Review: ‘Duke’ #1 Surprises In The Best Ways

Skybound’s first G.I. Joe miniseries arrives this week. The Real American Heroes are on their way back into the modern world, and Duke #1 shows exactly what role they’re going to play.

Joshua Williamson, Tom Reilly, Jordie Bellaire and Rus Wooton reintroduce the world to G.I. Joe, through its most famous leader.

Several weeks ago, Sergeant Conrad Hauser saw one of his best friends murdered by an alien robot. No one believes him. Now, the former soldier known as Duke is going to risk everything to reveal the truth about the attack that killed his friend. What he doesn’t know is that this mission is going to put him on a collision course with the organization known as Cobra…

I wanted to like this issue. G.I. Joe was one of my first fandoms. I know I still have a lot of my old Joes in a storage unit somewhere. There was something about the brightly colored heroes and villains that appealed to me, and the Larry Hama-written comics just added to that.

So I was incredibly happy to see that Duke was more than just a reboot. This was a story that took the characters and framework created decades ago and does something new and interesting with them. Williamson has made the Joes feel fresh without tearing them down or making them completely unrecognizable. There’s a lot of spy-fi action, but it’s also centered in conspiracy thriller territory. It’s also full of Easter eggs — we have characters as prominent as Hawk and Destro, and as obscure as Adele Buckhardt and Mercer — and there’s tons of background details. It’s a Joe-fan’s dream.

Reilly and Bellaire and two of my favorites in each of their fields. The action is crisp, and Reilly’s pencils are extremely high energy. He frames each splash and panel in the most engaging way it could be. He also makes sure to show Duke’s nobility — I’m not sure how many of the panels in the intro pages had detailed description from Williamson — but he also shows Duke doing the right thing, no matter who’s involved: race, color, religion. That all sets up the credo of the Joes in the best way.

Bellaire’s colors continue to be some of the best in any issue she works on. The switch from sepia-toned and pin colors to flats make a transition from the hero to the struggling veteran just as effective as the script and the line art does. I also really liked how Wooton’s letters do a lot of the same lifting within the story, using things like font color and balloon shape to show the character’s emotional and mental state for example.

Duke #1 is available now from Image Comics/Skybound.