G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero Pt. 6

It's time once again to revisit Larry Hama and company's original 1982-1994 Marvel Comics series, G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero (via Image Comics' 2024 G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero Compendium Vol. 1). Today we we'll be looking at issues #28-30. (Only 20 more issues to go...! In this volume. And then 105 more issues after that until the end of the series.)

As per usual, I am pulling the covers posted below from the Grand Comics Database, rather than from the collection itself, which is why they still say "Marvel" on them. And Larry Hama wrote all of these, which is why I'm not listing his writer credit on each. 

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #28 (1984)

Art by Marie Severin and Andy Mushynsky

•If the last couple of issues, which featured the two-part origin of Snake Eyes, were too heavy on backstory for you, Hama makes up for it with this issue, which is pretty much all fighting...plus a little comedy relief, with even some of those comedy relief characters involving themselves in the fighting.

So, the Joe team that was inserted into the swamp has retreated via rubber raft back to the G.I. Jane (see the splash page atop the post), from which a heavier team will launch to attack the Cobra base there. Zartan and his Dreadnoks, all of whom are piloting little Chameleon swamp skiers, have tracked the Joes to the boat, and assuming that a strike force will be on the way, warn Cobra Commander and then split: "My friends and I are departing for parts unknown...My lair is yours--Just leave the keys under the mat." 

Destro, The Baroness and Wild Weasel all climb into Rattlers stashed nearby, while, in Zartan's HQ, Cobra Commander and Firefly discover a hidden panel which controls a secret army of Cobra robot troopers and remote-controlled HISS ("High Speed Sentry") tanks. (The robots look like regular Cobra troopers, albeit with metal faces and blinking antennas atop their heads; these are apparently a comic book predecessor to the later B.A.T.s, or "Battle Android Troopers", black and yellow androids introduced into the toy line and the cartoon in 1986.)

The Joe force consists of the WHALE (The toy package reads "Warrior Hovering Assault Launch Envoy", but an editorial box here says that acronym stands for "Water-borne Hovercraft Assault Landing Experimental), piloted by Cutter and carrying Deep-Six, Duke and Roadblock (the last two of whom have just arrived off the coast of Florida from Alcatraz); a Dragonfly helicopter piloted by Wild Bill, with Doc riding shotgun; and a tank crewed by Steeler, Clutch, Braker and another Joe in green who I don't think gets named in the issue.

Everybody fights. 

•As for the comedy relief, there's a Florida sheriff and his deputy, R.L., who see the Joe tank arrive suddenly and dramatically, with Steeler driving right through the wall of a box car on the moving train that was delivering it to Florida. It scrapes and damages the sheriff's vehicle, after which the lawmen give chase, demanding the tank pull over, which the Joes refuse to do ("This here is a tank, if you haven't noticed," one of the Joes tells the sheriff when he splutters a threat over his loudspeaker). When they meet up with the robot Cobra force, the sheriff joins the fray, blasting robot soldiers with his shotgun while hanging out of the passenger side window of their vehicle.

"Great jumpin' poliwogs!" the sheriff exclaims as the robots and HISS pour out of the swamp. "We done run into a nest o' armed subversive anarchists or some-such!!!" 

He soon corrects himself as he notices the "soldiers" being blown into various metal pieces. "Them's ain't anarchists! Them's robots!!!" 

The Florida lawmen finally leave the battle on foot, when Wild Weasel sends a missile at their car.

•The other bit of comedy relief involves a couple who look like that from Grant Wood's "American Gothic" painting, who are struggling with the TV set on their porch when the WHALE streaks by. They do not get involved in the fight, though.

•There are two bits of real badassery in this battle, both of which you can see in the panels above.  Destro strafes the WHALE in one pass, destroying Roadblock's gun, wounding Deep-Six and damaging his gun so badly that he can't elevate it to find Destro's range as he comes back for another pass.

