G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero #1

This review was comissioned by @krinsbez.

"G.I. Joe" is yet another piece of children's media targeted at my age range in my country that my parents kept me largely ignorant of. I picked up the basic concept from my elementary school friends, and I saw a few of the (since memefied) "knowing is half the battle" public service announcements on TV using the characters, but I never actually watched an episode of any of the series or read any of the comics.

There were various comics and the like titled "G.I. Joe" as early as the 1940's, but the franchise we're talking about really started as a toy line back in the early sixties. In fact, the G.I. Joe toys were apparently the originator of the term "action figure," which makes them an important piece of industry history even before getting into their conceptual influence.

The comic I'm going to look at today is a project that franchise owner Hasbro licensed to Marvel Comics in 1982, and enjoyed a highly successful run of 152 issues.

The cover features Stan Lee's name at once of the edges, but he isn't credited as having actually worked on this. Maybe he bought the creators donuts a few times or something, idk.​

The ultimate weapon of democracy, you say? Consider my interest piqued. Let's have a look at this newest dispensary technique for America's chief export!

The first page teaches us all about...well, I don't know if it's the ultimate weapon of democracy, but it's definitely a weapon. Or at least a toy of a weapon that the comic is meant to shill.

That's very helpful, Flash. You should think about being a tourguide after you retire from the military, you'd be great at it.

Anyway, as weapon designs go this seems okay. The necessity of the trail legs seems questionable to me, since a laser isn't going to have any recoil, but I guess it could still help stabilize the HAL during transport. The other thing I don't get is the slightly upward angle the barrel seems to be held at by default, which once again makes perfect sense for a longranged projectile weapon but not so much for a laser. Overall, I think they chained themselves a little too closely to how modern weapons look when they came up with this futuristic one, but it's still decent.

Well, next page introduces us to the actual story. "G.I. Joe" is an American elite rapid-deployment counterterrorism task force headquartered under, for some odd reason, the Army Chaplain Assistant School. Like I said, odd choice of sites to base Toy Delta Force out of. Anyway, this introductory issue will be telling the story of "Operation: Lady Doomsday." Not sure if that's just an evocative codename, or if they actually are up against a villain named Lady Doomsday. Turns out it's...sort of both, but also sort of neither! We open on a train carrying a critical whistleblower from New York to Washington DC, where she's supposed to testify in front of congress. Dr. Adele Burkhart is a nuclear physicist who was lured into working on an insanely powerful MAD weapon under false pretences, and from the sound of things there's a big chunk of the federal government who aren't thrilled about the Pentagon designing the biggest bomb ever without so much as informing them about it either.

Surprisingly, Dr. Bukhart is holding a press conference aboard the train itself, before even getting to DC. There are feds all over the train, but apparently no gag order.

The train's own crew, meanwhile, are incredibly anxious about this trip. The American people's reactions to the leak have been polarized, to say the least. Everyone on the right wants Dr. Bukhart dead. Everyone on the left wants to suck her dick. It's very likely that someone is going to try something before or during her testimony on the hill, and letting her do a press conference now makes "before" much more likely. So yeah, the conductor and engineer ain't happy about this.

I will say that this is already a much more politically nuanced scenario than I was expecting. A pleasant surprise, at least for now. Let's see if it sticks the landing.

The art is also a bit better than I was expecting, come to think of it.

Unsurprisingly, the train crew prove to be correct. A swarm of airborne infantry with silly-looking uniforms and sillier-looking gliders descend on the train out of nowhere. As the feds scramble to the defence, some of the reporters whip cleverly concealed pistols out of their fake cameras and shoot them in the back. The bad guys planned this out really well, it seems; I think there's a very good chance they have someone in the Pentagon pulling strings for them. The feds are hampered by panicking civilians, and ultimately crushed in the two-pronged assault. The leader of the assault, an unassuming-looking woman who the others address as "Baroness," grabs the VIP and forces the remaining defenders to stand down.

Also, I dig the Baroness' sense of humor. Like, seriously, half of the quips that the script gives her are more along the lines of what you'd expect from the hero. And like. A FUNNY hero, specifically.

Once they're in the bathroom, the Baroness - still holding Dr. Bukhart at gunpoint - attaches some kind of harness to both of them, breaks the window, and wrestles the doctor outside before HAHAHAHA OH MY GOD SHE JUST FUCKING METAL GEAR SOLID 5'D THEM THIS LADY IS THE BEST

A helicopter collects the two of them before rendezvousing with their main (hypersonic) aircraft and beating it.

How are they going to retrieve all those soldiers who divebombed or infiltrated the train? I don't see any other Kojima-pattern fultons floating up after them. Hmm.

