Knowing Is Half The Battle
Despite being of non-American origin and pretty-much pacifist insofar as I’ve really thought through the use of military might and armed conflict, I have this strange love for GI Joe that I’m not entirely sure that I fully understand. I discovered the franchise when I was eleven years old, perhaps, or twelve, when it was (re)launched in the UK as Action Force (“GI” being a particularly American concept, you see, but “Action” apparently being a universal language). I’m not sure whether I saw the toys or the comic first, but it was definitely the first comic – reprinted as a back-up strip in the British Transformers comic – that really grabbed my attention. I can remember it now in vague, idealized terms: Larry Hama and Rod Whigham writing and drawing and the story being something that involved motorbikes and Lady Jaye and a bald villain called Dr. Mindbender and some kind of mutated plants. It was kind of like a superhero comic, kind of like Star Wars (Robotic drone soldiers! Pulpy, over the top dialogue!), and kind of unlike anything else I’d read at the time. I was hooked.
But only slightly hooked, it seemed. I only read the Action Force comic that followed for awhile; it was full of lazy British attempts to copy the (superior, even to me back then) American stories and I soon gave up, convinced that a comic based on a toy wasn’t the sort of thing a nearly-teenaged boy should be reading, even if I secretly wanted all the toys (Zartan changed color when you put him in sunlight! Even now, that seems pretty awesome to think about, even if it was less the promised camouflage and more “Oh, he’s turned blue”). This was the same logic that led me to dump my Transformers addiction, although that was helped by Transformers having become an impossible-to-read mess by that time.
That said, my love affair with the toy incarnation of the military industrial may have been short but it’s turned out to be surprisingly long-lasting. I mean, it’s not like I’ve ended up going back and buying all (or, indeed, any) of the toys or rabidly buying up back issues of the comic, but there’s still something about the idea of GI Joe that appeals to me; I remember the few stories from the American comic that I read as classics from my childhood, and the characters as some untouchable, uncriticizable ideals that nothing new could ever live up to. I have no doubt that neither of these beliefs are actually true, and have stayed away from newer versions of the franchise for fear of disappointment, but still; even now, I secretly think that Destro and Cobra Commander are some of the greatest fictional villains to ever be created, up there with Darth Vader and Doctor Doom.
What can I say? Apparently guys in masks seemed extra evil when I was a kid.
I write this because beside my bed there lies an unread copy of Classic GI Joe Volume 2 from the local library, picked up in a moment of “What’s this? Oh, wow! Remember this?” nostalgia, but untouched since it got home. It lies there like a reminder that sometimes you can’t go home again, and shouldn’t even try, especially when “home” is a romanticized world of toyetic hijinks that never really existed in the first place. I want to read it and love it for what it was as much as what it is, but I’m convinced that it’ll let me down. So this is me apologizing to my child self for the disillusionment that I’m about to go through… but, really. You brought it on yourself.
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This is apropos, slightly.