New Year, New Comics: Reenlisting with Marvel’s ‘G.I. Joe’

As a child of the 1980s with a love of cartoons, action-adventure stories, and serial narratives, I was big into G.I. Joe. Yet I came to the Joe comics last. First came the action figures (Mutt & Junkyard was my first). Then, the cartoon. Only later, after I’d traded in baseball cards for comic books, did I discover the G.I. Joe comic (ironically at a time when I was largely growing out of the toys — for the moment — and the cartoon had long since left the air). When I jumped on board, the series was, in hindsight, winding down, with the title firmly in the throes of the popular (?) Ninja Force subgroup. I stuck it out to the end, but there were plenty of other comics to read when it did, and I thought little of its passing.

I did eventually go back and read some of the earlier Joe comics. After the launch of the Devil’s Due series in the early 2000s (the vanguard of a subsequent wave of 80s nostalgia series which, as twenty-something comic fan, I ate up with a spoon), I picked up the reprints of the earlier Marvel Comics in volumes adorned with exciting new covers from J. Scott Campbell. Yet even then, even with IDW subsequently picking up the license and re-issuing the entire Marvel run in a comprehensive series of volumes, I never really made it much farther past issue #50, leaving a sizeable gap, between that and the mid 130s where I started, of unread GI Joe comics.

I’m aware of a lot of what happens in that stretch, stuff like Trucial Abysmia and a murderous SAW Viper and that one issue Todd McFarlane drew that got rejected and then re-issued as G.I. Joe Special #1 because by then McFarlane was hawt, but I haven’t experienced any of those stories for myself. 

For the last few years, I’ve toyed with the idea of starting a new G.I. Joe-centric writing project, one which takes a comprehensive look at all aspects of the franchise — the toys, the cartoon, and the comics, one figure, episode or issue at a time — in the context of it all being one large shared narrative told across multiple media, and how the similarities and differences across that media contribute to that narrative.

I’m still not ready to pull the trigger on that — still too many other obligations ahead of it — but the thought hit me recently that reading through all the old Joe comics (again for some, for the first time for others) wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Even if I’m just doing it for fun, and will still go back to them again with a more critical eye when I do get around to my project. Especially given how entertaining the new Skybound GI Joe stuff has been to read. 

So that’s my “New Year, New Comics” resolution. Time to fire up my PDF of the complete G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero from last year’s Kickstarter campaign, re-read those earliest issues of GI Joe, then read for the first time the middle chunk of Larry Hama’s long run on the title. Because now I know that sometimes, you can just read something for fun.

And knowing is … well, you know the rest.