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Thread
: Lines/Colors/3D
The GI Joe/Cobra Concept Art & Filecard Project
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01-13-2012, 12:26 PM
Tanksmasher
Hog Driver
Join Date: Aug 2008
Location: Georgia
Posts: 12,236
Quote:
Originally Posted by
zuludelta
Bounce away!
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.
Well, I nominate this thread to be serve as the "Ask Zulu" thread, then
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.
You hit the nail on the head, Z. This is why I think we all have created our own little worlds to explain or rationalize the discrepancies and to correct the inaccuracies in GI Joe. Even as a kid, I cringed when they stretched reality by having non-aviators fly skystrikers or other such anomalies, or when the organization seemed lopsided by having too many artillery guys, and few to no officers and things of that nature.
Troynos pointed out that he's beginning to love the property more than the merchandise, and I have to agree that organizing and rewriting the backstories for characters, starting in Vietnam, for me at least has been a lot more satisfying than collecting.
I don't know why I don't post more in this thread, but I'm always impressed by your work and thoughtfullness.
Tanksmasher
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