Tag Archives: Waldenbooks

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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August 19, 2011 · 11:44 AM

The Comic That Changed Everything – Part Three

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

In our last episode, young Tim paid a whole dollar for G.I. Joe issue #90!

There was much to love about this comic:

-Page one was a splash, that is, a single illustration taking up the whole page.  Modern comics eschew this in favor of text recaps or several smaller panels that lead to a page two splash or a page 2-and-3 double splash, but for my oddly tuned aesthetics, comics should start with a splash on page 1.  And this particular splash page showed two characters I’d never seen bicker – Zaranna and the Baroness, screaming and grappling with each other while almost falling out of a Cobra transport helicopter over Manhattan.  Once again, several things rare or unheard of in the Joe cartoon: Villains fighting, more than one female villain in the same scene, and more than one female villain fighting.

-There was something “open” about the art.  It would be another year before I decided Mark D. Bright, the pencil artist who drew G.I. Joe #90 (and the following 15 issues or so) was my favorite artist in all of comics.  And it would be another two years before I decided I would buy any comic he drew once his G.I. Joe run had ended.  But for now, there was a strong sense of spotted blacks (a term in illustration that denotes where significant shapes filled with black ink help provide a sense of form and depth to anatomy, props, and backgrounds  — something you don’t see in the line-only styles of, say, the Garfield newspaper strip or Herge’s Tintin) that didn’t overpower the artwork, and that let the color breathe more than that first comic I’d ever looked at and rejected.  (That would be G.I. Joe #54, drawn by the wonderful Ron Wagner, whose work I quickly came to love.)  There were also more colors by now – Marvel had upped its palette in the intervening years, and slightly improved its paper stock.

-An entire scene comprising of the Cobra brass – Cobra Commander, Destro, Voltar, Zaranna, the Baroness, Dr. Mindbender, and Darklon arguing about the power balance of their organization.  But the meeting is led by Destro, not Cobra Commander!  This made my head spin, but in a good way.  And insults are hurled:

“This throwback wears a monocle and a cape and he’s casting aspersions on my character.”  (Darklon to Destro)

And they’re funny!

I had briefly seen Destro take over Cobra during the first TV miniseries six years earlier, and Serpentor (the Cobra Emperor) had permanently wrested power from  Cobra Commander within seconds of first appearing, but this was more involved, humorous, and pleasantly disorienting.  (And where was Serpentor, anyway?)

-Joe prisoners and Brain Wave Scanner.  At last, the promise of the cover art fulfilled!  Worse, Cobra agents travel into the Joes’ memories and plant false information!  As a fan, my heart went out to these fictional characters.

-Old Joes and new Joes.  Conspicuously each new season of the G.I. Joe TV cartoon would leave out older characters as newer ones appeared.  There were debut toys to sell, after all, despite the challenge this unending stream of characters caused the show’s writers.  And when it came time to populate a crowd scene, rather than place “retired” Joes in the background, it was the nonsensical “greenshirts,” anonymous, generic Joes that would fill that role.  I even have a memo from 1985 where a Sunbow producer spells out for the writers which characters to no longer include for that year.  It was that purposeful.  But here in this Marvel comic book were the aforementioned new characters, as well as Breaker, Cover Girl, Mutt, and Bazooka from ’82, ’83, ’84, and ‘85.

-Serpentor’s corpse!  I cannot overstate what an odd surprise this was.  On TV, no one ever died.  (My brother and I didn’t know that Duke was supposed to have died in the 1987 animated G.I. Joe: The Movie.  So convinced were we by the clunky audio patches that place him merely in a coma after taking a poisoned staff to the heart that we believed the small eruption of red liquid from said wound was in fact blood-colored poison.  Of course it was a coma, because no one died in kids’ cartoons.)  Here, not only were Destro and Dr. Mindbender talking about hiding Serpentor’s corpse, they alluded to having plans for it.  So not only had I missed his death, and any ensuing power struggle, now I had to keep reading to see what would happen to Serpentor’s body.

-Also, the B.A.T.S talked.  On the cartoon, Cobra’s Battle Android Trooper robots didn’t speak.  Zombie-like, they merely walked and fired their machine guns.  Here they talked and piloted helicopters.

