GI Joe: Classics Vol I By Larry Hama

GI Joe: Classics Vol I

By Larry Hama 

So imagine you're a Hasbro executive in the early 1980s and Kenner, a rival toy company just handed your company the profit beating of its life with it's Star Wars action figures. I mean the company isn't in any real danger but this is eating into your market share and the boss just told you that the bonuses are now on the line (which puts your cocaine hot tubbing weekends in serious danger [Oh man! I’ll only be able to use ONE my my private jets and snort five eightballs from the asses as eight high-end hookers instead of two trips on different private jets and double the hookers and blow! Noooo!]). You got this product line, GI Joe, it was big in the 1960s but the Vietnam War has left the market for military toys kinda small. So what do you do? Apparently what you do is call a comic book company and rebuild from the ground up, changing the size of the toys, the backstory (not that there was much before), everything (The other thing you’ll do is pressure the government to change the law so you can put unlimited adverts in children’s programming and then use that to create an entire TV show that is basically one giant advertisement.) The company they called was Marvel, who in turn called in Larry Hama.

Larry Hama was born in 1949 in New York, a third generation Asian American raised in Queens. He grew up in his own words “playing Kodokan Judo as a kid” and later studied Kyudo (Japanese Archery) and Laido, which is a Japanese form of swordsmanship focused on using smooth controlled motions to draw your sword, cut your opponent, clean the blood from the sword and return the sword to the scabbard. He was also very passionate about art and that led him to study at Manhattan's High School of Art and Design, where at the age of 16 he sold his first comic to the fantasy film magazine Castle of Frankenstein. After graduation, he worked drawing shoes (Back in the hoary days of yore when an artist could earn a living…) for a catalog until serving in the Army Corps of Engineers in 1969 to 1971, where he became a firearm and explosive expert (As you well know, demolition is an art, and a science.). Afterward, he would find himself active in New York's Asian community and moved into the comic world, where he did some work at Marvel before landing as an editor for DC. While at DC he worked on Wonder Woman, Mister Miracle, Super Friends, and the Warlord. Around 1977 or 1978 he created Bucky O Hare. In 1980 he returned to Marvel (where he met his wife Carol) and worked on the comic The 'Nam and Wolverine. He also started working up a pitch for a spin-off of the Nick Fury comics, Fury Force. Fury Force would have been a daring special mission force battling the evil forces of Hydra. Instead, he got tapped to write GI Joe, and collaborated with Archer Goodwin to come up with Cobra to play the villains to the Joe’s Heroics. Ironically Hasbro was worried about selling bad guys (those bad guys became 40% of their sales) and about selling toys based on girl joes (also had no problems selling those) (It’s almost like sexist bullshit is bullshit.) Hama and Marvel stuck to their guns however and we're all better off. Hama's introduction of female characters who were motivated, tough and not willing to be defined by their male co-troops brought in a remarkably high female readership. Under Mr. Hama's leadership, a diverse cast also made up the GI Joe team members which in a lot of ways would support its longevity and this comic had legs. It ran from 1982 to 1994 with 155 issues, 147 were written by Hama, 2 were co-written by him and one was penciled by him. By 1985 it was Marvel's top subscription title and received 1200 fan letters a week. It was also credited with bringing in legions of new comic book readers as GI Joe was their introduction to the comic medium. Now a lot of this was Mr. Hama being willing to ignore the cartoon (given it didn't start until 1985, he kinda had to) and other sources. Additionally, Hasbro was willing to give them a large degree of latitude and Mr. Hama was writing the profile for each character's toys as well. This is just as well as Mr. Hama did not shy away from confronting and tackling the issues of military life or the contradictions of being in an organization that preaches ideals of honor and duty while asking its members to do often very dark deeds. Because let me be blunt, war is full of dark deeds even if you don't break a single law of war. The laws of war aren't there to prevent horrible things from happening, just to make sure that they're horrible things everyone else can live with (Well… almost everyone…That’s kinda where the horrible things come in. Unless the war gets really bad and “almost everyone” becomes a bit more relative.). Mr. Hama's own experience in returning from Vietnam also makes an impact here. In the GI Joe comics, you'll find little glory or jingoism but you will find a considered look at what being a soldier, sailor, marine, or airmen means. Even if it's dressed up in colorful outfits and takes place between stories of punching everything from terrorist, mutants, and manic robots (Are they really Manic? I mean, that’s a psychiatric symptom. Do the robots have prolonged periods of euphoria, hyperactivity, grandiose delusions, and poor impulse control?{I don't know ask Megatron or Starscream}). What's interesting is that while GI Joe might be Mr. Hama’s most lasting contribution to the world, it's not what he was aiming for. He originally wanted to write comics featuring more anthropomorphic creatures, like ducks. He's mentioned that his greatest ambition is to write for Scoorge McDuck and I dearly hope someone gives him a shot.

