Guest Post – My G.I. Joe Life, Part II

Robert N. Emerson closes out his look back at G.I. Joe and his life. Visit his LiveJournal for more of Robert’s rambling writings.

Click here to read the first part of this feature.

My enjoyment of all things G.I. Joe was closing in on a decade, which had included fun times with a lot of friends, however my main play pal was Jeff, my uncle who was a few months older than me and the most consistent, built-in friend of my childhood. However, we were fast become something other than children, as we were supposed to be growing up, not just getting older, right? While I think Jeff grew-up, I am fairly certain, even to this day, that I had just been getting older, which is fitting to say for a grown man writing an article about his less-than-grown-up pastimes. Of course, that is someone else’s opinion on it, I am quite sure, and not mine.

As we grew older, though, and started to go from elementary school, into junior high and, finally, high school, we started to play with our G.I. Joes less and less, save for one weekend, during a heavy winter, when we thought it would be cool to play with them one last time, during my freshman year. No one knew, as my grandparents were in Reno, and it was just Jeff and I in the house. Our last hurrah, so to speak, as we entered adulthood and we had a blast playing it that weekend, but we could tell it was a bit different.

During this time the G.I. Joe cartoon ran for almost a hundred episodes, we suffered the Cobra-La stuff from the movie, and then came the new cartoon, not from Sunbow, but from DiC, yet it was not what it had been in its previous incarnations and, worse still, the animated and toy line choices started to negatively, in my opinion, effect the comicbook.

As I said, G.I. Joe was the first time I was a completist, while the toys had only been for that one year, it was the comics that I had collected, steadily, for a close to a decade. Not only was I collecting the main G.I. Joe book, but I also collected the whole run of the Special Missions series, yet things started to go awry, in my opinion, around the time you had the Eco-Warriors and Cesspool stuff. Obviously the Captain Planet franchise of the time had Hasbro wanting to jump on board the eco-friendly programming, which might be good for toys and cartoons, but was badly misplaced in the comic books.

Now, I had collected the comic, religiously, since June of 1982 and I had not faltered, not once, until just after I came home from the Marine Corps. I enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in the Summer of 1991, fulfilling a lifelong dream, as I took part of the delayed entry program. Shortly after I graduated from high school, I found myself at Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego, but my comic books were still being pulled by my local comic book store, Beyond Comics, while I was gone. But, my career was cut short when an instability in my shoulders was discovered and, after a brief rehab period, I was given a medical discharge, due to a condition that existed prior to enlistment.

It was upon returning home, forlorn at the way my dream had ended, that I took a look at something I had loved as a boy, which I continued to love as I turned into a man, and saw that it was not what I had once loved. Much of the realism, the grit, was gone and replaced with this plastic façade. It was obvious that Larry Hama and company tried to keep that ton, but it was just as obvious, I feel, that there were more guiding concerns from Hasbro. It was, after all, their property and, thus, they held the reigns. Toward the final issues of the originl run, so I heard, things got better again, but that was a death rattle.

For a long time, my love of G.I. Joe was something on a shelf, it was there and as strong as it had been when I put it there, but the newer stuff was not for me. Do not even ask me about the Sigma Six cartoon, Devil’s Due did their best with the comic adaptation, but the whole thing irked me, as it reminded me of a lot of things that I do not like about child-target marketing today.

But, that does bring up the moment I took G.I. Joe down from the shelf; Devil’s Due Publishing. Talk about a moment of happiness, a gritty G.I. Joe comic that was penned by folks who were obviously fans of the original. Not only was the take modernized with good stories and modern technology, but the characters had aged quite well. It was, for me, a good seven year run, as it was solid, even with a stumbling block here and there. Blaylock and crew picked up the torch and ran with it, so much so that my nostalgia for G.I. Joe rekindled, with the classic toys coming back en vogue, a life-action movie in the works, and new animation and comics coming out, including from Larry Hama himself.

To use an often over used phrase, from a much quoted movie, “Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.”

It is a good time to be a G.I. Joe fan, with the movie coming out, as well as a video game, we are getting familiar hands on the comic book rights, which is re-launching the series, and the new animated mini-series, G.I. Joe Resolute was penned by none other than Warren Ellis and if the teaser trailer is a good sign, it is just as gritty and mature as the early comic book. So while I could say that G.I. Joe left me in the early 90s, it has been with me since the early 80s and was just waiting to let me know it was still there, in the first part of the 21st century.

So, I guess you could say that G.I. Joe has covered three decades, two centuries, and a whole slew of high and low points in my life, be it the awesome toys that I still have in the trunk down in the basement, or the cool toys they release still today, which I like to think is a good thing.

Of course, that leads me to another often used, often quoted, perhaps overly so, statement: Now you know and knowing is half the battle. Yo, Joe!