Roadblock, using just brute strength, elevates the gun himself ("Won't and can't are two words I don't believe in" he tells Deep-Six and, later, when Duke congratulates him, Roadblock hooks a thumb in Deep-Six's direction, saying "I just stood there, Duke. He pulled the trigger.")

Meanwhile, Destro takes a bullet right in the kisser, and reacts as if he had simply been stung by a bee.

•In the end, Wild Weasel picks up Cobra Commander in his Rattler to fly him to safety...the two-man plane not having enough room to take Firefly with them ("But you're a resourceful lad," the Commander tells him, "I'm sure you'll do just fine." Then, he says to himself once in the air, "Ah, yes...I must remember to re-stock my supply of lackeys when I get back to Springfield..."). A pissed-off Firefly stomps through the swamp, swearing vengeance, when he runs into Destro, who was also left behind after his Rattler was shot down.

As for the Joes, their WHALE is badly damaged, and several of them are wounded, particularly Deep-Six. While no one died, this battle does seem to have had a greater cost than some of the others in this series. 

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #29 (1984)

Art by Frank Springer and Andy Mushynsky

•There's an awful lot going on in this issue. In the aftermath of the previous issue's battle, the Joes are repairing the badly damaged WHALE. Destro and Firefly have to make it out of the swamp and back to Springfield by themselves, which means getting past the Joes. And Cobra Commander unveils a new, long-term plan to subvert American democracy which seems...familiar.

•While the Joes work on the WHALE at a rather public dock in Ehrlinger's Cove, the locals jeer at the "The little sojer boys" who "done bwoke their wubber waft." In the opening splash page featuring the WHALE Springer draws a "G.I. Joe" logo on its side. I thought the team was top secret? Should they really put their logo on their vehicles? Heck, should they even have a logo? 

•Another demonstration of just how strong Roadblock is. Three grown men hang on a big piece of metal armor he's toting around just to mess with him, and he doesn't even notice the extra weight. 

•As soon as he arrives back in Springfield, Cobra Commander goes directly from Wild Weasel's Rattler to deliver a speech, the Nazi-ish, fascist trappings of which puts Donald Trump's most dictator-coded moves to date to shame. There's massive dais with the Cobra logo on it, huge torches and banners everywhere (Of course, if this was Trump, those banners would have his face on them, rather than a logo of some kind; unlike Cobra Commander, the real-world villain doesn't even pretend to be part of some larger group or movement beyond himself).

•The gaslighting claiming military victory after an engagement that was anything but sounds familiar to what I see on the news every day now regarding the Iran war, too: "Do not let false rumors of our military mishaps alarm you! Cobra is winning!"

•I think it worth lingering on the Commander's speech a bit here, as I find it interesting to see what Hama and Marvel circa 1984 thought an evil, anti-American organization might believe, express and strive for. 

I think it especially so because, unlike real-world terrorist organizations (or even most fictional ones), Cobra isn't formed around a particular interpretation of a religious faith or a clear animating political objective; instead, they just seem to be anti-American, and, as the opening of the cartoon always says, "determined to rule the world." (And, despite how fascistic they style of Cobra might be, they don't seem to be organized around a strong man; their leader is not only so mysterious nobody knows his basic biography or even real name or face, but those that do know him best seem to be constantly trying to betray him.)  

So, here's more of his speech:

When the citizenry loll back on their fat haunches and hire the poor minorities to do their dirty work, we win!

When love of money eclipse moral conviction, we win!

When good men see the ascension of evil and do nothing, we win!

So, um, 42 years later, is Cobra still winning...? 

•Cobra Commander goes on to summarize some successes, a series of schemes which range from the entirely plausible ("Our nationwide 'Greed Is Good For You' seminars are filled to capacity") to the semi-silly ("Our media department has succeeded in selling ten more mindless sitcoms to the networks to further lower the intelligence of America!"...The Commander would have loved reality TV, social media, YouTube and TikTok...!).

