacts with them.  As a Vietnam vet, Frank Castle was the bridge to the other two comics we read – one about Vietnam and the other with occasional flashbacks to it.  And again, we were boys who liked guns.  The Punisher may get slammed or ignored for being a one-note vigilante book, but that’s an unfair judgment.  Even the stories lacking pathos are exciting action tales, and a handful of stories from the 1980s – notably Grant and Zeck’s “Circle of Blood” and the odd Mike Baron yarn – are smart and compelling.  And to my surprise, Garth Ennis’ 2004-2008 run on the character comprises some of the most satisfying comics I’ve ever read.  (But they’re bloody and grim, and not for everyone.)

A month after Punisher War Journal #19, we picked up (the regular) Punisher with issue #35, which happened to be the start of a 6-part, biweekly-shipping story arc.  Two months later, we took the super-hero plunge with Uncanny X-Men #268.  (Which doesn’t modestly flaunt super-powers since the three spotlight characters in this one issue don’t fly or shoot eye beams.)  Another two months later it was Daredevil, with issue 286.  Again, another grounded hero.  While Matt Murdock does have enhanced senses, he doesn’t fly and he doesn’t shoot eye beams, and his costume is as restrained as super-hero tights go.  And even if he had been over the top, we were primed by now.  Somewhere in there was Wolverine #24 as well, a character a friend in school had talked up. (And written a paper about.)

I don’t want to overdo it on this street-level, depowered bit.  Super-heroes with fantastic powers could well have grabbed us earlier, and we would likely have accepted it.  Sci-fi and fantasy were a-okay in ours books.  I loved Transformers and Tron, Kevin was getting into Dungeons and Dragons, and we both liked the animated G.I. Joe: The Movie, even with its 40,000 year-old Himalayan snake man who wants to conquer Earth.  Make that re-conquer Earth.  But the path is worth noting, that we didn’t jump into super-heroes immediately.  It probably says more about culture than us.  Had we been born five years later we’d probably have been watching Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers instead of reading the black and white Turtles book and ignoring Power Rangers.

During that first year, while purchasing only 6 monthly comic book series our collection went from one comic book to more than fifty.  You’ve already read about that first mail order shipment, but what was different about the next one?  Tune in next week to find out!

Part 1 – [2] – [3] – [4] – [5] – [6] – [7] – [8] – [9] – [10] – [11] – [12] – [13]

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January 20, 2012 · 1:24 AM

The Comic That Changed Everything – Part Twelve

The 'Nam issue 36 cover detail by Wayne Vansant

Part 1 – [2] – [3] – [4] – [5] – [6] – [7] – [8] – [9] – [10] – [11] – Twelve

In our last episode, Tim and his brother Kevin are interested in Vietnam, and have started reading comic books!

Marvel published a monthly series called The ‘Nam.  I didn’t really know what that was, but I could put two and two together:  The title design was a military stencil font, those three letters looked like the end of the word “Vietnam,” and there were Army guys in green on the covers.  While comic books starring super-heroes were grabbing some attention from Waldenbooks’ two spinner racks at our local mall, we hadn’t made that jump yet.  G.I. Joe was “realistic” in a way Uncanny X-Men (whatever that was!) was not, so if we were going to start reading a second comic book (third, counting our truncated following of Joe’s spin-off book G.I. Joe Special Missions), it needed to be similarly grounded.  I had been flipping through this ‘Nam comic for two months now.  Issue #36 had had a particularly compelling cover:

The 'Nam issue 36 cover by Wayne Vansant

I hadn’t experienced any racism in my life, but I knew what it was.  A friend of the family had been singled out a few times, and in grade school we talked about the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. every January.  There we even had a short play about mean parents not letting their kids befriend kids of other races that we performed each year.  And the nation’s capital was the next city over, so the 1963 March on Washington was referenced on local TV news and in the pages of the Washington Post probably a tad more than in the, say, Los Angeles or Anchorage media.  And as much as racism was a real topic that we talked about in history class, it wasn’t anything anyone talked about in any day-to-day fashion.  There was a heaviness to it, as if it was taboo.  So to see it a) on the cover of a comic book, and b) on the cover of a war comic, was surprising to me, a white suburban 6th grader.  The ‘Nam #36 was on-sale the same month Kevin and I got back from summer camp and bought G.I. Joe #92, our second real issue of that series, so we hadn’t passed the tipping point — we were still only buying a G.I. Joe comic book, not just any comic.  But by the time issue The ‘Nam #38 came out two months later, we had 20 or so comic books, and this cover was most compelling.  (If a little lurid for what was an otherwise tastefully done book.)