Well, anyway, cut to the Pentagon. While I suspect that someone with a fancy office in this building was complicit in what just happened, the memo understandably didn't get passed around all that much, and the generals we're now introduced to are in full panic mode. The abductors left a message saying that any attempt at rescuing Dr. Bukhart will result in her immediate murder...and also were polite enough to identify themselves as Cobra. Which is pretty blatantly daring the Americans to do the thing they're also warning them not to do. They're doing some kind of whacky headgames with this, for sure, which indicates that what they want might be strongly related to the type of response that the abduction provokes. Unfortunately, just giving in to their textual demands isn't an option either; Dr. Bukhart knows way, way too much about America's nuclear weapons technology to be left in enemy hands, and even if their little headgame fails Cobra will certainly be happy to extract that information for their own uses.

As for the actual goal...well, that kind of comes down to what Cobra even is. At its core, Cobra is an evil organization full of toy heavily armed mooks and toy cackling supervillains who cause trouble and need to be fought by toy commandoes with futuristic toy weapons. The in-story justification for Cobra, when it bothers to have one, varies heavily from version to version. Sometimes they have a political agenda, or are a vanguard for alien invaders, or are a resurgent ancient conspiracy. Usually though, it comes down to "some dickhead pyramid scheme runner sold enough essential oils to turn his followers into a private army, and is now using it to bully national governments into giving him even more money." Dunno which version this comic is going with, so I can't guess at their goal with this operation yet.

Anyway, while some of the brass would consider the best outcome to be one where Cobra executes Dr. Bukhart and then gets wiped out by conventional forces, others don't think that's a good idea. Not because they don't hate the whistleblower, but rather because everyone knows that they do hate her, and if they end up getting her killed it'll be impossible to make it look unintentional on the Pentagon's part. Heads will end up rolling, and their own heads are probably going to be among them.

Sucks, but the whole point of the military is to be there for things that suck.

Anyway, they can't just bomb Cobra's base off the map, and a conventional assault is likely to both result in the captive's execution and to be a high casualty event in general due to Cobra's sturdy defences. So, it's time to send in Toy Delta Force to figure out some whacky infiltration hijinks. Let's look at those GI Joe dossiers!

I remember from one of the cartoons that Snake-Eyes never takes his suit off, or speaks in coherent words. I don't recall if the reason for this was ever explained.

Anyway, the squad leader is a guy named Colonel Clayton Abernathy, who goes by the cringey military nickname of "Hawk." Hey, it's still better than Mad Dog Mattis, cut the guy some slack. Cut to Abernathy being chauffeured to the base and having an amusing exchange with the driver about which generals signed the order to break the speed limit this badly and, accordingly, how seriously the order should be taken. It's cute, and really feels like a PG-ified version of actual military smalltalk. Meanwhile, one of the generals goes down to the training level to get the rest of the squad ready.

Predictably, most of the GI Joes aren't thrilled about being sent to rescue Dr. Burkhart. To the point where I'd be extremely worried about "friendly fire" incidents if I were that general.

I don't think this comic will actually go there, but it's already surprised me just by acknowledging the problems with American militarism and gray blob interests at all. I don't know these characterd nearly well enough to say that none of them will go full heel and become a villain. So, it's possible. Very unlikely, but possible.

They're summoned to the briefing room, where they recieve good news and bad news. The good news is that they have good high-atmosphere surveillance of Cobra's island base in the Carribean. The bad news is that the island has more SAM sites on it than the District of Columbia, some of them nestled in among the houses of the island's impoverished fisherfolk. Cobra made sure they picked a place with abundant human shields, naturally, and this abduction stunt of theirs has gotten the world's eyes on America's response. Clever bastards. They've also got somewhere around a thousand soldiers on the island, with bunkers, multiple barbed wire and concrete wall lines around their vital structures, and antiship mines in the surrounding water. The only infiltration option is to make a distant water landing with tiny little boats or divers and try to sneak ashore around all the active defenses. Not a good time.

How did they ever manage to build this giant fortified base so close to US waters without the Americans coming down on them in the first place, I wonder? We might just be handwaving this away under the genre convention provision, but we also might not be. I'll be pleasantly surprised once again if we're not.

So, whacky multi-part amphibious infiltration plan it will have to be. Unfortunately, Cobra might be able to match them in the whacky shenanigans arena as well. They have reason to believe that the organization's leader, the pseudonymous Cobra Commander, is present on the island. They only have one photo of Cobra Commander, and he looks like he may be related to Snake Eyes.

As you might expect of a villain with such a goofy outfit, Cobra Commander is really, really good at whacky shenanigans. His shenanigans may even exceed those of GI Joe. However, it's still their least bad option.

The team is also warned about Cobra Commander's top field agent who's probably been co-running the base's security ever since she returned with the captive. The woman known only as "Baroness" is one hell of a shenanigan performer herself. She does hijinks, even. And also has a real penchant for traps and tricks that tend to involve explosives, specifically. So yeah, watch your step, and watch anyone who looks like they might be her.

