G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero #1 (continued)

The pair of GI Joes at the converted Spanish fort start sneaking and stealth-ganking their way in to rescue and hopefully not murder the VIP. If they can get her out BEFORE the main force arrives by amphibious transport, then getting her off the island will be a hell of a lot easier and destroying Cobra's leadership much more straightforward. Meanwhile, the other two duos meet up again near the fishing village and update each other on their successes.

In the command room, Baroness seems to be losing faith in Cobra Commander's plans. In a way that doesn't really jive with the whole "they destroyed the dummy airfield, right on schedule" thing.

Either she's being left out of the loop for some intra-Cobra political reason, or she and Cobra Commander are putting on a show for the captive. Or else they know that the GI Joes are probably listening in already, and it's them they're trying to fuck with. Well, we'll see.

The rest of GI Joe lands, their amphibious vehicle disgorging a bunch of land vehicles containing the rest of the unit. Cobra's forces are getting smashed, but...I get the impression that these defenses are being manned by disposable rubes or people who Cobra Commander has already written off, with the actual valuable personnel being in hidden bunkers and aware of the true plan. I think. Maybe? I wish I knew more about what even motivates a Cobra mook. Is this the cult interpretation, or something else?

Baroness is starting to really doubt her employer's sanity at this point. If they don't make good on their threats, she points out to him, nobody will take Cobra seriously. They said that any rescue attempts will result in Bukhart's execution, and now the rescue team is storming their defences and they still aren't executing her. How are they ever supposed to do terrorism again after this? In response, Cobra Commander tells her that now that everything is in place he feels safe telling her about the real plan. Until this juncture, the risk of an info leak was just too high.

Okay then. I guess she WAS in the dark until now, but he'd always been planning to change that when it was safe to do so. Okay then. I kinda like that. Unlike the mook soldiers who are implied to be full-on personality cultists, the Baroness doesn't have blind faith in the Commander. She has faith in him, but it isn't blind, and it can only persist for as long as he continues to merit it.

Anyway, it seems like they're doing some kind of decoy thing. To what ends, I'm not sure yet.

We know that Baroness has a knack for going undercover, and we've been told that she's the extra tricky one at least when it comes to close quarters tactics. Pretty safe bet that she's the dummy Dr. Bukhart, and Cobra Commander is hoping GI Joe's rescue of her will put her in position to do...something...that their organization couldn't otherwise manage.

Not sure what that something could be, though. The deception is only going to last until she runs into someone who actually knows Dr. Bukhart, which I imagine won't be long after rescue. She has a pretty small window of time and exposure to a pretty small selection of military equipment and personnel during it. What could she do that would make this all worth it for Cobra?

Meanwhile, the attackers reach the fishing village and rendezvous with the infiltration team members who aren't already at the main fort. The only sounds are the squacks of scavenging birds as they pick at the blanket of corpses lining the street. The team concludes, rightly or wrongly, that Cobra Commander wiped them all out to prevent them from aiding the invaders.

The guy telling them they can't afford to bury the bodies is Stalker the jetpack dude. In previous dialogue bits, he showed himself to be one of the more cynical and bloodthirsty members of GI Joe. In this instance though, he's objectively correct. They'll have plenty of time to give the murdered natives a proper funeral after the mission, no reason to jeopardize things by doing it now.

So, they intercept the convoy bringing fake-Bukhart to...the airfield? I thought the airfield was already destroyed? Is Cobra pretending not to know that they already destroyed it? maybe? Not sure what the logic is here, ngl, but anyway GI Joe attacks the convoy and rescues who they think is Dr. Bukhart. They also kill most of the soldiers escorting her, which makes me think that those troopers were never told about the deception and thought that they were actually relocating the prisoner and not being sent out to die as a minor part of a ploy lol. Escort is neutralized, Stalker flies in to grab the hostage, and the hostage doesn't even wait for him to land again before revealing that she isn't the hostage.

Well that didn't even take as long as I thought it would. You'd think she'd at least stick a poisoned needle in his chest before the reveal if nothing else, right?

If Cobra Commander's villainous gloating can be believed, the whole point of this fake base, these sacrificed minions, and however much money it cost him to set up was...killing off the GI Joe unit? Because apparently they're the only ones capable of stopping his real plans in the future, for some reason? Erm...wouldn't the Americans just recruit their next best bunch of special forces dudes into GI Joe to replace the losses? I guess there'd be a short-term reduction in the unit's effectiveness as they got the hang of each other and grew to fill their predecessors' shoes, but is that really going to be long enough to make this worth it?