-Also importantly, one bit a dialogue in issue #90 had a footnote.  Destro refers to the “Cobra Civil War,” giving me that heart-bending tingling feeling I get when a story hits a cliffhanger or I realize I’ve missed some revelation.  That certainly explained him trying to sort out the chain of command and Serpentor’s body being preserved in ice.  That footnote pointed us to issue #77, which could now be a likely next comic book to track down.  (Footnotes, like sound effects, have most unfortunately fallen out of favor in monthly mainstream comic books, but at the time they were all the rage.)  This will be important later on in the story of my brother and I starting out in comics as we bought our next issue of G.I. Joe at Waldenbooks a month later – but shockingly, it wasn’t #91!

What issue was it?  Tune in next week!

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

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August 5, 2011 · 1:31 PM

The Comic That Changed Everything – Part One

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

Because my mom didn’t want to cook dinner every night of the week, Wednesdays we ate out.  This tradition lasted for about 6 years.  We loved our local mall.  (Ironic since the growth of the suburban mall in the 1970s reflected the flight of retail stores from the American Downtown, a trend that closed my grandfather’s Baltimore department store years earlier.)  After a renovation that added an entirely new wing complete with 3-screen movie theatre, video arcade, and food court, Montgomery Mall had us hooked.  So after Mom came home from work she and brother Kevin and I would drive up the Beltway (the loop of interstate around Washington, D.C., and now the bane of many an automotive commuter) eager for a reliable night out in the consistent 72 degrees of our hermetic shopping experience.

After fast food dinner, we’d browse the book store and then split up – my mom to the department stores, and Kevin and I to – the arcade was actually called this, with a red and green neon sign – The Name of the Game.  A half-hour later we’d drive home in time to finish homework and watch whatever ABC sitcoms were dulling our senses that particular season.

In the June between 5th and 6th grade, while strolling into Waldenbooks, past magazines and bestsellers, I looked up at the two spinner racks of comics and saw a revelation.  His name was Road Pig.

The G.I. Joe cartoon had been in reruns for two years, a death spiral we could not fathom it pulling out of.  New toys continually refreshed the line, but they didn’t speak or move.  The explosions were imaginary, made in the onomatopoetic lexicon of little boys splayed out on a shag carpet.

From that top rack I pulled a comic book – odd thing it was – and noted several important elements:  A bold “G.I. JOE” logo.  The aforementioned Road Pig, a villain we had met in our role play, but never on television.  He was brandishing his cinderblock-on-a-stick, a weapon so bizarre that if new episodes were on the air we inherently knew it would not appear, much like Snake-Eyes’ sword, television restrictions being what they were.  On this cover image Road Pig was hauling two… who were they?  I didn’t actually know since they were out of costume, but I could tell they were older Joes, circa year one.  And a foreboding sign on the wall, pointing past them to something called the “Brain Wave Scanner.”  Whatever all of this was, it begged several questions and I was curious for the answers.

Opening this flimsy periodical offered more surprises and teases.  Over the first four pages, more characters who were too new to have appeared on the G.I. Joe cartoon!  And an entire panel where one group of them – the Iron Grenadiers with their ceremonial swords (like U.S. Marines in their dress blues) actually brandish them!  Threateningly!  At other villains!  It was too much for me to take.  The Iron Grenadier action figures did come packed with swords, but they were permanently sheathed.  So if Snake-Eyes was never going to use his sword on television (he did have it in hand once, but didn’t get to impale a robot or anything), and the Iron Grenadier toys made it physically impossible to properly use these other swords, that an “episode” of the G.I. Joe comic book had more relaxed rules concerning action and “violence” content made my eyes bulge.

And then a Cobra villain shoots another Cobra villain!  All before page 5!  (It was just a tranquilizer gun, but a kind of gattling tranq on steroids.)

But this was the icky G.I. Joe comic book!  Hadn’t I already tried this out with Yearbook #3 and #4?  Weren’t those printed on a dull newsprint, with a limited palette that could not rival the saturated intensity of animation cel vinyl photographed on 35mm film and telecined for broadcast?  Yes.  They were.  But there were a few more colors here than those earlier comics, (or perhaps a more adept color artist), and the pull of all these characters and actions that were not available on television overrode my aesthetic concerns.