When given an overview of the rescue target, Dr. Bukhart, Hawk tries to meet his underlings where they are and say that the media has "painted a pretty black picture" of her, but that the headlines might be inflammatory and they really shouldn't judge her before they meet her. I get the impression that Hawk himself is actually a bit more sympathetic to the whistleblower than he lets on, but is pretending to be less so in order to not alienate the grunts. It only sort of works. Most of the team still thinks they shouldn't be risking their lives to save a "traitor," and at least a couple of them think they should just carpet bomb the island back underwater. Hawk has to remind them that there are civilians on the island, and also that even if there wasn't it wouldn't matter, because the GI Joes are soldiers, and soldiers follow their fucking orders.

The troops still don't look happy. Despite Hawk's best efforts, this mission appears likely to face sabotage from within as well as from without. And possibly from above as well; the flag officers in Washington SEEM to have arrived at a consensus about the need to rescue Bukhart, but there may still be dissenters who just aren't saying it out loud. This is going to be a nightmare of an operation.

That evening, at Cobra's island base, the captive Dr. Bukhart is visited by Cobra Commander. If the Baroness was a real character, this guy is something else. He doesn't have quite the same offbeat "action hero but evil" charm, but he has this sort of bizarrely self-aware scenery-chewing villainy that hits my funnybone hard. My best concise description of him would be "movie M. Bison, but better."

To be fair, movie M. Bison might have been directly inspired by Cobra Commander.​

There's also...hmm. I think the comic is doing something, with this scene. In the panels leading up to the above screenshot, Bukhart was telling Cobra Commander that his plans to drug the nuclear secrets out of her are fruitless because any minute now Uncle Sam is going to turn this island into an ocean trench. In her own words, a government willing to develop a weapon like the doomsday project - let alone mislead the scientists they have working on it - isn't going to think twice about carpet bombing an island that happens to have a village of poor nonwhites on it. Cobra Commander responded by saying that things aren't quite as simple as she's making it sound. In that context, the above screenshot...hmm. I'll get back to this at the end of the post.

As Cobra Commander finishes chewing up the scenery and begins swallowing it before Dr. Bukhart's terrified eyes, the GI Joe advance team is being lowered to the sea in an inflatable boat just outside of radar range. They spot Cobra's beach defences just as the defenders spot them. Fortunately, there's still one thing the squad has that Cobra's forces don't, and that thing is "a guy with a jetpack and a bunch of grenades."

The rather ornery man who goes by "Stalker" manages to close the distance between boat and shore before the cobras can react, and causes enough chaos and destruction for the rest of the GI Joes to win the following shooting match and successfully land their boat. The fleeing cobras will soon be back with friends, of course, but that's okay. As long as GI Joe can reach the jungle before then, they can make themselves very difficult to find. Now, it's time for the commandoes to split up and try to sabotage as much defensive infrastructure as possible to clear a helicopter landing zone. Hopefully, Cobra won't make good on their threat and execute the doctor immediately once defences start going down.

Interestingly, jetpack-Stalker plays the same battlefield role in this 1980's comic that drones eventually came to play in the real life modern world. If this story were written today the GI Joes would need to have a different trick, because nobody is surprised by portable air support anymore.

When he receives word of the encounter, Cobra Commander isn't upset at all. In fact, he isn't even disappointed in the troops who were forced to retreat. Quite the opposite.

That said, I'm starting to question what we've been told about Cobra Commander's tactical brilliance. Like, if I were him I don't think I'd be saying that right in front of the soldiers I thought I'd sent to their deaths. Hell, I wouldn't even say it in front of my other soldiers who I didn't pick for that assignment but might have. I'm not sure what exactly he incentivizes his minions with, in this version, but even if he has some intense cult indoctrination going on this would still be tempting fate.

Baroness thinks that these commandos are a little too effective for her taste, even if they're not as dangerous as Cobra Commander expected. Best to kill the hostage now, just in case. The Commander disagrees, however. The way he sees it, even if he's allowing himself to get overconfident, the long and short of it is that as long as he has Dr. Bukhart alive and imprisoned, the GI Joes have to come to the central fort where he can bring all his forces to bear. Even if they secure the entire rest of the island and destroy all his outer defences, they still can't attack the main building as long as he has a gun to Bukhart's head.

Eh...he's forgetting something though. Or else, maybe the writers are forgetting it. After the train attack, Cobra left a message saying that any attempts at rescuing the doctor would result in her execution. An attempt at rescuing her has been made now, and they aren't executing her. So, if it comes down to a seige of his central bunker, how seriously will the Americans take the exact same threat that Cobra Commander failed to go through with the last time he made it? Every time he fails to carry out a threat, his ability to use threats to manipulate his enemies is weakened.