And...is there really no other force that even comes CLOSE to what GI Joe can do? Nowhere in the world? Really? If these were actual superheroes with innate one-of-a-kind powers then this could make sense, but they aren't. They're just the dozen or so toughest dudes in the US armed forces, and we have no reason to think that the second dozen or so toughest dudes are that much weaker. They have futuristic equipment that isn't issued to other soldiers, but there's no reason the military couldn't issue it to other soldiers after giving them a crash course in how to use it.

Yeah, I'll be disappointed if this really is the motive. Even within the sort of comic book logic this story runs on, the only way this could add up is if Cobra Commander really just has a personal grudge against this specific group of soldiers and is rationalizing it to himself.

The main force arrives at the fort. They were expecting to get word from/be reinforced by the rescue team at this point, but there's no word from them. Holy fuck, did Baroness actually just straight-up kill those GI Joes offscreen? No, of course not, the comic would never do that to named characters with cool equipment that you can sell toys of. But she apparently did SOMETHING to put them out of the qction for the near future. Maybe she chewed off each of their trigger fingers or something, and they'll all get prosthetics before the next issue. She just tied them up and went down the line, chewing off their right forefingers one by one. That's probably what happened.

The main force, spearheaded by Snake-Eyes and Scarlett, penetrates the Spanish fort. They're shocked and horrified to see Dr. Bukhart still here, with Cobra Commander holding a pistol to her head. They're even more shocked and horrified when a huge steel slab comes down and cuts off the hallway behind them, trapping the two pointmen off from their backup. When Cobra Commander tells them to drop their weapons or else the VIP gets it, they do.

He's much more intimidating in that souped up helmet of his, incidentally. Now he looks more like a faceless supervillain and less like the executioner from Shrek.

On the downside...I'm a little disappointed that Snake-Eyes just immediately complied with Cobra Commander's demand without any hesitation. He was one of the most anti-Bukhart members of the team, with Scarlett even taking a whole panel to give him that speech warning him that she knows he's tempted to snipe Bukhart through the window before the rescue attempt can even happen. This seems like it should be the moment to really put his character to the test and give the payoff for that inner conflict. It's kind of weird that the story isn't doing this, after that setup.

Anyway, Cobra Commander did a real stupid here by gloating to Dr. Bukhart about his real plan and then not gagging her before the good guys reached them. Equally embarassing for Cobra Commander, this petite middle-aged-or-older woman is able to twist her body around within his grasp to such a degree that when he shoots her it doesn't even get her head. Which in turn buys Scarlett the split second she needs to grab a concealed shurken out of her sleeve and embed it in Cobra Commander's wrist.

He might still have been able to save the situation, or at least take some of the GI Joes with him in the explosion, but then the steel blast door melts open. Cobra Commander may have a fuckbuddy or two in the Pentagon, but if so it never occurred to them that the soldiers would be stubborn and/or clever enough to pry that laser artillery gun off its chassis and have six guys work together to drag it upstairs. The blast door is specced to stand up against breaching charges, but not against this thing.

Unfortunately, Cobra Commander is able to slip away through a hidden trapdoor in the smoke and confusion, but at least they stopped him from killing Scarlett and/or Snake-Eyes out of spite or whatever. On the flip side of Cobra Competence, he didn't even manage to hit Bukhart in the gut or something. He only got her arm. What a clown.

Bukhart is glad to see that the US military isn't completely devoid of scruples after all. Which, um. Are we forgetting that the only reason they DIDN'T bomb the island underwater is because of international attention? Obviously Bukhart might not realize the diplomatic stakes of this rescue, but the reader does, and this panel seems like it's supposed to be communicating something to the reader. Yeah, I don't know how to feel about this.

They hurriedly climb into Cobra Commander's escape vehicle and take off. There's some amusing dialogue about how no one here has flown a helicopter in years and they think they're going to get themselves all killed, but like, snarky and lighthearted-like. And, lo and behold, they manage to not get themselves all killed when the bomb goes off. Various squad members wince at the loss of their favourite new toys, but at least they've got zero fatalities.

The last few panels, showing the escape, also gives us an outro for Dr. Bukhart's arc. It's a pity that most of the middle part of that arc was offscreen, and that what was being foreshadowed with the GI Joes themselves never really went anywhere, but still, it's something.

The comic doesn't judge her in the wrong for whistleblowing. It also doesn't judge the soldiers in the wrong for judging her in the wrong. It's up to the reader to decide who's right and who's wrong on that front, though I will admit that it's hard to do that without more detail about what the Doomsday Project is and what "false pretences" they got Bukhart to work under. Still, I like that while it does have her softening her stance on the USM due to their exemplary conduct while rescuing her, it does NOT have her walking back her leaks or her general politics. Nor does it pretend that the people who wanted to let her die aren't actually a problem, even if it does downplay their influence to an uncomfortable degree. I'm still a bit bothered that this conclusion is just ignoring the role that diplomatic pressure played in determining the Pentagon's actions here.

