G.I. Joe (comic)

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"Fly, my ugly, fly!"

G.I. Joe was a comic series from Marvel Comics that crossed over with Marvel's Generation 2 series. Earlier, a Marvel G.I. Joe / Generation 1 crossover miniseries had drawn from events in the G.I. Joe comic as though it were in continuity with it, but the G.I. Joe comic had ignored the miniseries at the time. During the Generation 2 crossover, G.I. Joe characters showed familiarity with the Transformers, perhaps indicating that the miniseries had been retconned into the G.I. Joe history.

In Great Britain, Marvel UK reprinted G.I. Joe issues as Action Force, adding new material of their own and even crossing over with the Marvel UK Generation 1 book. There was no effort to maintain continuity between the G.I. Joe stories and the new Action Force comics, and this wiki considers the unique Action Force material to be its own universe. The Action Force comic was eventually merged with the UK Generation 1 comic, but by that point Action Force was nothing but G.I. Joe reprints.

Overview

At the time that G.I. Joe and the Transformers was published, a storyline in G.I. Joe had Cobra Commander and Destro appear to perish in an assault on the G.I. Joe base. G.I. Joe and the Transformers stayed true to this, featuring Cobra Commander in the first issue but noting his apparent death in the second (even with a footnote encouraging the reader to read G.I. Joe #55 to learn if the Commander had truly died). Destro also disappeared from the story as soon as Cobra Commander's death was mentioned. However, the G.I. Joe book had no reciprocal ties to the miniseries, and in fact its use of characters like Doctor Mindbender and the Baroness was incompatible with their whereabouts in the mini. Then shortly after the mini concluded, the G.I. Joe companion series, G.I. Joe: Special Missions, featured Slip-Stream giving another character a toy of a Transformer that he claimed to be Jetfire, though it looked like Megatron. This may have been a sign from the author about how he viewed Transformers in relation to his G.I. Joe universe, although a Bumblebee toy was also shown prominently in the crossover miniseries, so no interpretation is clear.

Years later, as the G.I. Joe comic's fortunes sagged, Marvel tried rebranding it as "G.I. Joe featuring Snake-Eyes and Ninja Force". Four issues later, two shadowy Transformers appeared in the story, intrigued by Destro's transforming castle. The next issue, its title changed to "G.I. Joe featuring Snake-Eyes and Transformers: Generation 2", opened with Megatron in full view, his body ravaged from the events at the end of the Generation 1 comic. He was assaulting the castle in disappointment that it was not, in fact, another Transformer. But in the course of the battle, he was impressed by a rail gun that Cobra shot him with, and he made a deal to give Cobra Cybertronian technology in exchange for rebuilding his body with the addition of the rail gun. When G.I. Joe learned of this partnership, they sent a message to the Autobots on Cybertron, who sent a small team to Earth. The storyline came to a climax with G.I. Joe and the Autobots battling Cobra and Megatron in the American town of Milleville. Megatron ended up destroying most of the Autobot squad and escaping in the Ark with the American double-agent rail gun inventor, apparently without giving Cobra Commander his promised technology.

The G.I. Joe and Generation 2 comics went in separate directions from that point. Generation 2 added one more issue's worth of material to the story, wherein Cobra was revealed to actually have a semi trailer full of Cybertronian tech that Hot Spot gave his life to destroy. Also, Dr. Biggles-Jones was rescued from Megatron's captivity and returned to the Joes. Meanwhile, the G.I. Joe comic made reference to neither of these events, and while it did show the Joes being airlifted out of Milleville, the fact that alien robots had been involved was never brought up again. Moreover, the Generation 2 comic featured planetwide devastation more than once, even showing G.I. Joe dealing with the aftermath, but the world of the G.I. Joe comic was much less apocalyptic. Not once did it acknowledge anything related to Transformers in the year that it lasted before cancellation.

Creative team

Almost every issue of G.I. Joe (and certainly every issue that crossed over with Generation 2) was written by Larry Hama. The series also shared several artists, most notably Herb Trimpe and the pencil/ink team of Andrew Wildman and Stephen Baskerville. Wildman and Baskerville even worked on the first crossover issue of G.I. Joe.

Other notes

• In 1982, Hasbro had commissioned Marvel to create a story treatment for their G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero toyline, which Marvel then used as a basis for their comic series while Hasbro took it to Sunbow Productions to be made into a cartoon. This formula proved extremely successful, and Hasbro used it again for the launch of Transformers two years later.
• Richard Starkings and Simon Furman didn't want to run G.I. Joe as a backup strip in Transformers (after the Action Force merger), feeling it wasn't the best stablemate for a robot-based comic, but the order came down from on high. Transformers would greatly downplay the Joes, to the extent #172's TransFormation page joked that an F-14 Tomcat on the cover means "you may be forgiven" for thinking the team were getting a cover spot again. Furman told James Roberts this was a deliberate move to "suppress" a comic they felt didn't fit, "no offence to Larry".^[1]
• The Generation 2 crossover has been reprinted more often now than the Generation 2 series itself, including from IDW Publishing who never even touched Generation 2 with a pole.
• Though the contents do not fall under this wiki's purview, the Marvel G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero series was revived in 2010 by IDW Publishing, with Larry Hama returning to write. At one point, the series revealed that G.I. Joe's headquarters, the Pit, was secretly built atop an existing underground facility used to house and research a giant alien, a plot point intended to set up a Transformers crossover storyline^[2]; IDW ended up not going forward with the idea, and the only published connection between IDW's A Real American Hero and Transformers came in the form of A Real American Hero #200 and The Transformers: Regeneration One #100 having subscription variants that formed a connecting crossover image. The IDW series ended with issue #300 in 2022, only to immediately pick up again with #301 under Skybound Entertainment the following year.

References