The 'Nam issue 38 cover by Mark Texeira

This moment, buying The ‘Nam (in what I believe was the last week of) the first month of 6th grade was the tipping point.  This is where Kevin and I went from enjoying more G.I. Joe stories than we could get from just the TV cartoon to becoming regular and devoted comic book readers; When we started buying a second, regular, monthly comic book series.  (So by a certain definition, it’s The ‘Nam #38 that was “The Comic That Changed Everything,” rather than G.I. Joe #90.)

This title, because of its higher quality paper stock, color separations, and limited distribution, was pricier than G.I. Joe.  It was $1.75 rather than a mere dollar.  But the dam was starting to burst.  Kevin and I just liked comics.  We liked stories, we liked art, we liked reading.  With this purchase it would no longer be confined to G.I. Joe stories, G.I. Joe art, G.I. Joe reading.  So I bought this issue of The ‘Nam, and tried to read it on the way home (but I get lightly car sick if I read, so I gave up after a page or two).  At home I discovered it’s a great comic.

Before I could buy the next one, however, I bought my first graphic novel.  Long before DC had any kind of backlist, back when Marvel had only published about fifteen trade paperback collections of famous runs of comic books and didn’t really know what they were doing (as evidenced by the ISBN number ending up on the spine of Marvel’s 1989 The Power of Iron Man and other cutely poor editorial and design choices), Marvel did have three modestly-priced graphic novels reprinting the first twelve issues of The ‘Nam.

The 'Nam TPB covers by Michael Golden

Next to the two spinner racks of individual comic books, Walden had a larger spinner rack of graphic novels (whatever those were!).  That included the second and third ‘Nam books, and for whatever reason, I found the cover of the third one the more compelling.  After hovering around for a few weeks, I bought it.  Excellent art, tight scripting, compelling characters, and the shocking death of a major character.  Regular readers had known him for nine months.  I’d only known him for twenty pages and yet it was an affecting surprise.  And soon I bought the other graphic novel, and then issue 39, and 40, and somewhere the first volume, and then we were regular readers, meaning we now collected a second comic book monthly besides G.I. Joe.

But to be honest,  besides all this grand talk of pathos, characters, and dramatic tension, my brother and I were still just boys who liked guns.  G.I. Joe and The ‘Nam had those in spades.  So it was only natural that the next comic book title we tried out was replete with fire arms as well.

And what Marvel series in 1989 was all about guns?  Tune in next week to find out!

Part 1 – [2] – [3] – [4] – [5] – [6] – [7] – [8] – [9] – [10] – [11] – Twelve

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January 13, 2012 · 10:01 AM

The Comic That Changed Everything – Part Eleven

G.I. Joe issue 94 panel Snake-Eyes Vietnam flashback by Bright and Emberlin

Part 1 – [2] – [3] – [4] – [5] – [6] – [7] – [8] – [9] – [10] – Eleven

In our last episode, Tim and his brother Kevin bought G.I. Joe issue #94!

Part one of the NINJA COMMANDO’s spotlight reveals more about Snake-Eyes’ origin, and how he first crossed paths with the Baroness, and why she holds a grudge.  (Played out in general that she’s on the Cobra side and he’s a Joe, and specifically that she goes after him in Switzerland while he’s anesthetized.)  The flashback is Saigon, 1968.  And Vietnam was of interest for me.  Why?

My father subscribed to several military magazines, and those sat on our coffee table next to hardcover books on jets, and near novels and histories like God is My Co-Pilot, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, and Time Life’s WWII set.  And while Dad was more interested in The Second World War than Vietnam, the latter was still fresh on the minds of many Americans.  Saigon fell just two months after my brother was born.  The Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, “The Wall,” was dedicated the same year Real American Hero debuted.  And President Reagan’s rebuilding of the Armed Forces was still palpable.  Mom worked for Senator Dodd.  Dad worked for NASA.  Neither of those related to Vietnam, the place or the war, but as an “inside the Beltway” family the TV news was on every night for two hours, so though we didn’t have anyone in the family serving in the military, we were aware of it.