But hey. Bukhart isn't saying "I take it all back, USA USA USA, gimme more nukes to build," and she's being portrayed positively for not doing so. That's something. That is, once again, much better than average for the time and medium.

Meanwhile, Cobra Commander sneaks over to one of the secret hangars on the far side of the island, where he meets up with Baroness and her collection of freshly-chewed right forefingers. She's got to take the wheel, since his hand is all fucked up, and this operation was a bust, but she's recovered her faith in him. However much they spent on this dummy base, it apparently wasn't ruinous to their organization, and his plan was good enough for her to approve of it once she had the full picture. It was just bad luck that the GI Joes did something unexpected with that laser cannon.

I presume that he omitted the part where the laser cannon was only half of the problem, and the other half was that he let the prisoner know everything and then didn't keep her from blabbing. I imagine Baroness would be much less forgiving of this failure if she knew about that part.

And, that's Lady Doomsday.

I wanted to talk about how the plot itself played out with a bridge like "politics aside..." but that wouldn't really be accurate, because the way the story had to tiptoe around the ideological minefield of its subject matter kinda messed with the structure itself.

The comic really emphasized a conflict of the conscience vs. the self-interest of the US armed forces. Civilian oversight vs. military autonomy (which is just one insurrection away from military autocracy). That was the one thing the characters talked about the most. And then, in the end, their victory came down to...creative use of their equipment and the villain doing something dumb. That last detail is extra weird after how much Cobra Commander got talked up as an asymmetric warfare genius, and how well laid and executed all his plans were until that one moment. Character-wise, I can see how his megalomania might have compelled him to gloat to SOMEONE as everything came together, and how the absence of any trusted underlings at the moment might have made him default to the prisoner, but...why wouldn't he gag her? From everything else we've seen of him, that just doesn't seem like a mistake he would make.

...

I wonder. The whole subplot with the fishing village didn't go anywhere either. It's never explained why he had them all killed when he did. One of the commandoes speculates that it was to prevent the villagers from aiding them, but what kind of meaningful aid could they have even provided? There was the question of whether they could afford to bury them all before marching on the base, but I don't think Cobra Commander was banking on that. And, Dr. Bukhart's opinions about the military's potential for mercy and humanitarianism seemed like the only real arc of the story, but it never got any other moving pieces to interact with and ended up being just a handful of isolated sound bytes.

With all that taken into account, I wonder if - at some point in the creative process - the plan was for Cobra Commander to try and goad GI Joe into committing some kind of atrocity on the way to his base. Like, maybe he was going to have his forces hole up in the village - with the natives trapped there with them - and shoot at GI Joe from there. He shows Dr. Bukhart live footage of the slaughter, reminds her that she'd be fairing no better than the natives herself if she wasn't famous, and uses that to play on her preexisting antimilitary attitudes and convince her that she might as well go with him rather than them since the world is in a fallen state and everyone is equally bad. But then, to both of their surpise, GI Joe DOESN'T wipe out the village, even though it would have been easier and safer for them to do so. Cobra Commander's plan backfires, resulting in a successful rescue.

Maybe not EXACTLY that, but something closer to it. The pieces - both practical and thematic - seemed to be set up for something more along those lines. As for why they DIDN'T end up doing this, well, I'm not sure. Maybe they decided that having some of the heroic GI Joe team momentarily advocate FOR doing a war crime, even if it's really just momentarily, would be a bridge too far for a children's publication. Or maybe it's just that they just couldn't get the plot logistics of that storyline to add up, and had to write themselves out of a corner at some point.

I could be totally wrong and barking up the wrong tree, but as it is this comic really does feel like the setup and payoff of two different stories, and the ending feels rushed. I might be wrong about the reason for this, but there's definitely a reason for it.

...

This doesn't get to the point of ruining the story or anything. It's well drawn, well written, and - aside from those last couple of pages - well plotted. The politics, once again, are just about as close to genuine criticism of the US military as a children's comic of the time would ever be allowed to come, so even if the end result isn't great I'm inclined to look at it pretty favourably in terms of messaging. Like I said, just letting kids know that the potential for corruption within the military exists and needs to be opposed when it starts creeping in is a lot better than nothing.

I've got a bit more GI Joe left to go. We'll see if the next story holds up as well.