GI Joe Vol IV By Larry Hama

GI Joe Vol IV

By Larry Hama

“The only rational purpose for mastering violence is to abolish it” 

Storm Shadow page 207

Having discussed Mr. Hama in-depth in my review of Volume 1 and added to that in Volume 3, I don't really have anything to add. Other than to repeat my call to allow him to write for the Scrooge McDuck comic, so that a man who has given so much to our popular culture can realize one of his great ambitions. Hell, maybe I should go ahead and start a letter-writing campaign. Anyways let's turn to GI Joe Volume 4 which collects together issues 31 to 41, which ran from January to November of 1985. So this graphic novel gives you almost an entire year of Joe for your reading enjoyment. Unlike volume III which kicked off with the silent issue and proceeded along with a strong ninja focused theme, this graphic novel doesn't really have a theme. The biggest thing tying it together is there is a lot of set up that will pay off in future volumes and the appearance and expansion of the roles of several civilian characters that would never really appear anywhere else.

The first of those is Billy, who did appear in earlier volumes but I didn't want to discuss him because of spoilers. In fact, I'm going to tell you that if you haven't read these comics to go ahead and skip this review until you at least catch up here. It's okay, the wonderful thing about the written word is that it can wait for you! For those of you who don't care about spoilers, have already read these comics, or are returning, Billy is Cobra Commanders' son. Now in prior volumes, Billy had been operating in Springfield - the American city covertly ruled by Cobra - as a one boy anti-cobra insurgency (That must make family gatherings a bit awkward…{Pretty sure they don’t have those}). Which given that he seems about twelve is honestly very impressive. Billy, however, has been brainwashed and trained by the Baroness and Major Bludd to kill his own father while posing as a member of the Cobra Youth (Wow, okay. Villain Infighting™. They are all basically like the pre-Rule of Two sith.{This is more Game of Thrones than the HBO show!}). Strangely it's not Cobra Commander who recognizes his own son but Destro! Destro prevents the assassination, not because he wants Cobra Commander alive but because he objects to forcing Billy to commit Patricide. This adds another layer of mystery onto just what is the history between Destro and Cobra Commander; I mean Baroness has been an actual member of Cobra since Volume I at least, but it's Destro who recognizes Billy? This also opens (And then promptly closes, because the question is self-answering. Bad. Very Bad.) the question of just how bad a father Cobra Commander is anyways? I mean there's the issue of not recognizing your only kid when he's five feet away from you, on top of the fact that Billy has apparently been in and out of Cobra dungeons for who knows how long and Cobra Commander didn't seem to even notice! I mean... If you only got one kid how hard is it to keep track of him? Especially when you have armies of minions to help! Cobra Commander couldn't even seem to do the bare minimum of shipping his only son off to a boarding school! I mean seriously Stalin managed to do better than this as a parent and he was fucking Stalin! (Indeed. He managed to keep his daughter Svetlana away from Beria, and Vasily only turned into a paranoid drunk! Mom did kill herself over the Holodomor though, so that explains the alcoholism...It’s only Stalin’s fault indirectly! Yakov…. Well, he died in Sachsenhausen Konzentrationslager during The Great Patriotic War.) Lucky Billy's behavior during his “trial” builds admiration in Storm Shadow, who gets Billy out of there and proceeds to parent him... By teaching him to be a deadly ninja assassin but in Storm Shadow's defense, that's how he was raised (I mean, you do what you can with what you have…).