The Vietnam War, or I guess The Vietnam Conflict, since America still doesn’t technically consider it a war (if my 12th grade history serves me), was recent.  Americans were coming to terms with it.  College classes were now being taught on it.  Stone’s Platoon and Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket were earning box office dollars and winning accolades.  At the same time, CBS was running a great TV series called Tour of Duty.  This show only lasted for three years, and had the unfortunate timeslot of Saturdays at 10pm.  (Not quite the kiss of death that it would be now, but still not great.)  (This meant I would watch “The Golden Girls” with my mom at 8, Tour of Duty at 10 with my brother and father, and PBS’s broadcast of the BBC Robin Hood at 11.  [Yes, I watched The Golden Girls because it was a well-written, well-acted, funny show.]

Tour of Duty was an hour long drama about the regular soldiers of Company B serving in Vietnam.  Season 1 was filmed in Hawaii, so it looked great, and benefited from writing that portrayed the ups and downs, and the shades of grey the average Army grunt experienced in country.  That this show came along when G.I. Joe was in full bloom, combined with my brother and father’s interest in war history and military armament, was a coincidence.  But it only enhanced our appreciation of the military themes in G.I. Joe.

The show lasted three years, and was about as gritty as the accepted standards of the time.  It was violent, but not overly so, and the violence was tastefully done.  This was before TV ratings, back when a “Parental Discretion is Advised” disclaimer was rare, and a big deal.  (The show didn’t have it.  ABC’s 1989 broadcast of Robocop did, for comparison.  And that was quite edited from the theatrical cut.)  More importantly, Tour of Duty dealt with racism, ethnic divisions, moral ambiguity and the fog of war, and the hopelessness of the day-in, day-out slog.  It, like G.I. Joe, was told from the grunt’s point of view.  There were no cutaways to the White House, the Pentagon, or the Paris Peace Talks.

So with all this swirling around in the cultural ether — TV shows and movies and government — it was quite exciting when Marvel’s G.I. Joe veered into Vietnam via flashback.

Moreso, those three months of checking the spinner racks at the Montgomery Mall Waldenbooks, where we went from G.I. Joe issues 90 to 92, and then to 94, offered something even more focused:  An entire comic book series about Vietnam.

What was it called?  Tune in next week to find out!

Part 1 – [2] – [3] – [4] – [5] – [6] – [7] – [8] – [9] – [10] – Eleven

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January 6, 2012 · 12:12 PM

The Comic That Changed Everything – Part Ten

Detail of Andy Kubert's cover to "G.I. Joe Special Missions" issue 28

Part 1 – [2] – [3] – [4] – [5] – [6] – [7] – [8] – [9] – Ten

In our last episode, Tim and his brother Kevin bought G.I. Joe issue #94! 

Before I get too far into the Snake-Eyes Trilogy, I want to take a step back one month and sideways.  Marvel’s G.I. Joe had a spin-off, G.I. Joe Special Missions.  And Kevin and I showed up just in time to catch the final issue.

By 1986, writing G.I. Joe offered a certain challenge for scribe Larry Hama.  Every year, Hasbro delivered to him 20 new characters, but the monthly series already had plenty.  (Not to mention the vehicles, which may have lacked dialogue, but still netted starring roles, like all the attention paid to the Skystriker and Rattler jets in issue #34, “Shake Down!”)  Marvel had already solved the problem of having too many X-Men characters by starting a second X-Men title in 1982, the monthly New Mutants.  I don’t know whose idea it was – someone in Marvel Editorial, Marvel Sales, someone at Hasbro, kids writing in letters, Hama himself, or some combination, but G.I. Joe and Marvel’s coffers could use a similar expansion.

