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Thread
: Lines/Colors/3D
The GI Joe/Cobra Concept Art & Filecard Project
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01-07-2012, 05:56 PM
zuludelta
EQ-Viper
Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: Canada
Posts: 4,343
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Lifeline 71
Well, it's good to hear you'll still be around. I may take you up on bouncing around some ideas.
Bounce away!
Quote:
Originally Posted by
spacemonkey
This line was set up to make a profit and had it not been for Larry Hama, these would just be lifeless army men. There isnt a "keeper of the flame" to make sure
everything jives. Being prior military, I understand your frustration. My adult brain wants continuity and proper military structure. It's just not there.
This whole exercise actually made me appreciate so much more what Hama did with what he was given. He had to have been frustrated immensely by having to keep the suits at Hasbro happy whilst also trying to balance the needs of continuity (both in the comic and the "background story" he was writing in the file cards) and some measure of acceptable internal logic and a reasonable sense of quasi-realism.
And there was the pressure of working on the best-selling comic book of the mid-1980s (also, being a licensed comic book, the
GI Joe
creative team had less time to produce an issue than a team working on a Marvel property comic book, they had to finish everything a week or two earlier because the suits at Hasbro needed to approve everything before Marvel could send the proofs to the printers)... some of the fans would absolutely crucify him for the smallest thing... I remember some asshole kid named Shane (I forget his last name, but he signed his nickname as "Cool") writing a letter to
Postbox: The Pit
(the letter was printed in issue #91, I believe) and absolutely eviscerating Hama, and even threatened to get his lawyer dad to sue him over some stupid thing he had about the stories not being realistic enough.
I do think that at some point, you could see where Hama probably just said "Screw it" and pretty much set himself on auto-pilot: I'd say it was soon after the Cobra Civil War storyline in the late 1980s (you have to re-read the Cobra Civil War story again if you haven't read it in years... the first time I re-read it as an adult, it dawned on me that Hama wrote it as a tongue-in-cheek satire/parody of the Vietnam War, with the GI Joe-backed Serpentor faction as the stand-in for South Vietnam and the Fred VII faction as the stand-in for North Vietnam).
I have to say though, finally coming to terms with GI Joe being "Hasbro's" and not "mine" (or even "Larry Hama's") has really helped marginalize my inner
fanboy
and the ugly tendencies that come with it. No more private fan-raging at whatever new GI Joe-branded trend-chasing thing Hasbro or its licensees shove out and expect us to buy. I'm still a fan of the Hama-era ARAH comics and toys of course, but I'd like to think of myself as a reasonable "fan-man" now and not a rabid fanboy.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Loose Cannon
that you are my friend. That you are. You need a Ask Zulu Thread
Well, I nominate this thread to be serve as the "Ask Zulu" thread, then
Quote:
Originally Posted by
spacemonkey
So how does a group that comprises of 30 to a couple of hundred individuals combat a force as large as Cobra?
It can't, at least not directly. Sure, you could have small surgical strikes or unconventional offensive operations here and there, but the way you maximize the force-multiplication potential of a (largely infantry-based) organization that small against an exponentially larger enemy force would be to use them as reconnaissance and battlefield surveillance assets, and hand off the responsibility of acting on the gathered intelligence to a larger combat element.
EDIT
: BTW, just in case I haven't been clear in my rambling posts these past couple of days, I don't think it was "wrong" for me or anyone else to want a realistic GI Joe (as much as "realistic GI Joe" means anything), although the notion of it does strike me now, with hindsight, as being incompatible all along with the original intent of the property. It's just that I couldn't do it in a way that satisfied all my criteria for what would be a realistic GI Joe that still remained—in my opinion (and I can't stress this enough, this is personal preference, and not me saying that everybody else is wrong or whatever)—reasonably faithful to the ARAH toy designs and comic books.
__________________
Last edited by zuludelta; 01-07-2012 at
08:26 PM
.. Reason: added clarification
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