Forever War: GI Joe 49

[knight_moves]

Zartan has been captured, but Ripcord is still Our Man in Springfield... and he's managed to relay the coordinates of Cobra HQ to the Joes.





I wanted to lead with the cover, because try to imagine how left-field this shit is after almost fifty issues of straight military fiction where the most out-there stuff is a couple ninjas, maybe a space shuttle, the odd bioweapon... fuck it! Mummies!





It's not a metaphor, either! Mindbender and Destro are literally stealing a mummy! This has not been foreshadowed at all!

They are, of course, gathering the bodies of the ten greatest warriors in history to clone a new ultimate soldier for Cobra. Of course, the bodies aren't warriors per se, but military leaders like Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun... but it's fine, I'm sure the resulting gumbo-man won't mind being a minion at all.



Ripcord is blown and is it a bad sign that even the Cobra are having a hard time keeping track of which Joe is which?



Case in point: there are enough guys in this one crowd scene to make the Krakoa X-Men look like post-Crisis Kryptonians.

Meanwhile, Ripcord has hijacked a car, but with a little girl inside. Naturally, he has no desire to do the Hasbroverse A Perfect World...



I know this is probably just Cobra indoctrination, but little girls are also just like that, man. You don't let them watch Bluey and shit gets real.

Finally, it's time for the assault on Springfield.





AND THEY'RE STILL INTRODUCING NEW JOES! Geez, Hasbro, how much money did you think kids had in the Eighties? Reaganomics working overtime...

Since Cobra needs their ultimate warrior to know about innovations more recent than the chariot, they decide to add Dr. Mindbender's brainwaves to the stew.



I like the implication that Mindbender got the job because he was the only one silly enough to trust his skull to something invented by Dr. Venom (RIP).

So we end with Serpentor freshly baked and leading the counteroffensive against every Joe ever in a story so big it'll cost an extra fifty cents.

Comments

[scorntx]

"Somewhere in the Mid-East", where police wear fezzes on-duty and theft of mummies is punishable by summary execution.
Ooohh, that could be anywhere.

I'd question the logic of how the genes of history's greatest leaders are supposed to instil someone with those qualities as if it were a matter of genetics alone that did it, but people willing to put that much effort into something like this are probably best left alone. They might be capable of anything.
(... though they're going to find Alexander the Great's corpse and not tell anyone? Just gonna loot it for parts?
A'right, then...)

Actually, given Cobra's track record, it's amazing this is where their mind went with cloning tech, rather than making Serpentor out of themselves.
Which at the very least seems like it would've saved a lot of faff.


Sell all the toys?
SELL ALL THE TOYS.
(back in the day when a wave was more'n four toys and the one y' wanted wasn't shortpacked and ya had'ta spend months searchin' for it and couldn't jes go on the internet an' order it, razzafrazzarazza(something incoherent about snakes)razza...)

Epic level sass from Destro, there.
Can't tell if that's sass from the Baroness as well, or if she's legit asking.
... ... guessing probably not.

[beyondthefringe]

Oh, kids in the '80s had a LOT of parental-supplied income. How else do you explain the simultaneous ascendancies of G.I. Joe, Transformers, Masters of the Universe, etc etc etc.

And of course every year came with a wave of like, a dozen new releases of action figures, vehicles, bases, and accessories.

Poor Larry must have been exhausted. "Okay Larry, we're introducing a new Cobra leader and we're thinking he's a snake-themed emperor so... get right on it."

[thezmage]

I'm not sure if it's as much of an onslaught when you consider this was over the course of four years, so that's only about 4 waves of action figures

[lbd_nytetrayn]

Weren't Joes relatively cheaper compared to the larger figures (MotU, ThunderCats, TMNT) or the more complex (Transformers)?

Dang, can't believe they left Slaughter out of this.

How did Rip-Cord know where they were? I thought that was a problem the last time Joes were in Springfield?

"Yo, Hawk"? Shouldn't that be "Yo, Joe"?

I might be wrong, but it feels to me like the Joes only have one of each toy vehicle here (versus more general stuff like the cargo planes) as opposed to the fleets of everything in the cartoon. Am I reading that right? If so, kinda neat, since one is probably all any kid is going to have of any given vehicle.

[beyondthefringe]

Later on, they'd have multiples of some vehicles, but for the longest time it seemed like they only had the one of each. I figure they were getting experimental, cutting-edge stuff still in development ahead of everyone else, and part of their deal was to test it before it went into general production.

This tracks with the focus given to like, Ace's fighter jet and the MOBAT in different issues... and when we see equipment destroyed (as early as issue 1) it's "we'll get another" not "there's more at home."