This volume also introduces Candy Apple, a young lady who works in her father's business as Bongo the Balloon Bear. She gets pulled into things when she loans her van to a group of Joes dueling with a Crimson Guard family in a mall (I will explain) and that leads to a relationship with Ripcord, a paratrooper Joe with acrobatic skills. Their relationship is marred by her frustration that Ripcord won't share his real name with her or explain why some of their dates dissolve into gun battles (Given how she meets him, I don’t know why that needs to be explained. Also, he’s gotta be hella fun in the sack so…). I can't really blame her here as those are legitimate complaints (The real name thing yes, the gun battle thing…{I’m gonna disagree, if I keep taking a girl out and getting jumped by masked men, I want to know why!.} “It’s classified, I can’t tell you.” is an acceptable answer.). Revelations about her family take this into a whole other direction but I'm going to hold off on discussing those until a future review. We also get more of the family of Crimson Guardsmen: the Broca's. In the comics, the Crimson Guardsmen are mostly deep cover operatives infiltrating American society to operate as a 5th column for Cobra operations (I serve the Soviet Union. {I knew it!} I jest. Kinda. But this is straight uplifted from the KGB playbook. They were really really good at inserting sleeper agents - sometimes families - into the US. McCarthy wasn’t wrong to worry about commies hiding behind the curtains. They/we were definitely there, diligently making extremely detailed pre-google maps of American cities and trying - largely unsuccessfully - to find out military information, but the US government was very terrible at finding them and he had no idea what he was doing. He was right in that they were there, but they also weren’t much of a threat. Most of the successes of the Soviet spy program was the use of already-cleared individuals who defected.). In this case, the Broca's are stationed outside of the US Army base that the Pitt, the secret GI Joe base, is under but keep coming up short on getting definitive evidence of Joe operations. We also see what happens to a Crimson Guardsmen who is killed in action, he is replaced by another one surgically altered to look like the fallen man, and his family is supposed to just accept that and keep heading forward (Yeah, no the USSR didn’t go that far.). It's a rather firm reminder that in Cobra the individual's life and freedom don't mean anything and you're expected to not just sacrifice your life but arrange even your most intimate relationships according to Cobra's requirements.

There's also a lot of setting up for future plots in this volume and new characters are introduced, for example, the Joes Duke, Shipwreck, Lady Jaye, Spirit, and Airborn are introduced. Now Spirit and Airborn are introduced fairly well but I'll admit that I don't like that Spirit is dressed up as a stereotypical Native American scout, complete with wearing a US cavalry blouse over fringed buckskin pants (Oy gevalt). Although to be honest I believe that Hasbro was mostly behind that. The original Joes all tended to wear uniforms that could pass as some kind of military uniform whereas newer joes would get progressively more and more... Colorful. Lady Jaye on the other hand is wearing a military uniform but her first act as a Joe is picking a fight with Scarlet. I got to admit to not understanding this as Lady Jaye is only the 3rd woman Joe at this point and the first thing she does is pick a fight with one of the only other women on the base and the one who outranks her? Odd choices like that aside, there are good character moments in here, such as Stalker standing up for the rights of Americans to disagree with how their military is used or general government policy (If only the actual US government then and now actually agreed.). His argument is that it is a fundamental right and that in a democracy compromise is vital. I agree with that but with some very strong limits, you cannot compromise on the rights of your fellow citizens. For example, I can't and won't compromise with people who think laws should only apply to certain people and only certain people should have rights. Either we all have our rights and we're all free or we don't have rights only privileges extended to certain people that can be taken away at any moment. For example, all lives can't matter if black lives don't. Some of you might be saying I shouldn't drag politics into a GI Joe comic but my reply is if you read these damn things you'll see politics is baked right fucking in. So I'm not going to pretend there's no political or social commentary here. (And every last one of you know that I drag my politics into these all the damn time. If you don’t like it, there’s the door.)

However, the sheer amount of set up means that there's no real complete story in this volume and we're left hanging for several things. In Volume II, we had the complete story of Kwinn and Dr. Venom's feud. Volume III gave us the story of Storm Shadow and the resolution of his feud with Snake Eyes. Volume IV not so much but there is a lot introduced here that will pay off in the future, I can only grade the work in front of me. So GI Joe Volume IV gets a B-. It's a good read but it's the weakest volume of GI Joe so far and there's too much that I have to read future issues to get any payoff that I can't justify a higher grade in my mind.

That wraps up America month here at the review series. Next week I review a book selected by our ever-wise patrons, The City of Brass by S.A Chakraborty! If you would like to have a voice in recommending reviews, future books or theme months, join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where a dollar a month gets you a vote. Our September poll goes up tonight! Until next time, thank you and keep reading!