He then goes on to introduce a new plot, involving a handsome, young, upwardly mobile businessman in a suit, a member of Cobra's Crimson Guard. The example the Commander parades here is wearing a very off-model costume, but this comports almost exactly with my memories of the file card that came with the Crimson Guard action figure, which was one of the relatively few G.I. Joe figures I had as a child, which described them as elite soldiers infiltrating the professional class of America while working in secret to further the aims of Cobra.  

The Commander describes him as, "On the surface, an upstanding pillar of the community...a loving husband. A fair and compassionate father-- --The last person to be suspected of being a deep-cover Cobra agent!!"

He goes on: "He will worm his way into the confidences of the mighty and work his way upward in the political machine to the senate and...dare we hope--higher?"

Now, a deep-cover agent being "the last person to be suspected" of being one is pretty de rigueur for 

spies of all sorts. As a little kid reading the file card, and just now again as an adult, this sounded somewhat Red Scare inspired, the idea that prominent people throughout American society were actually agents of our communist enemies. And certainly, the Commander's mention of one potentially achieving a position higher than a senator one day calls to mind elements of The Manchuria Candidate. 

Reading this in 2026, I also thought about the religious right's decades-long effort to fill the judiciary with anti-abortion judges, a plot so successful that, in 2022, they finally had enough such judges on the Supreme Court itself that they were able to overturn Roe v. Wade. 

There's something to be said for the long game, for bad guys posing as pillars of society, for worming one's way into the confidences of the might and working one's way upward in the political machine, huh? 

The Crimson Guard action figure would be released in 1985, the year the first season of the cartoon show debuted, in which the Guard also appeared. That this is some months earlier, that might help explain why the costume this Guardsman is wearing looks so off; perhaps the design wasn't yet finalized...?

The toy and cartoon design are pretty great though, and remains one of my favorite visuals from the franchise.

•As the Joes finish fixing up the WHALE (and Destro and Firefly sneak up on them, intent on stealing it as a getaway vehicle), Cutter drops a tool into a toolbox, wipes his brow and says to himself, "Me for a frosty bottle of Yo-Jo Kola!"

This is the first appearance of the Joe's favorite brand of soda, which inexplicably has their cartoon battle cry in its name. It will be mentioned again and again in the comic and cartoon, although it's usually spelled cola-with-a-C.

I am curious of its origins, if Hama's first draft of a script mentioned a more natural bottled beverage, sometimes described as "frosty", for a grown man to desire after a hard day's work. You know, a beer. 

But this being a comic book marketed to children, the remit of which was specifically to tell toys to those children, perhaps the editors at Marvel balked at the mention of an alcoholic beverage, and thus we have Cutter craving a soda pop in this panel...? (Later in the series, we'll see the Dreadnoks repeatedly referring to grape soada and, in a few issues hence, Doc offers Deep-Six a cup of hot chocolate rather than coffee, and I thought the same thing; especially since Hama has Deep-Six reply that he never touches the stuff.)

•Destro jumps Cutter, who tries to fight him off hand-to-hand, causing the incredulous, metal-faced Destro to respond, "Did you think you could hurt me by punching me? In the face?" 

I love that he always takes every opportunity to point out that his mask isn't just metal, but "polished berylium steel." 

(I think this came up previously, but spellcheck says it's "beryllium", with two L's, while the comic says "berylium" with one L. Of course, the comic seems unable to decide whether there's a hyphen in Snake Eyes' name or not, so maybe its spelling isn't to be trusted...)

•Though beat up pretty badly ("Feels like I been stopping bowling balls with my face..."), Cutter isn't about to let Destro make off with his WHALE, which leads to a rather wild chase, complete with a few scenes of comedy relief (including some more appearances by our friends the sheriff and Deputy R.L.). While Duke and Wild Bill chase the WHALE in the Dragonfly, Cutter makes it back to the G.I. Jane and joins the chase, which means driving it overland on its hydrofoils until those fall off and he fortuitously lands in a channel. 