The double-sized G.I. Joe issue #50 featured a back-up tale of five Joes stopping a jetliner hostage situation, and two months later, G.I. Joe Special Missions debuted as its own bi-monthly series.  (It went monthly in ’88.)  Special Missions spotlighted Joes that didn’t appear in the regular series, and was all self-contained, single-issue stories.  Cobra appeared, but the serial drama of G.I. Joe was side-stepped in favor of discrete 22-page narratives of overseas missions, backstabbing, and another hostage situation or two.

And this is a striking book.  Artist Herb Trimpe drew almost every issue, and for its tightly written narratives, fast pacing, and crafty twists, it’s actually my desert island comic.  While I’ve gone on at length about the merits of G.I. Joe, if I could only take one run of comic books with me on a permanent tropical exile, it would be the 28 issues of G.I. Joe Special Missions.  While I love what Hama can do with a cliffhanger, and weaving threads together and apart over time, he’s at his best with finite sagas.  (Going back to G.I. Joe #34, for example:  It’s a self-contained story starring only 4 people and two jets, yet it doesn’t feel confined by 22-pages.  It’s about fighting to live, honor, and the larger canvas of conflict reduced to a tiny scale, all told as a light adventure tale.  Imagine 27 more comics like that and you have G.I. Joe Special Missions.)

In August of 1990, my father, mother, brother and I were headed to New York from Maryland to visit my paternal grandmother.  (According to my calendar, this was right around when we went to the beach and found issue #93, although the two memories don’t “feel” chronologically close.)  Near the Bethesda subway stop, our local Jerry’s Subs and Pizza, and one of the city’s three major intersections sat a Crown Books and a Dart Drug.  I don’t know if the bookstore carried comics — I’d guess no – but it turns out that the drugstore did.  Near the cashiers was a low, light grey rack of magazines, puzzle books, and possibly other comics.

Please remember at this point, Kevin and I only collect G.I. Joe.  We haven’t yet moved on to other comic book series.  (That’s one month away, and the topic for next week’s blog post.)  While we’re not quite leery of other series, G.I. Joe makes sense, and our money is committed to action figures, LEGO, and the occasional radio controlled dune buggy.  But if there’s a comic book that reads “G.I. JOE SOMETHING SOMETHING” on it, that’s not a big stretch.

There on that low, light grey rack was G.I. Joe Special Missions issue #28.  Big, yellow block letters.  White background.  And tantalizingly, several vehicles we hadn’t yet seen in that one comic book we did read:  The Cobra Stiletto, the Cobra Condor Z25, the G.I. Joe Defiant (or was it the Crusader?), and what kind of looked like the G.I. Joe Phantom X-19.  And notably, no people.  Again, the kind of cover you’d never see on Superman, Batman, or X-Men.  This was just tanks and jeeps and planes.  Or in this case, just planes.  And like G.I. Joe issue #90 three months earlier, it was just a dollar.  I bought it, or perhaps convinced my dad to buy it for me since I’d be reading it on a car ride and parents are suckers.  And while Kevin had initially advised against buying #90, he was onboard this time.

G.I. Joe/Frontline Combat art by Zeck, Trimpe, and Toth

Special Missions #28 is a great read.  (If you want to learn how to write airplane comics, read it, the aforementioned G.I. Joe #34, Special Missions #5, and “Thunderjet!” from EC’s 1952 Frontline Combat #8 by Harvey Kurtzman and Alex Toth.) Hama deftly balances the nuances of piloted flight with the action of aerial combat, all while using authentic jargon, finding opportunities to explain that jargon to readers, and throwing in some goofy fun or less-than-realistic moments. In the case of Special Missions #28, that would be the Joes landing their Space Shuttle on the flight deck of their aircraft carrier.  Without an arrestor cable.  Which is somewhere between ridiculous and impossible.  But it still makes for a fun yarn, and “Condor” (the title of this story) is the only time in all of Hama’s comics where the on-page characters speak directly to the readers.  In this case it’s Hawk, kneeling in front of all the Joes, soccer team photo-style, on the deck of the Flagg, telling us to keep reading the regular monthly G.I. Joe.  I didn’t like this breaking of the fourth wall, and I didn’t like discovering a whole ‘nother G.I. Joe series that was over the day I found it, but I’ve come to terms with Hawk’s goofy dialogue and I have a faint wish to track down the original art for that final page splash, buy it, frame it, and hang it on my wall.

