Guest Post – My G.I. Joe Life, Part I

Robert N. Emerson shares with us his memories of G.I. Joe. Visit his LiveJournal for more of Robert’s rambling writings.

It is the Summer of 1982, barely a month after my 9th birthday, when my family gave me a surprise, belated birthday present, a comic book; G.I Joe Issue #1. Now the reason for this was several fold; not only had my step-father played with G.I. Joe as a boy, but he gave me his original G.I. Joe, to go with a G.I. Joe-esque 12-inch figure that had a Jeep, some Safari gear, and thus alligator. Now this was a pretty big deal, since prior to this, my step-dad and I were distant, probably because right after they married we moved a few hundred miles from my old friends and family to live near his family. Either way, G.I. Joe became something we had in common and my mother encouraged it.

Now, as we all know, where the G.I. Joe comic comes, the toys will follow and this was no exception. In addition to G.I. Joe #1, my parents gifted me with a one-year subscription, which came monthly in a plain brown paper periodical slip and the new action figures. Initially I only got the individual action figures, which included the original nine Joes and a Cobra Officer and Soldier, my parents got me multiples of the Cobra guys so that things would seem fair. Over the course of 1982 I slowly got more and more G.I. Joes, including the mail-ins of Cobra Commander and Major Bludd, all while I was reading the G.I. Joe comic every month. But, Christmas time was when things got big for me, as that was when I received my Official Collectors Display Case, R.A.M., J.U.M.P. Jet Pack, V.A.M.P., H.A.L., M.M.S., and the F.L.A.K., as well as the figures that came with some of them.

Now I was a child of the 70s and 80s, which means the two big action figure franchises of all time, Star Wars and G.I. Joe, as well as other action figure and toys, such as the Bionic Man, Star Trek, Disney’s Black Hole, Battlestar Gallactica, and so forth, I even had a yellow lightsaber Luke, but it was G.I. Joe that made me a completist for the first time. Never before had I owned everything of something, never, as most of my early childhood, as well as some of the later, my family was poor. But, even in our worst years, my family made sure I got some G.I. Joes, which was cool. Never again, though, with respect to the toys, was I a completist with G.I. Joe, just that first year, but that was okay, not only did I have the comics, there was also my Uncle who was the same age as me and he got a lot of what I did not.

It was cool, I think, having an Uncle the same age as me, with a lot of the same interest, in fact, while joining the Marines as a lifelong dream of mine, Jeff enlisted, too, and made a bit better of a career out of it. Well, at least he did not blow both his shoulders out like I did and earn a medical discharge.

But, as I said, Jeff and I played G.I. Joes together, a lot, and as the years passed our sessions got more and more complex, with a sizeable amount of rules for personal combat, vehicular combat, and surface to air, air to surface, and myriads of other forms of superheroic militaristic action. While G.I. Joe had a solid level of realism, early on, it also added in a cool fanciful element, so that it was not too gritty for the target audience. Now it was not as light hearted as the G.I. Joe animated series, which I enjoyed, but nowhere near as much as I enjoyed the comic book, as the comics actually had death, honest to goodness heroic and villainous death. Now I was an only child, so I was prone to being more grown up than my age, but that was still something that set the comics apart from the cartoon, as they treated their readers with an unusual amount of expectation. Complex ideas like heroic sacrifice, treachery, terrorism, murder, and other mature subjects were handled within the pages of G.I. Joe, while the cartoon consisted of the longest record of near misses in the history of the world, with perhaps the noted exception of the A-Team’s firefights.

Needless to say, as kids, there was a big delineation point between comic book fans and cartoon ones, which was also the first time, in hindsight, that I would consider myself a grognard. G.I. Joe was a lot of first for me, interestingly enough. It is also the first time I had my name in print, through my own actions, as I signed up for one of those mail-in figures, back in the day, so I had my own G.I. Joe file card and figure.
It was definitely cool and one of the first big nerdy things I had done, which is saying a lot since I started playing Dungeons & Dragons when I was six, almost seven.

But, that is a different story, so back on track; time to talk about the rules of play!

When Jeff and I would play with our G.I. Joes, we had the bottoms of their right feet initialed so that no one would get the others figures, it would usually be a huge deal that would cover much of my grandparents house and yard. Often one or the other would be headquartered in the den, while the other was in the entertainment nook, with the living room as a neutral/contested zone. In fact, many of these sessions would cover whole weekends, with meal and sleep breaks. Sure, it is a bit odd, but we were kids and, well, kids like to play with their toys.

We had rules for how to handle combat and they were fairly considerate, although there were sometimes arguments, what we would have given for a laser pointer back then, yet play went along nicely. We would throw missiles, be it from ground or air vehicles, at other vehicles or personnel, and we would eyeball weapons fire by taking our finger from the tip of the firing weapon to the target, trying not to adjust beyond a straight line.

Our family, I am sure, thought we were nuts, with the level of complexity that we used, but we had a good time. But, we were still kids, playing with their toys, playing pretend, and that was a good thing. Yet, as we all know, people get older and grow up, or we are suppose to grow up; right?

Click here for Part 2 of Robert’s look back at G.I. Joe.