•I'm a big fan of this panel. See Trip-Wire there? That would be me on, like, every G.I. Joe mission.

•In the end, Destro uses his wrist rockets to shoot down the Dragonfly, forcing Wild Bill to make a seemingly impossible landing aboard the Jane in a flaming helicopter. While the Joes are distracted, Firefly has an audacious escape plan: He has Destro lash the WHALE's wheel, and then he and Destro hide away in the barrel-sized containers of emptied depth launchers. When the Jane is finally able to suck up the WHALE through its open hull doors, the Joes find neither enemy aboard....just an impossible to defuse bomb that Firefly left behind for them.

•Trip-Wire prepares to make the ultimate sacrifice to save the others, but Roadblock isn't having it: 

He kicks Trip-Wire off the explosive device, picks it up, and then throws it to a duct leading to a funnel on deck, where it explodes harmlessly in the open air. A few panels later, Roadblock compliments Trip-Wire's show of bravery here but also gives him a lecture: "Uncle Sam paid megabucks to train you to fight with a team. A dead hero don't do his buddies no good, and medals ain't no shinier when they're posthumous."

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #30 (1984)

Art by Frank Springer and Andy Mushysnsky and Pat Redding

•When Zartan and his Dreadnoks think they recognize the Dragonfly from the battle in the Florida swamp landing at McGuire Aire Force Base in New Jersey—which, coincidentally, is where they retreated to—Zartan does some incognito investigation and, seeing some Joes there, reports to Cobra Commander. He's convinced the Joe base is hidden there and prepares Coba for a full-scale attack. 

•Meanwhile, on Staten Island, we see one of the Crimson Guards and his fake family have just bought a new house near the Chaplain's Assistant's School at Fort Wadsworth, AKA right next to the secret location of the actual Joe base, The Pit.

"Fred Broca" doesn't seem to be all that great at staying undercover, though. Note his last name is just "Cobra" spelled backwards, and the Cobra hood ornament on his car above. A moving truck marked "Arbco Moving & Storage" (yes, an anagram of "Cobra") delivers boxes to the family's new house, and these undercover Cobra agents will spend the rest of the issue setting up their highly advanced spy equipment. If G.I. Joe is based in the area—and they are!—then they are sure to detect them. 

Fortunately for the Joes, just as Fred is about to turn the equipment on, he gets a phone call telling him to return to Springfield, as the Commander thinks he's found the Joes' base. Fred and his wife react by smashing their equipment in frustration. 

•Speaking of Arbco, Cobra is using a line of Arbco Brothers Circus trucks to transport their weaponry to the area for an attack. Billy, the little boy from Springfield we met way back in G.I. Joe #10, has stowed away on one and is snooping when he's discovered by The Baroness and Major Bludd. 

"Perhaps he resents Cobra enough to join our cause!" The Baroness says. 

This will prove important later. 

•The rest of the issue involves a sizable Joes vs. Cobra battle. The Dreadnoks were charged with doing recon at the airfield base and then cutting a hole in the fence to allow Cobra's forces to sneak in. Instead, they use their weird weapons to start chopping up planes (see Mike Zeck's cover above), inadvertently causing an explosion and alerting the base (and the Joes) of their presence.

Cobra Commander leads an attack with HISS tanks and FANG (Fully Armed Negator Gyrocopter) helicopters, and the Joes engage and ultimately repel them.

Have we finally gotten the greatest adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey...?

Homer's epic poem The Odyssey is one of the oldest surviving works of literature and a cornerstone of world literature and Western culture, directly inspiring such modern works as James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses, 1995's episode five of Wishbone, The Coen Brothers's 2000 film O, Brother Where Art Though? and the Animal Man passages of DC's 2006 weekly comic book series 52.

Now comes perhaps most consequential retelling of The Odyssey, with major talents tackling the oft-told story in a much talked-about new take sure to introduce the classic to a new generation. 

I am talking of course about Godzilla's The Odyssey. 