Credit goes to Hama’s artistic collaborator, the talented and reliable Herb Trimpe, who had drawn the first year of G.I. Joe.  Trimpe flew planes, and owned his own, so Hama tried to give him planes to draw in this spin-off.  I’m convinced this particular comic book would never have happened unless Herb Trimpe was paired with Larry Hama to draw G.I. Joe Special Missions:

G.I. Joe Special Missions issue 12 cover by Herb Trimpe

Back to the victorious Dart Drug purchase, I don’t remember reading that issue in the car ride north, but I do remember throwing it in the back of our Chevy Malibu station wagon a few weeks later when we drove the hour to visit my other grandparents in Baltimore.  This was before Kevin and I discovered protective bags and boards, in that first year when our entire G.I. Joe collection sat stacked in a cardboard box at knee height on a bookshelf in my bedroom.

Anyway, Special Missions doesn’t get a lot of attention, but narratively it’s as vital as the regular series.  And because each issue is a complete story unto itself, it’s actually more satisfying than G.I. Joe, even without Snake-Eyes and Storm Shadow showing up all the time.

I have a distinct recollection of seeing a TV commercial for Special Missions #28, but I have never seen any evidence of it on the Internet.  Bethesda, Maryland’s Dart Drug and Crown Books were demolished a few years later.  A feud in the Crown family tore the business apart, competition from Borders and Barnes & Noble was fierce, and that entire plot of land was to become a eighteen-story, double-towered headquarters for Chevy Chase Bank.

But this wasn’t the end of buying comics in Bethesda.  What was our new outlet?  Tune in next week to find out!

Part 1 – [2] – [3] – [4] – [5] – [6] – [7] – [8] – [9] – Ten

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December 19, 2011 · 12:59 PM

The Comic That Changed Everything – Part Nine

Part One – Two – Three – Four – Five – Six – Seven – Eight – Nine

In our last thrilling episode, Tim bought G.I. Joe issue #93 and saw Snake-Eyes’ face!

Just below issue #93’s great cliffhanger was the “next issue” blurb, one that promised the beginning of “The Snake-Eyes Trilogy.” My brother and I owned enough issues of G.I. Joe by now to know that the series had never been delineated with story arcs. Chapters weren’t branded as “part 1,” or “part 2.” It was all an ongoing story, with some characters and plotlines taking the spotlight and others moving to the back or dropping out for stretches at a time. So combined with the fact that this “Snake-Eyes Trilogy” was about the mystery man, and that we had just seen his scarred face for the first time, here was ample evidence that #94 and beyond were a big deal. The tiny preview of next month’s cover showed a healed Snake-Eyes pulling the bandages off his head and brandishing a pistol, a steely look of resolve over the NINJA COMMANDO’s face.

Oddly, when that issue did arrive at Waldenbooks in September, the cover was different. The earlier image had been redrawn, and much of the space was now taken up with giant type that read “SNAKE-EYES GETS A NEW FACE!” And “THE SNAKE-EYES TRILOGY PART 1: WARRIOR REBORN!” And “TOP SECRET.” One of the important factors that separated the monthly G.I. Joe from almost all of Marvel’s other output was the lack of type on its covers. Marvel super-hero comics (and some of the licensed books) regularly had dialogue on the front, and copy that sought to pull in young readers, a decades-old remnant of once head writer and editor Stan Lee’s hyperbolic writing style (“The Day Kitty Pryde Leaves the X-Men, is the Day the X-Men Fall!”) In fact, only 16 out of the previous 93 issues of G.I. Joe had cover copy. This point is worth spending some time on. By way of example, note how impactful this random cover by Mike Zeck (issue #62) is:

G.I. Joe issue #62 cover by Mike Zeck - as printed

There’s tension. You’re worried about the prisoners. One looks injured, one looks seriously ticked off. Maybe he’ll try to escape! Visual cues let you know they’re out of their element: barbed wire and AK-47s particularly. These guys are prisoners behind the Iron Curtain. That’s a scary thought for a soldier in 1988 or so, or a boy following his exploits. But the cover loses all its power if there’s copy:

G.I. Joe issue #62 cover by Mike Zeck - type added

So when Kevin and I found issue #94 at Waldenbooks, with its leading cover text, even if we didn’t consciously realize it, the “part 1 of 3” and the mere presence of a blurb meant that something was different. Now it may have just been Editorial trying to goose sales — Read this issue or you’ll miss out! – but the cover treatment, whether it pulled in additional readers or not, was an accurate reflection of the heightened stakes in this run of issues. I mean, last month the Baroness just blew up the Dreadnoks’ van. In this new issue, she shoots Scarlett point blank in the head! I’m not a bloodlustful guy, but I do appreciate edgy kid entertainment, and stories that don’t talk down to me. This kind of violence could never have flown on TV, but we knew that in war, people get hurt. People die.

And some wars come to a premature end.  Which one was it, metaphorically?  Tune in next week to find out!

Part One – Two – Three – Four – Five – Six – Seven – Eight – Nine

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October 28, 2011 · 11:40 AM

The Comic That Changed Everything – Part Eight

Part One – Two – Three – Four – Five – Six – Seven – Eight – Nine

In our last episode, Tim bought G.I. Joe #93, a comic book that promised to tell much about NINJA COMMANDO Snake-Eyes, but surely would not reveal his never-before seen face!  But then Tim turned to page 18…

There it was, taking up almost the entire left side:  A full portrait of Snake-Eyes, unmasked!  Four huge scars crossed his cheeks and mouth, his right eye bugging out, a calm expression on the martial arts master’s face.  It was a shock.  I must have made some noise outloud, or burst out “WHOOOA!”  Kevin must have asked what was up.  I didn’t show him the page, but I sure wanted to.  “There’s something in here you’ll really like,” was all I could tease.  Surprises in fiction, whether they be dramatic reveals at the end, unexpected cameos, or twists and turns along the way, are the most exciting parts of reading stories and watching films or TV, and this was possibly the biggest surprise of them all.  (In a dead heat for first place are the deaths of several key characters at the beginning of the animated Transformers: The Movie, a shocking theatre-going experience that had taken place three years earlier and three miles north.)

Looking back at Mark Bright’s robust portrait of everyone’s favorite Joe I’m struck by how tame the gore is by any standards of action and violence twenty years on.  (This is a topic for another day, but it’s clear that what used to net an R-rating now is routinely PG-13, and concerning blood and violence we’re a much more permissive and desensitized society.)  When I really think about it, Snake-Eyes doesn’t look that bad.  This is the face of a soldier who took trace fire in Vietnam, and who took a face full of exploding fuel in a crashing helicopter on the way to the Iranian Hostage Crisis?  I mean, his skin doesn’t look like what little I know of burn victims.  But again, this is me being rational and methodical in an analysis that benefits from decades of hindsight and reflection.  This image, and indeed all of the violence in Marvel’s G.I. Joe, had to meet the standards of the The Comics Code Authority, the industry’s self-censorship board.  But as a soon-to-be sixth grader mired in the height of kid G.I. Joe fandom, this was a revelation without comparison.

The rest of the issue is thrilling.  The Joes arrest and then lose the Dreadnoks, Flint and Roadblock threaten civilians (not really), the Baroness learns that the same plastic surgeon who fixed her years earlier (a footnote to issue #22, waaay too early for my brother and I to register as a big deal) is the some one operating on Snake-Eyes, and that Snake-Eyes killed her brother!  And then, the Baroness blows up Zarana and the Dreadnoks’ van via remote control — while talking to Zarana on the telephone!  This ranks as one of the best cliffhangers ever, and is heightened by the cruelness with which the Baroness executes her task, frowning while she literally pushes a red “detonate” button.  (“Luckily I had a contingency plan.”  WHAM!)  It was all too much excitement, and if it weren’t for needing to shove the issue into my brother’s hands so he get up to speed, I would have read it again from page 1 that very instant.

It is this magic that I long for when I read comic books.  A thrilling hunger to know what will happen next, and a  nervous worry that anything will, and that my favorite characters might not make it out of the next story alive.

What Kevin and I couldn’t have known was that we started reading the G.I. Joe comic book right around the time that writer Larry Hama was pulling together several plot threads and character revelations, and that the next few months would be my favorite comic books of all time.

