30-Day Comic Book Challenge - Week 3
G.I. Joe #1
Destro #1
Scarlet #1
Deadpool #5
Something is Killing the Children #1
Something is Killing the Children #2
Something is Killing the Children #3
I haven’t missed a day yet, and I have thrown in a little more variety (well, stuff besides X-Men comics) and that has me kind of excited about reading comics. I even took in mostly Indie comics this past week. I’m real comic reader!
I went with that particular gif because I started catching up on some of Skybound’s new G.I. Joe stories this week (and on my Surface, no less.) For those unaware, the G.I. Joe property has been a bit of a hot potato in the comics world over the years, starting with Marvel in the early 80’s (At least as far as my reading history goes. You could technically go back to 1937 for Joe stories if you want to nitpick, but I don’t really feel like writing an entire wikipedia article here). After Marvel cancelled the title, there were a few attempts to start it up, including by Benchpress Comics, a venture that I personally had some dealings with when they agreed to publish The Secret Monkey, a comic I co-wrote with my friend John Hunt. They never officially got the rights from Hasbro, and they apparently went bankrupt, and we stopped making Secret Monkey comics so John could make real comics. I shoudl note that we did have a small online following in the early 2000’s. (That’s probably a future post on its own.)
The next Joe comics of any note came from Devil’s Due in 2001. It was a direct continuation of the Marvel series, taking place seven years after we had last seen the characters, and they even amusingly acknowledged that they were older, and in some cases, fatter:
Devil’s Due had a good run with the property, even publishing a crossover with The Transformers, which was being published by Dreamwave at the time, something that Marvel had done when they owned both properties. But in 2008, they lost the rights and IDW Publishing acquired them, and they completely rebooted the property, ignoring all the Marvel and Devil’s Due storylines (which kind of makes sense. I mean, time passes oddly in all comics, but the original Marvel run had some of the Joes serving in Vietnam. They’d be damn old.) This run featured some really cool stories and used some characters that were definitely under-utilized in previous incarnations, and I definitely recommend picking some up if you are curious.
IDW would stop publishing G.I. Joe comics in 2022, and this year we saw yet another revival by Skybound, and if that name is unfamiliar to you, that is the company owned by Robert Kirkman, creator of The Walking Dead. They are again crossing over with The Transformers (which Skybound also bought the rights to) in what is now known as the Energon Universe. And so far it is amazing, and I recommend picking some of these up, as well. And if you do it through that link, you’ll make me very happy.
While my podcast has always been very G.I. Joe-centric, my enjoyment of the characters goes back to childhood, with the toys, the cartoon, and the comics. But there was yet another publisher of G.I. Joe comics from back then that you’re not going to see on any wikipedia page and it is one that is near and dear to me, because they were created by my brother, Mark:
Check out my first painted cover, and it you look close, you can even see the blue lines from the paper that he painted it on. My brother wrote and did the art for, if memory serves, 12 issues of G.I. Joe for me, and left the coloring to me. I was eight or nine years-old at the time, so the coloring was pretty bad, but the stories were pretty good, all things considered. The aforementioned John Hunt also made me Transformers comics that I could color as a kid, although they never did a crossover. But yeah, I was a pretty spoiled kid.
There’s a page of John’s Transformers art as a teenager. And yes, he does still earn his living in comics now.
So, to say the least, I have quite the history with these characters, and it makes me happy to see them still relevent today. The Skybound series has even combined elements of the early comics, the animated series, and the animated movie, so no matter what aspect you were a fan of, they have it going on here. Basically everything but my brother’s comics. But maybe one day I’ll have a chance to write for them and just take some of his ideas for a laugh.
With this history of comics being made for me, is it any wonder I wrote one as an adult? Check it out here, and while you’re surfing around you can check out my Redbubble store, or just support me with a quick and easy PayPal donation:
Please also like and subscribe to this Substack. It does my heart good. Thanks for reading and stay tuned to see if I can get through Thanksgiving without missing a day of comic-reading. Yo Joe!