IDW published the oversized one-shot comic in June, branding it with a "Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theatre Presents" above the title. Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theatre was a 2024 miniseries by the great Tom Scioli, in which Jay Gatsby used his vast fortune and single-mindedness to try to rid the world of Godzilla, a bizarre literary mash-up that also folded Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, the protagonist from H.G. Wells' The Time Machine and others into the adventure (I reviewed the collection, released in 2025, in this column). 

It was as great a comic as it was a wild one, and it must have been successful for IDW, as they have since launched a line of "Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theatre Presents" books, starting with April's Romeo & Juliet and Godzilla. Godzilla's Odyssey is the second in the line. 

Unfortunately, Scioli himself isn't creating these books himself, each of which has a different creative team. Rather, Scioli is providing inspiration, and contributing around the edges. He provides the cover art (or, given the variants, some of the covers) and a five-page Godzilla and Robin Hood back-up. 

The Odyssey book is the work of writer Frank Tieri, whose 2023 Godzilla vs. pirates comic Here There Be Dragons was surprisingly well received for how simple it was, and artist Ilias Kyriazis, whose inspired art sings, and really sells the unlikely combination of source material.

Now, based solely on a reading of the summary on Wikipedia just before reading this, it certainly seems Tieri stays fairly faithful to the Homer's poem, at least in terms of the chronicling the events of Ulysses' journey, if not each and every character, and certainly not the structure (It would seem a couple of books have been excised, but those seem to be the same ones that usually get excised). In fact, I wonder if it may even be a bit more faithful than that other big Odyssey adaptation of the summer...? But I should probably leave that matter to be judged by anyone who has both read Homer's original poem and remembers it. 

That so much of The Odyssey is in Godzilla's The Odyssey is in itself is pretty impressive, as Tieri and Kyriazis don't have much room to work with; they need to squish the whole 24-book poem into just 35 pages. They manage it, and they do so without ever betraying that they were crunched for space. The layouts are as open and breezy, and the panels as few-per-pages, as one has come to expect from modern comics. Hell, they even allow themselves a splash page here and there. 

Perhaps this is helped by the extremely fleet pacing, where a typical adventure of an island might only take a page or three, or a nicely constructed page like this one below, which combines a map with a comic, and put me in mind of one of those Sunday installments of The Family Circus, where a dotted line might follow Billy or whichever kid through the neighborhood:

(Come to think of it, I bet it would be fun to see a clever artist adapt the entirety of Odysseus' journey into a Family Circus style journey strip. Surely someone somewhere has had that idea already though...)

The other way the comic saves time and space is by the relative simplicity of its structure. The entire adventure is told in the Olympian court, with Athena and Poseidon recapping what goes on and has gone on while they argue with one another (Athena is pro-Odysseus, Poseidon anti-Odysseus), and eventually Zeus involves himself.

The Olympians, by the way, are wonderfully designed. Rather than the standard toga-wearing models and bearded men of old movies and most comics, Kyriazis' Olympians are all quite distinct, some of them even unique. They put me more in mind of, say, George O'Connor's masterful Olympians graphic novel series or Cliff Chiang's version from his chunk of the 2011-2016 New 52 Wonder Woman series rather than those of, say, George Perez's post-Crisis Wonder Woman relaunch. 

You can probably tell, or at least guess, who each of the are at a glance, and yet I like how...different they seem from one another and, in some cases, from more traditional renderings. The most interesting looking of them all are, of course, Athena and Poseidon. 

While the latter looks like a big, strong, muscular old man with a long beard and loin cloth, resembling his brother Zeus save for that, in medium shot, he looks a bit like the ocean and, in close-up, a bit like a fish, Athena looks like no version I've ever seen before, nor imagined. That's her on the left below, identifiable by the owl on her shoulder. Honestly, the strange armor she wears suggests a chess piece or a fancy layer cake to me. It's a great design, one that looks appropriately alien given how far removed the Olympian gods are from humanity.

So, how does Godzilla fit into all of this...?

