GIJoe

[RoIIo Tomassi]

In February, IDW will relaunch "G.I. Joe," with the core title written by Fred Van Lente and drawn by Steve Kurth. The other two series -- "G.I. Joe: Secret Missions," by writer Chuck Dixon and artist Paul Gulacy and "G.I. Joe: The Cobra Files" written by Mike Costa and drawn by Antonio Fusa -- launch in March and April, respectively.

And so it goes.

[anarky]

I wish they'd stop this bullshit. This is worse than Transformers before they streamlined it (and re-split it, although along lines that make more sense). I'm getting the paperbacks as they come out, and I get confused as to how they go. Doesn't help that the Cobra Civil War was collected by title (two trades apiece) and then released about a month apart, resulting in one fucked-up reading order, and the very next story was two combined trades in order.

And I'm still not sure that three titles are necessary.

[RoIIo Tomassi]

Necessary? No. But it's the amount they can sustain. And the Cobra book is just a happy accident. It was imagined as a mini and did so well, it's been ongoing ever since with the same creative team through all its incarnations.
All three books always hover around the 10k level on the sales charts, so if the price for getting continuous Joe books on what is essentially a weekly basis (counting Hama's ARAH series) is having to reboot back to number 1 issues every couple years, I chalk it up to the realities of the industry and just be glad I get smothered in Joe every Wednesday.

[anarky]

Okay, I suppose. As long as one of them is no longer a Snake Eyes solo title. I'm not even quite sure Hama could've pulled that off.

[anarky]

Just read the preview of the new Cobra on Newsarama. I'm not sure I'm sold on the Oktober Guard being re-imagined as assassins. It just seems, I dunno, wrong.

[anarky]

Triple post! Are you even still here, Grimlock, or are you too busy sucking balls?

Have you read this?

Holy fucking shitballs.

Looking around online, it appears I'm once again disagreeing with most of the vocal internet Joe fanatics, but this looks MOTHERFUCKING EPIC! Finally! Someone's doing something new with the book, aside from this weird mishmash of completely novel re-imaginings juxtaposed with a weird attempt to make a hyper-realistic version of the old toyline.

I know there have been "public" superhero teams, but has a major comic book ever dealt with a similar special forces team?

[RoIIo Tomassi]

I can see the "soldiers as celebrities" angle playing. In the wake of badass mofos like Seal Team 6 being the rockstars of the armed forces in real life, it's not much of a stretch to segue that into the fictional Joe world.

However, in the Joe-verse, wouldn't this open up a HUGE can of worms? All of these people are officially dead. I don't care how bad ass your Elite Military Unit is, those kind of nefarious misdealings would not go over with Congressional Oversight, the Media, the families of soldiers(both those in and not in the Joe team) and probably the rest of the country. The benefits of going public have no chance against the downside of going public.
Hopefully VanLente will address that in the series.

[Tom Foolery]

Issue 21 of Snake-Eyes is gonna be a "silent" issue as an homage to the original GIJoe 21.

Every 21st issue of every comic should be silent. With all these reboots and relaunches from Marvel and DC all the time. That would be awesome.

[anarky]

Snake Eyes/Storm Shadow is tripe. This was, overall, one of the weakest Joe books I've read, and I read fucking Dreadnoks Declassified. The sad thing is, the overall story should be decent, and I know Dixon is capable of a lot better. This was just a fucking mess, with gaps so big I couldn't help but wonder if they left out an entire issue when they reprinted it in paperback. Art varied from downright gorgeous to pretty shitty, sometimes from page to page.

Seriously. Felt like entire issues were missing, but they weren't. Helix stuck out like a sore thumb.

[jjreason]

I have just finished the 13s of each series & have to read through the rest. I read them month by month as opposed to title by title - were the last issues of season 2 the 19s?

[anarky]

I'm not sure. I only know them by paperbacks, where they're not numbered well, if at all.