The first graphic novel collects issues 1 through 10, there's not really an overarching plotline connecting the issues but the stories all interconnect and feed off of each other. The series starts off in media res, not giving us an origin for Cobra or for the Joe Team but does introduce us to characters like Snake Eyes, Scarlett, Duke, Cobra Commander, Dr. Venom, and Baroness. At this point, we really only see the basic Cobra troopers and the Baroness serving as Cobra Commander's right-hand woman (Dr. Venom staying safely in his lab [As is good and proper. We academics ought not risk ourselves on the field of battle! What are you mad? The only ones who should do that are the Applied Computational Demonologists and Combat Epistemologists who might be necessary if creatures with Too Many Tentacles And Mouths rise from the vasty deep to eat our brains]) and the GI Joe team is a very small group barely more than a squad in size. The unit's very existence is top secret with the troops posting as the motor transport element of the Chaplin's assistance school, in Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island. A little fun fact, Fort Wadsworth was a real military base until 1995, it's currently part of a National Recreation Area. Their secret base the Pit is hidden underground and the Joes have to conduct their mission in secret keeping that information even from other soldiers in the base. The comics mainly focus on the Joes while on missions and show that while they are mostly operating against Cobra, they are used for a variety of other missions. That said we start to get a sense of who these Joes are, even if some of the more colorful characters haven't shown up yet. They are sent on missions such as rescuing a Doctor who was in the middle of decrying the US Military when Cobra kidnapped her, investigating the disappearance of a US science station, and even going into Afghanistan for their first confrontation with the Soviet Oktober Guard; the USSR's own top-secret special missions unit. In what might be considered a story ahead of its time, there's even a mission where the Joes have to infiltrate a militia unit that might be looking to not just survive World War III, but start it (Weirdly prescient that one…). We also see Mr. Hama's willingness to set out the not-so-glamorous side of military service, long hours doing boring work like cleaning weapons or being sent out on missions to serve as a glorified decoy without even realizing that everything you're doing is a feint (Afterall, G.I. Joe was written as a toy advertisement, not a military recruitment tool). I'd just like to point out that Stalker's reaction to that is very realistic. We do manage to get some sense of the Joes as people, Clutch is a fast driving maniac who is a womanizing pig. Breaker is a huge computer nerd. Stalker is a man who enjoys being out in the wild and will take pictures as readily as he will take headshots (I’ll be seeing you, you won’t see me; with my telephoto in the night. It’s only right. Put Cobra in the gunner’s sight, bombs in the night, Recon-Scouts foreveeeeeer). Scarlett is a driven and motivated woman willing to take on the entire planet just to make people take her seriously. As a group or individuals, the Joes will be sent all across the planet to counter threats to the United States and its allies and hopefully advance the cause of freedom and democracy... Even if it's indirectly by preventing Cobra Commander from killing those ideals. Each issue gets its own mission with the focus being on different characters and different interactions. For me, the most colorful interactions were between Stalker and the Oktober Guard or Clutch and Scarlett. Frankly, Clutch is lucky that Scarlett was under military discipline, otherwise, they would never find his body (And nothing of value would be lost? {Well, he is a really good driver, but it is a big military gotta be at least one other guy or girl who can drive that well.}). If your main exposure to the Joes and Cobra before this was the cartoon, you're gonna find this a little confusing. My best advice is to forget that the cartoon even exists (Good advice for everyone, really).

Cobra hasn't quite reached it's fully realized form here, however. Most of the Cobra cast hasn't been brought into the story yet and there are elements that feel out of place to a reader looking back from decades in the future. Such as the quasi-fascist and not-so-quasi salutes that the troops use (there's a panel of Baroness giving a full out Nazi salute in the background for example) and a semi-deification of Cobra Commander that has the rank and file willing to go to their deaths on his orders. I can't say that this Cobra is unrecognizable however, it's clearly a matter of time and experimentation for Mr. Hama to fully express the unique brand of crazy evil that Cobra is. However, it does suffer from a lack of characters on team bad guy and not much explanation of just what Cobra is trying to do beyond “We're bad guys, we wanna rule the world.” We also get a number of nonaligned characters, my favorite being Kwinn, who is called an Eskimo but is actually an Inuit mercenary (I should note that the modern-day Inuit consider Eskimo a slur and ask that term a slur and ask that we don't use it anymore, that is how he is referred to in the book, which to be fair was written in 1982. So no hate to Mr. Hama here, but this will be the last time we refer to Kwinn as anything but an Inuit) who always fulfills his contract and has his own odd but understandable morality. He's the first character to actually really pull off a win against the Joes (of course he shows up in the second issue). Which brings up the interesting fact that the Joes don't pull off a 100% win rate in their own comic, or even in their first 10 issues which aides in it feeling realistic. Kwinn has an interesting character arc in the GI Joes series, but it's only his introduction that happens here so we'll have to wait till further reviews to cover it.

The comic is also full of the military slang and jargon of the period, which had changed drastically by the time I got into uniform. That said the terms are always defined clearly in the issue when they are used and Mr. Hama avoids going too far into the weeds I think. Keeping in mind that this comic is meant to sell toys, Mr. Hama also makes a point to give the gear and vehicles that the Joes were using space to shine as well, so you do have to put up with Steeler the tanker waxing poetic about the MOBAT, the Joes tank. That said I've run into tankers who actually do that, so it's not that out of place (I mean, we both know Military Hardware Nerds who do this and some of them never served. So of course the actual tankers are gonna do it). Plus I imagine any tanker who gets inducted into a special mission team would have to be fairly obsessed with his vehicle. This comic isn't for everyone if you flatout have no interest in anything military you're going to hate it, on the flip side if you're only mildly indifferent the character interactions and arcs have a strong chance of pulling you in. The character relationships are still being worked on here but you can see the roots that are going to grow into strong trees that will bear up one of the longer lasting series in comic history. I do fully recommend that you give the comic a try unless the very idea of the subject matter turns you off completely. I'm giving GI Joe Vol I a B+, mainly due to the fact that Cobra needs more time to develop and if we're going, to be honest, I know how much better this series is gonna get. Especially once we get Destro and Roadblock rocking across this battlefield.

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In the Red Text you had your editor Dr. Ben "only plays a recon scout on tv" Allen
In the Black Text you had your reviewer Garvin Anders.