Well, he appears on the opening splash page, when "The Trojan Godzilla", an apparently life-size wooden construction of the familiar monster, is left as a gift outside the gates of Troy. In the world of Godzilla's The Odyssey, Godzilla is well-known, referred to as "the legendary hammer of Zeus". (Does the mention of Godzilla and Zeus in the same sentence tickle your memory, as it did mine? Then you are likely remembering 2016's Godzilla: Rage Across Time #2, in which writers Chris Mowry and Kahlil Schweitzer and artist Tadd Galusha had Godzilla storm Olympus, climaxing in a battle between the King of the Gods and the King of the Monsters.)

And he pops up now and then throughout Odysseus' journey as a sort of guardian monster. He's there to fight the cyclopean monster who killed, cut and half and then replaced the cyclops on one island (that would be Gigan, of course), as well as the many-headed dragon Scylla (King Ghidorah) and the whirlpool monster Charybdis (the tidal wave-creating Titanosaurus).

(Now, why didn't Odysseus think to simply grab Charybdis by the throat and throw it at Scylla...?)

Perhaps most satisfyingly, Godzilla is there at the end in Ithaca, where he cracks open Odysseus' castle and uses his atomic breath to skeletonize the suitors (Is this as suspenseful as a long-bearded Matt Damon fighting dozens of men in hand-to-hand combat? No, but it is certainly quicker and more satisfying; I mean, if you've already seen Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, then surely you can imagine how delightful it would be to see Godzilla vaporize Robert Pattison's smarmy Antinous, right?).

If all the creators did was stick Godzilla into the narrative like this, portraying his as something between a monster and a god—which, to be fair, he has long been depicted as, in his films as well as comics—then Godzilla's The Odyssey would have been a pretty fun comic while also fulfilling its reason for being.

But, of course, they don't stop there. As the last few paragraphs make clear, like most of IDW's Godzilla comics, this one makes full use of the whole Toho stable of monsters (and, surprisingly, other characters and creatures), using them in pretty much wherever they could conceivably fit as analogues to the original elements of classic Greek mythology. 

The characters never use the real names of the Toho IP—for example, Ghidorah and Titanosaurus are referred to only as Scylla and Charybdis—leaving it up to readers to recognize them. Godzilla fans won't have a problem doing so, though, making these 35 pages a treasure trove of Easter eggs. And, I imagine, if you don't get a particular reference, well, I'm sure there's a Godzilla fan somewhere online willing to tell you all about it (Like me; I will tell you all about any of the cameos in here).

I've already mentioned the most obvious ones. A delightful surprise came during the part where Odysseus receives a bag of wind from the god Aeolus (A sequence not in the film; while Nolan isn't shy about using the monsters or demonstrating that magic is real, he equivocates when it comes to the existence of the gods himself, even the one who is onscreen throughout the film). The bag has a bat-like symbol on it, which I thought odd for a few seconds, until I turned the page:

Of course, the wind is Rodan, who, in his initial 1956 film appearance, destroyed the city of Fukuoka by generating hurricane force winds by flapping his wings. (Check out that first panel, too; I love how Kyriazis captures and conveys the sheer weirdness of a giant monster emerging from a small bag.)

Perhaps the strangest Godzillafications in the comic though come on the island of Circe and when Odysseus sails past the sirens. Circe doesn't turn his men into pigs, but rather into loathsome giant sea louses, like the one seen in 1984's Return of Godzilla. And the sirens, rather than being some sort of admixture of women with birds or fish? Well, here they wear head-to-toe silver jumpsuits with ponchos; it appears they are a trio of Kilaaks, the all-female aliens from 1968's Destroy All Monsters. 

There are several more such inserts, at least one more of which I thought quite clever, but I don't want to over-spoil the book for anyone who hasn't read it yet. 