Not to change subject (because Rollo or one of his alter egos can probably help you), but I read the first two volumes of the Devil's Due G.I. Joe vs the Transformers (by way of IDW's G.I. Joe/Transformers Vol. 2 paperback). Wow. I don't mean that in a good way, but not exactly in a bad way.

Series 1 started familiar. I know I read the first issue in floppies. But the rest was new to me... though I did recall the last few pages. I'm not sure why this is. Did I read it, and forgot it? Or did I drop it after the first ish and happen to read the last few pages on the rack to see how it ended?

I forgot how incredibly wordy Blaylock was. The underlying story isn't bad, but, really, did (for instance) Flint and Lady Jaye need a whole fucking paragraph each to introduce themselves to Hawk, in consecutive panels, a panel after Flagg gave them equally wordy intros? It was almost like some of Jim Lee's early Image stuff, where he had some dude I guess was his high school buddy write fucking War & Peace on every page. Art is decent, but not spectacular. Major holes in the plot (Bumblebee and Wheeljack are free of Cobra because they were in another part of the Ark... only Bumblebee's inert form is seen by Starscream's, and we know he's captured), but okay enough.

Series 2, I know I haven't read. This is a fucking mess with pretty pictures. Shockwave manipulates Cobra scientists to open a space bridge to Cybertron so he can invade. Which he apparently, as far as I can tell, does so by communicating surreptitiously via a space bridge. Why not open it himself? Some Joes attack Cobra, and they're transported to Cybertron right as a grenade goes off and transports several Transformers to Earth at different times, giving them alt modes based on time-appropriate vehicles. And supposedly locks them in this form, though this turns out to only be the case when it's convenient to the story. If the Joes and Cobras don't work together to put a chip on each Transformer that will free their minds and allow them to change form (even if they're not locked in it; don't ask), the world will end in fire every ten years for all of history. They have twelve hours per team, or the world ends through all time without any of the TFs actually doing anything. Do not ask. It doesn't make sense, and I've never heard of time travel used this way. I can only guess this was an answer the the Dreamwave version of Joe/TF set in World War II, which was much more popular than the Devil's Due version. Never mind that, because Shockwave rules Cybertron and the TF cast is essentially that of the second Dreamwave miniseries, this is actually much closer already to the Dreamwave mainline TF continuity. Oh, and the Dinobots are given alt forms that are dinosaurs, despite not even being machines, and they singlehandedly defeat all the Decepticons on the planet because their dinosaur forms are more powerful than any TF, or something. Seriously, it's a mess that makes little sense on any level (particularly whenever they try to explain the shitty pseudo-science), though, strangely, not so bad that I felt I wasted my time reading it.

[RoIIo Tomassi]

I honestly can't remember a single thing about the two DDP crossover series. I actually had to look in my little logbook to see if I had the second one (I do).

I skipped Art of War (the third series) and got the first of the two Back Horizon issues for $6.99. I guess they cut the four issue series down to two issues by doubling the size of each issue and tripling the price. It sucked. I eventually found the second issue for a quarter so it helped even out the cost of the first issue. I'm also working on finding the Art of War issues.

Mostly what I remember about the series were the covers. Any image of Optimus and Snake Eyes together is cool.

The DreamWave series kicked ass. Did they do a sequel? I'm completely blanking on that one.

[anarky]

A question on tonight's Jeopardy! test was a description of some art form split across three panels, something something, something else.

It was just barely enough for me to think, "That reminds me of that old comic book, the one with the Eco-Warriors. TRIPTYCH!!"

Looked it up afterward, and it was the right answer.

If I make it on Jeopardy! this year, I have Larry Hama to thank for it.

[jjreason]

I read the GI Joe vs Snake Eyes 6 part story here this afternoon. I would say that I didn't like it very much, except I have no idea what happened at the end even though I went back over it a couple of times to try and figure it out. Did they think Snake Eyes was trapped in the ship? Did the ship sink?

[anarky]

Spoilers, asshole!!!

j/k. I'm not too concerned about spoilers on this title anymore.