What are they?  Tune in next week to find out!

Part One – Two – Three – Four – Five – Six – Seven – Eight – Nine

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October 21, 2011 · 12:14 PM

The Comic That Changed Everything – Part Seven

Part One – Two – Three – Four – Five – Six – Seven – Eight – Nine

In our last episode, after returning home from summer camp and buying G.I. Joe issue #92, Tim went with his family to Ocean City, Maryland.

One of OC’s two malls, Ocean Plaza Mall, had a toy store near a bookstore next to a video arcade in front of a food court with my favorite pizza, so it was a destination.  And one afternoon in the August before 6th grade I wandered into Harriet’s Books, which was a small shop with (I want to say) a green sign with yellow letters.  Kevin had gotten into Dungeons and Dragons novels, and I might’ve had to pick up a summer reading book.  Just inside on the right was a newsstand with magazines and – COMIC BOOKS!  Comic books?  Why, if those had been there in years past I certainly hadn’t noticed.  But my eyes worked differently.  Now I was on the lookout.  And there on the bottom shelf was a bright yellow logo that spelled one my favorite words:  “G.I. JOE.”  It was issue #93!  Confusing!  Hadn’t we just bought issue #92?  Was Waldenbooks behind?  Was Harriet’s Books ahead?  It didn’t matter, all I knew was that I now had three comics to read over and over on the trip (we had brought G.I. Joe #92 and the Batman adaptation).

For some reason Kevin had stayed in the car – I guess my jaunt inside was going to be quick?  Mom or Dad must have been there, or both?  Maybe they were in the Super Fresh (grocery store) and I had enough time to kill to run in the mall?  Anyway, I opened the car door and excitedly showed Kevin.  “Awesome!” was probably his reply.  Contrary to his mild reaction two months earlier regarding issue #90, Kevin was now fully onboard and we were splitting all comics purchases 50/50.

The cover to #93 teased big revelations regarding Snake-Eyes, the masked ninja commando clothed in all black.  It’s important to properly set the scene of how mysterious and cool this character was:  We’d never seen his face, he never spoke, his action figure came with a sword, an Uzi, and a wolf, AND HE WAS A NINJA COMMANDO.  I also liked grenades, and his action figure had three molded onto his chest.  Very cool.  Since he didn’t speak, the writers on the TV show seemed not to know what to do with him, and besides three or so episodes, Snake-Eyes rarely appeared.  It fell to Larry Hama, who had created the character’s entire back story, to flesh out him in the pages of the monthly comic book.  Even though we only owned less than 15 G.I. Joe comics by this point, Kevin and I knew that portions of Snake-Eyes’ origin and motivations had been doled out over time – issues #21, 26, 27, 43, 84 – but we didn’t have most of those yet.  We were in the dark.

I got in the car and started reading.  The issue was great, starting with a compelling splash page of the Baroness and Zarana (two villains) grappling with each other in the open doorway of a transport helicopter over Manhattan.  At the top, the title “Taking the Plunge” only added to the drama.  In the story, threads from issue #90 continue and new story beats develop: Destro asserts his leadership over Cobra; the Dreadnoks brainwash Clutch and drive an ice cream truck; Flint, Lady-Jaye, and Roadblock (three series regulars from season 2 of the TV show) drive G.I. Joe’s Tiger Force-recolored vehicles; and seemingly innocuously, Snake-Eyes and Scarlett see a plastic surgeon in Switzerland.  Tantalizingly, Dr. Hundtkinder removes the ninja commando’s mask (the one that looks like a normal face for going about in public, not the black costume one) and rattles off anatomical mumbo-jumbo.  (Actually Hama being diligent and accurate.)  But we weren’t going to see Snake-Eyes’s real face because that was a permanent part of G.I. Joe lore.  Since early 1982, Hasbro, Marvel, and Sunbow had held back what masked characters Destro, Cobra Commander, and Snake-Eyes looked like.  It was embedded in the mythology.  Those visages would forever be mysterious and unknown.  The comic book had previously gone to some lengths to show Snake-Eyes without his mask, but always in shadow, cropped, or from behind.

And then I turned the page.