Now, while Godzilla's The Odyssey seems pretty faithful to the plot of The Odyssey, thoroughly Godzilla-izing the proceedings to the point where Homer's story is at once transformed but intact, does it diminish Odysseus, given that is now the co-star in a poem named after him and that, over and over, Godzilla saves him and his crew? (For one example, Odysseus doesn't have to come up with any kind of scheme to save himself and his men from the cyclops; here Godzilla arrives at the cave mouth to fight Gigan while Odysseus and company simply run away).

I'm not sure. He still has his "brilliant attack on Troy" going for him (even if the shape of his wooden gift is different), he still has the bravery and perseverance to face and survive whatever is thrown at him, and he still pulls off his bow trick and he is at least prepared to take on all the suitors until Godzilla arrives. 

And then, I suppose, there's this scene:

At the end, Odysseus comes face to face with a power far beyond him, one that has demonstrated its ability to control his face and, ultimately, whether he lives or dies. Now, a scene in which Godzilla confronts a human adversary or ally like this, seemingly sizing him up and, if the human is a good guy, ultimately storming off without eating, stomping or roasting him, occurs repeatedly in the Godzilla cycle of films. Here, Odysseus has the courage to face him (even if Godzilla has the hero sweating!), just as he has faced the dangers presented to him throughout his journey, and he has the grace to thank Godzilla, just as he had prayed to the gods a few pages earlier.

In the end then, Tieri doesn't just insert Godzilla (and friends) into The Odyssey, but he manages to portray the invincible monster as a divine figure capable of using his great strength for good or ill, and for rendering judgement on humans.

In other words, Godzilla's The Odyssey presents Godzilla as a something of a god, which, as I mentioned previously, is a common take on the character, while the comic simultaneously portrays Odysseus' relationship to this godlike entity in a way consistent with the way he addresses the Olympians and ultimately comes to think of them after an earlier burst of hubris that apparently so offended Poseidon (In this telling). 

As weird, as unlikely and as funny as Godzilla's The Odyssey is, then, it's also the very best kind of comic book team-up. 

************************

Now, if you didn't buy this comic off the rack last month, either because you weren't sure how awesome it might be or because you quite sensibly didn't want to spend $7.99 on a 40-page comic book (and/or, like me, you were waiting for a trade collection of the "Monsterpiece Presents" specials), well I've got good news for you.

Do you have a library card? Does your library offer access to Hoopla digital media service through their website? If so, then you can borrow and read Godzilla's The Odyssey for free...along with a bunch of other Godzilla and IDW comics. Not a fan of reading comics (or anything else) on screens, I was waiting for some kind of collection to read this, as I said above, but, well, with the national conversation turning to The Odyssey this weekend, it seemed like a good time to check out the Godzilla version. 

Bookshelf #38

This week's bookshelf is my original First Second shelf, and, indeed, most of the books here are from the publisher. 

On the furthest left are the bigger format books, like Aaron Renier's The Unsinkable Walker Bean, a couple of George O'Connor's Olympian books, a couple of Lewis Trondheim and Fabrice Parme's Tiny Tyrant books and, turned sideways to better fit the shelf but thus hiding their spines, the first of James Sturm and company's Adventures in Cartooning books and Gene Luen Yang's Prime Baby. 

Then comes more standard-sized First Second books, including Richard Sala's Cat Burglar Black, Trondheim's Vampire Loves, Dong Hwa Kim's The Color of... trilogy and more. 

There's no real rhyme or reason to the other, non-First Second books on the shelf; I seem to have just stuck the wherever they fit.

So, laying across the top of the First Seconds are Hope Larson and Rebecca Mock's two-book adventure series Compass South and Knife's Edge and a couple of Papercutz's Smurfs collections. 

And stacked up on the right, we have the second and third volumes of Sekihiko Inui's superhero manga Ratman (Is volume 1 around here somewhere? Or did I borrow it from the library, and then decide to buy the second and third volumes for some reason?), the final five volumes of Hiromu Arakawa's Full Metal Alchemist (In this case, I do remember that I had read all the volumes of the series that my local library had somewhere around 2010 or so, and then, too impatient to wait once I was caught up, I started buying the new volumes as they were released) and my copies of Scott Pilgrim, which I guess I decided neither to shelve with my Oni books nor on one of the manga shelves, where these tankobon-style graphic novels would fit perfectly. 