I flipped back to the cover.  One dollar.  That was a lot, but it also wasn’t.  Kevin and I had a weekly allowance, and did not spend it on candy or gum.  Or prose books.  Those were all parental purchases.  We tended to measure money with our own private system:  The least expensive toys we bought were about three dollars.  At Toys”R”Us, that meant a single G.I. Joe action figure, or an Autobot minicar (like Bumblebee).  Everything scaled up from there in multiples of three and five.  A $12 or $15 Joe vehicle was possible after a few weeks or months of saving.  The $30 Metroplex was a bit out of my reach and became a birthday request.  The $100 U.S.S. Flagg aircraft carrier was an utter impossibility.  (Even the rich kid down the street didn’t have that, and he had a Millenium Falcon!)

So when I showed G.I. Joe issue #90 to my brother, his immediate response deflated, but did not surprise me:  “Cool.  Don’t buy it.”

Did I? Find out next week!

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

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July 29, 2011 · 12:33 PM

My First Comic Book Ever Was “G.I. Joe Yearbook” #3 – Part Three

Note for last week’s readers:  The part two chicken scratch doodle of Another World has been partially updated.

In our last episode, Tim bought his first comic book ever, G.I. Joe Yearbook #3…

G.I.Joe Yearbook #4 cover art by Mike Zeck

G.I.Joe Yearbook #4 cover art by Mike Zeck, 1988.

Then, what I believe is one year later, but could have been only half that, we returned to Another World.  I bought G.I. Joe Yearbook #4, looked at but passed on another Mad, and Kevin bought two back issues: G.I. Joe #61 and #62.  (Or maybe he’d bought them on that first visit?  Memory’s funny that way.)  At home he promptly put them on a high shelf in his room where I couldn’t reach them.  He never offered them to me, and I never snuck a peak when he was elsewhere.  I didn’t even touch them until later when we were regular comics readers and those two issues were incorporated into our burgeoning G.I. Joe collection.  This should demonstrate the strange disinterest I had in comic books at that initial point.  (It is also indicative of our overly strong sense of personal ownership.  My toys were mine, Kevin’s were his.  We didn’t share, and we didn’t much trade.  This is not meant to sound mean, it’s just how our personalities worked.  We played with our G.I. Joe toys side-by-side, my characters and vehicles interacting with his, but him only holding and role-playing with his, and me with mine.  Weird, I know.  It’s worth an entire blog post, how we played with our toys.)  By then we had found D&D wares at the Waldenbooks at our mall (an important location that I’ll come back to in a later blog post), and rarely returned to Another World.  In fact, I don’t think Kevin ever went back.  I did go every year or three — it was friend and future editor Nick Nadel‘s local shop once he entered the picture, but until I had a driver’s license there was no point in shopping at this third-closest store.  It did move and renovate, and finally closed when parent company/comics mail order giant American Entertainment went belly up a decade later.)

But back to those two issues–

G.I. Joe #61 and #62 covers by Mike Zeck

G.I. Joe #61 and #62 covers by Mike Zeck, 1987.

Before Kevin whisked them away I do recall seeing these two covers, which by themselves form a kind of contained story, and being worried for the protagonists.  This is a point I’ll come back to at a later date on the blog — the power of the cover image — but for now you can likely acknowledge that even if you’re not a G.I. Joe fan or a comics reader, these guys are in trouble.  The barbed wire, the handcuffs, the menacing weapons.  Trouble!

As with the first comic I’d bought, Yearbook #4 did not turn me into a lifelong reader.  I just recall thinking there weren’t enough Joes in the lead Oktober Guard story, being confused by the recap pages that mixed narration with word balloons, and wishing the Joes in the back-up yarn wore their regular costumes and not their civvies.  Years later Tony Salmons would give me some original art from that story.

G.I.Joe Yearbook #4 pg 4 panel 4, art by Tony Salmons

G.I.Joe Yearbook #4 original art by Tony Salmons

So here’s where the biography stands:  Kevin and I have been buying G.I. Joe toys and watching the G.I. Joe cartoon for four years — half a lifetime.  For me it vies with Transformers as my favorite thing ever, for Kevin it’s no contest.  We read books and newspaper comics, and now own four actual G.I. Joe comic books.  But we’re still not readers!  What’s missing?

Tune in next week!

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