What did Tim see?  Tune in next week to find out!

Part One – Two – Three – Four – Five – Six – Seven – Eight – Nine

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October 14, 2011 · 11:53 AM

The Comic That Changed Everything – Part Six

Part One – Two – Three – Four – Five – Six – Seven – Eight – Nine

In our last episode, Tim and his brother Kevin returned home from summer camp and had missed an issue of G. I. Joe!

This timing has long amused and puzzled me.  In the four weeks we were away, G.I. Joe issue #91 managed to debut and complete its full sales cycle, so when we at last checked back in we were greeted by issue #92.  But how unlikely was it that the very four weeks we were away were the same four weeks that issue #91 was available?  Pretty unlikely, but it happened nonetheless, and we had to make do with #92.  On the one hand, we were excited to be reading any new G.I. Joe comic book.  On the other hand, it was disappointing that we had missed an issue.  Yes, there had been those two visits to a comic book store (with a full selection of back issues), but it was a small ordeal to mount a trip there (not really), so for the time being, we had no way of getting #91.  Fortunately #92 was excellent.

It’s actually the resolution of a storyline started a month earlier in the spin-off book G.I. Joe Special Missions (a fact that mostly eluded us, despite the footnote saying so).  #92 is a great action comic book with many moving parts – different factions of good guys, a rescue from hostile territory, corrupt politicians, a chase, and the series regulars Cobra.  And it zips along at a swift clip, and is funny, too.  Plus, to refer back to one of my initial reasons for the Marvel series hooking me in, this new issue spotlighted an obscure character, the vehicle driver Long-Range.  In fact, he (and his vehicle) get the entire cover to #92.  Whenever I lament modern action comic book writing with its poor pacing or lack of visual action, I hold this up as an example.  (Also, issue #50.  Great action comics both.)

I suspect that Waldenbooks received some of its comics late, because two weeks later the family took its annual trip to the beach, where Kevin and I found – much to our surprise, as we had only just bought #92 – G.I. Joe #93!  More on that in a moment, as something else important happened in this summer before 6th grade:

Batman Movie Comics Adaptation

Batmania.

It’s hard to adequately explain how big Tim Burton’s first Batman film was.  Everyone was talking about it, everyone loved it, and merchandise was everywhere.  I saw more than one Batman t-shirt every day that summer.  Montgomery Mall had a keyosk devoted entirely to Batman shirts and memorabilia.  I saw the film three times, daydreamed that my school would stage it as a live play and I’d be cast as Jack Nicholson’s Joker, bought the Topps trading cards with their alternatively dry and lurid captions (“Plunge Into Toxic Oblivion!”), and rolled my eyes at the high prices in the special catalog of toys and merchandise that Warner Bros. had printed for movie theatres.

Just a few days before we left for Ocean City, MD, Kevin and I were at the other bookstore at Montgomery Mall, B. Dalton Booksellers.  (Yes, the rival chains had names that rhymed – Walden/Dalton.)  We rarely shopped “Dalton,” as we inaccurately called it, since it was in a dead corner of the mall, but B. Dalton did carry graphic novels (important later) and that first week of August it did have the deluxe edition of the official DC Comics adaptation of the live-action Batman movie.  It was perfect bound, a term meaning rather than paper folded in half and stapled at the centerfold (comics, magazines), this book was printed like a book – glued, trimmed pages, and a square, though skinny, spine.  It was $5.00, a huge step up from the dollar we had spent on our G.I. Joe comics, but it was also A) generally fancy – glossy paper, increased color palette, higher quality printing, B) superbly illustrated, and C) BATMAN.  I couldn’t get this movie out of my mind, so to be able to read it over and over was exciting.  And read it over and over I did.  Every day at the beach for two weeks.

On this yearly trip I OD’ed on cable TV, Kevin and I splurged on video games (Mom saved quarters in advance of the trip), we played in the water and built sand castles, Mom and Dad read books, Kevin and I checked off summer reading, we ate out, and Dad took us miniature golfing.  And at one of two malls there, we stumbled upon the greatest revelation in all of G.I. Joe history.

What was it?  Tune in next week to find out! 

Part One – Two – Three – Four – Five – Six – Seven – Eight – Nine

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