Cesspool started out pitched as a similarly eco-themed “Oil Baron.” I’m not sure if that was a codename (probably not) or a title, but the figure and his ilk evolved and we got Cesspool. Along the way, Cesspool dropped his earlier name, “The CEO,” and Eco-Warriors dropped its earlier monicker, “Eco-Force.” We met the Oil Baron here several years ago at A Real American Book!, in fact, another Kurt Groen drawing.
Filed under G.I. Joe Behind the Scenes, Toys and Toy Art
Before Cesspool became the lead villain for Cobra’s half of the 1991 Eco-Warriors subset, Kurt Groen pitched this unnamed character, a pirate oil baron.
I’m not sure what he’s dropping, something with a Joe logo — a pouch? Spirit’s ponytail? Later, when Groen colored this, he added a backpack with an oil-shooting weapon, looking ahead to the water-squirting weapons that each Eco-Warrior came packaged with.
Filed under G.I. Joe Behind the Scenes, Toys and Toy Art
In 1986 Hasbro revised the generic Cobra Soldier, the anonymous man in a dark blue cloth uniform, as the Cobra Viper. The basic Viper is far from basic. He has knee-high books, a beefy backpack, body armor, a bigger machine gun, and a silvery face mask that resembles Cobra Commander’s. In every way the Viper is more aggressive and cooler than the 1982 Cobra Soldier. A brilliant idea that followed a year later was to use the name “Viper” as a base, and connect it to a variety of prefixes that denote specific types of Cobra troopers — Strato-Vipers are pilots, Frag-Vipers are grenade-lobbing specialists, Astro-Vipers are, um, astronauts. And on.
1988 saw a strange debut: Toxo-Viper. (Click that link for a photo in a new window.) The garish color scheme and alien-looking helmet were seemingly not a good fit for G.I. Joe, but the concept, a soldier suited for hostile environments (fuel spills, chemical weapons) was sound. And the Toxo-Viper had a counterpart on G.I. Joe, the 1985 figure Airtight. In 1991, with environmental awareness on the rise, Hasbro introduced an entire sub-line of toxic waste spreaders and fighters, the extra garish Eco-Warriors. Toxo-Viper got a redesign:
The above pencil art and marker art are by figure designer Kurt Groen. Here’s a detail, color added in marker to a photocopy of the pencil art:
The next step would have been a larger, slightly more polished marker drawing.
I’ve always found the Toxo-Viper version 2 to be oddly restrained compared to version 1. Waist-down it’s underdetailed and undersculpted, and the helmet is much less interesting, (although at least it doesn’t look like an alien). I suppose time and money were diverted to version 2’s water-shooting canon and color-change feature. I’ve never owned this figure, so I don’t have one to photograph, but here’s a picture at yojoe.
Filed under G.I. Joe Behind the Scenes, Toys and Toy Art
A Real American Book! 
