GI Joe 1

[knight_moves]

A nuclear scientist critical of the military for commissioning her to build a doomsday weapon is kidnapped by Cobra to, you guessed it, build a doomsday weapon. The Joes are tasked with rescuing her.



The way Cobra Commander sits in this picture is literally the most thug-gangster ass-shit like holy hell it's so badass







One rescue later...



I've long been of the opinion that, paradoxically, comics were a bit more mature when they were more for kids; my go-to example is Kingpin installing a figurehead mayor in Frank Miller's Daredevil versus today when he becomes mayor himself despite the umpteen times he's been exposed as an obvious supervillain.

This is a decent example of what I'm talking about: it's an adaptation of a toy commercial, but you still have the Joes suggesting that maybe they should merk this scientist for the greater good and her criticizing the military in a way the narrative treats as valid, instead of her being a J. Jonah Jameson. That's more nuance than you get in most political thrillers these days.

Comments

[beyondthefringe]

Cobra: practicing masks in the workplace decades before it became necessary.


Fun fact: Skybound is apparently releasing this issue with Hama’s original intended dialogue for Hawk’s speech. “ I never rewrote a single word of anybody’s script in all my time as an editor. If a change had to be made, I had the writer do it himself. I was sensitive to this because an editor changed a whole balloon in G.I. Joe #1. The original line was, "A soldier’s job is to do the unthinkable and be forgotten." What was substituted was some jingoistic patriotic crap that I carried the baggage for in silence for 30 years.”

[knight_moves]

Can't say that isn't a better line.

Good catch.

[tcampbell1000]

Fascinating!

[cainofdreaming]

About the bit about Kingpin becoming the mayor... I'd have thought the same but then Trump became the president.

[knight_moves]

It would be more like if Al Capone became President, given Kingpin is a murderer, a drug dealer, so on and so forth--at this point in canon, I think it's just that no one can prove it, but everyone KNOWS he's a monster.

[cainofdreaming]

And Trump isn't? Well, okay, he just laundered the cartels' money. And 'only' used his position to encourage others to kill, and spread disinformation about a pandemic which any idiot knew would get people killed.

[knight_moves]

This is kinda a sidenote to my point, which was that in the 80s, the storytelling was sophisticated enough that everyone could see Fisk couldn't be mayor himself, he'd need a figurehead.

For a real world analogy, let's say a political thriller depicted Vladimir Putin running for US president himself and winning instead of having Trump as a proxy. That'd be silly, right?

[cainofdreaming]

Only because of the must have been born in the US clause. The rather Russian than a democrat throng would back him without another thought. Without the first one, really.

[full_metal_ox]

There used to be people clamoring to amend Article II, Section I of the U.S. Constitution in the specific hope of getting Arnold Schwarzenegger elected President; this, of course, was before he disappointed them by being too corrupted by liberal Hollywood values.

And I rather suspect that there was a greater-than-zero Venn overlap with the people who subsequently refused to believe that Barack Obama was a native U.S. citizen (my favorite—if short-lived—argument was that Hawaii wasn’t yet a state. Sorry; that was conferred in 1959, two years before Obama was born.)

[shakalooloo]

Well, there was that time Doctor Doom tried to get a position in the US government...

[laughing_tree]

Setting aside the issue of plausibility — I’d agree with the other posters that modern politics has shown it’s all too plausible — I’d push back against the idea that more realistic/less fantastical = more sophisticated. There’s nothing especially realistic about Gregor Sansa suddenly turning into an insect, y’know?

[dan_ingram]

To be fair, Trump only became a super villain AFTER he became president.

[john_drake1964]

Al Capone as a national political leader is certainly a thing....at least, in soft-Alt History works.

Course, in Back in the USSA it's because he's supposed to be the Stalin counterpart for the USSA.

Then again, the timeline where Walt Disney becomes POTUS is certainly memorable, for all the wrong reasons....

[superfangirl1]

Cobra Commander has his own island, with a castle? Where does he get his financial funds from?

[scorntx]

Pyramid schemes.

[cainofdreaming]

Aren't those too ethical for him? I mean, he used to be an used cars salesman.

[scorntx]

Man's gotta make money somehow.
Can't just mooch off the Baroness forever.

[dan_ingram]

"Calm down, Short-Fuse. You told us that call sign was meant to be ironic!"