Then again, he also seems to have some secret agenda behind this caper beyond the obvious. Something terrorist-y involving the manner of response he provokes from the Americans. Until I know what his actual goal is, I can't really comment on the efficacy of his methods. For all I know, this first issue will end with a total Cobra Commander victory as he pulls the carpet out from everyone with his true objective. Letting the villain have an early W is just good technique if you want your audience to take them seriously as a threat in the chapters to come, after all.

Well. Anyway.

The infiltrators split up and creep their ways through the island jungle. One duo manages to find its way to an unmanned radar tower, where a bit of digging into the ground turns up the connection between it and the main bunker. There's a cute little exchange here.

Heh.​

They carefully laser it open and tap into the comm wire, so they can mess with the live footage and just loop some "all clear" readings while the main force approaches from that direction. Granted, Cobra knows that the infiltrators have landed, so spoofing their radar might not actually help all that much, but still it's something.

Another group, meanwhile, sneaks its way toward the main fortress, arriving at around sunset. Turns out that they aren't keeping Dr. Bukhart underground like I'd thought. She's up on the second or third story of an old spanish fort that Cobra refurbished, in a room that contains windows. The mission's other main point of tension starts rearing its head again as the infiltrators make visual contact.

Yeah. This is going to be the trickiest part of the mission for sure. Maintaining discipline and preventing "accidents" among troops in an uncontrolled environment who don't want to be on this mission and hate the rescuee for personal as well as ideological reasons.

In the meantime, the third duo of infiltrators make it to the base's airfield, which they're able to destroy with mortar charges and then disappear back into the jungle before they can get shot. However, it seems like they aren't actually even being pursued.

A dummy airfield. Even the corpse of a uniformed Cobra trooper left on the ground turns out to be a convincing dummy. We know Cobra must have at least a couple of real planes on the island, but they seem to be hidden somewhere less conspicuous, probably a camouflaged hangar or something. Considering that they also are leaving their radar towers unmanned despite allegedly having a thousand men on the island, this base is starting to seem like a Potemkin village. Cobra Commander is doing shenanigans alright. Hell, this might even count as chicanery.

The surveillance that the Pentagon ran before sending GI Joe in might have actually been spoofed by super-convincing decoy tricks, or it might be that Cobra has a man on the inside. Both seem entirely possible.

Anyway, I'll split it here. So far, this comic has had a surprising amount of nuance, and it's done some clever things to set up the story's real underlying conflict of "the US military as it wants to see itself" vs. "the US military as it actually is."

On one hand, the fact that the democratically-minded, loyal-to-a-fault voices within the military seem to be winning out so far is pretty predictable "America ra ra ra" for an eighties comic. On the other, the fact that more cynical, jingoistic voices are acknowledged to exist at all and to be a serious problem that needs constant vigilance against is much more unusual for such a comic. Notably, the cynical jingoists aren't just right-wing caricatures, nor are they shown to be blatantly corrupt or insincere in a way that would let the comic denounce them as individuals without confronting their ideals. The GI Joe-verse paints an image of what a better version of the US military should be like (within the confines of America's nature as an imperial power, anyway), while still acknowledging the problems that it actually has.

This part is more of a stretch, but I think Cobra also fits into this thematic arrangement. On one hand, sure, they're an impossible convenient enemy that makes the ethics of the situation impossibly easy; no political agenda that we can see, no grievances against the world order as far as we can tell, extravagantly abusive to its own lower-ranked members, motivated purely by greed and powerlust. On the other hand, if you look at their METHODS...we have a bunch of self-obsessed rich white people building bases in the global south and not giving two shits how it effects the natives, practicing "enhanced interrogation techniques" on captives and paving over historical relics to build their facilities. Like I said, I feel like I might be reading into this too much, but Cobra feels like a cartoon caricature of the US defense establishment at its worst.

That definitely adds some subtext to the dialogue between Dr. Bukhart and Cobra Commander. She thinks the USA is going to kill everyone on this island without regard for the lives of herself or the civilian bystanders, because of course they would. Cobra Commander replies that no, they're still too weak-willed and principled to do that, they're not like him.

And of course, the fact that the main reason those generals in the Pentagon scene gave for NOT just doing what Bukhart said was a pragmatic one; this is a high profile incident, and doing a war crime right now would be bad optics. Implying that if it weren't so high profile, maybe they WOULD do a war crime right now.

I don't want to overstate my case. This IS still an "America ra ra ra" story, and it's handling the military with an incredibly soft pair of kid gloves. If it came out today, I'd be much less charitable toward it. For a comic aimed at children in the eighties though, the creators were being pretty damned bold. Granted, until I reach the end of the story, I won't be sure quite how much praise they ultimately deserve. We'll find out together next time.