At the very top and the very bottom of that stack are two books so thin you won't be able to read their spines. On the top is the collection of the "What if Henry Rollins and Gleen Danzig were a couple?"  cartoons from Igloo Tornado entitled Henry & Glenn Forever and an Oh, Comics! anthology built around the theme of food (and labeled Vol. 1 No. 16). 

If you're not from Columbus, you may not be familiar with Oh, Comics!, but it was (Is? I am no longer in Columbus!) an annual anthology series published by cartoonist Bob Corby, who runs SPACE (The Small Press And Alternative Comics Expo, which is where I first became aware of the work of Jeffrey Brown, Tom Scioli, Ed Piskor, Paul Hornschemeier and, in 2000 or 2001, bought a self-published comic called Street Angel from Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca). Flipping through it now, I see lots of names and art I recognize—Max Ink, Matt Dembicki, Craig Bogart, Mike Carrol, Pam Bliss.

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero Pt. 5

When I first decided that I would review my way through the original 1982-1994 G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero comic book series from Marvel—via Image Comics' giant G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero Compendiums—I figured I would tackle six issues per post. That seemed like a decent-sized chunk of comics, right?

After doing four of them though, I came to realize that maybe that is just too many comic per post. Like, I suppose it depends on how much I find of note or interest in each issue and, so far, it seems like a lot. So, starting with this fifth post in the series, I'm going to try doing just three issues per post, and see how that goes. It will definitely make it easier for me to put them together (which means I can post them more frequently) and, I imagine, it will make them easier for you guys to read—although at this point, I suppose most of my readers are used to me going on way, way too long in all my posts.

This time, I'll be covering the milestone 25th issue, as well as the two-part origin of Snake-Eyes! As always, each issue is written by Larry Hama, unless otherwise noted. 

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #25 (1984)
Art by Frank Springer and Mike Gustovich

•Storm Shadow is chained at the wrists and ankles in the back of a boat taking him to be imprisoned in Alcatraz, which the Joes are now using as a brig. Roadblock is holding a machine gun to his head, but Storm Shadow doesn't seem at all phased about any of this, telling the Joes that "A prison is just a building...It can't hold a ninja." No wonder this guy was so popular!

•As with their capture of Cobra Commander a few issues back, I'm not really sure how it works when G.I. Joe takes a prisoner. Curiously, they don't unmask Storm Shadow (and let him keep the rest of his ninja outfit on), and I doubt it's because he too has plastic explosives in his mask, like the Commander did. Is Storm Shadow being charged with a crime? Is he going to be questioned? What's the legal process for members of a terrorist organization determined to rule the world in 1984, as far as a secret federal strike force like G.I. Joe is concerned...?

•Meanwhile, in the Everglades, Cobra Commander, Destro and The Baroness are traveling over water via what looks like the Cobra Water Moccasin (the same vehicle seen on the cover), although it is being piloted by a generic Cobra trooper, rather than Copperhead, whose action figure came packaged with the vehicle.

•"I'm sure you're going to like my new friend..." the Commander tells his two peers, "...Too bad Major Bludd couldn't join us!" The Baroness tells us this is because the Commander had Bludd placed in a dungeon back in Springfield due to his treachery in Switzerland, and when she reminds her boss that she too was involved in said treachery, he replies, " True. But you're much more charming than the major in every way my dear Baroness--"

•The Cobra high command spot Zartan, appearing on his Chameleon swamp skier (which pencil artist Springer positions him atop more like a traditional motorcycle, while the figure sort of lay across the top of it to pilot the toy). They follow him to his headquarters, a shabby-looking shack, where Zartan unveils his next trick—even his base of operations is in disguise...! (And yes, this reminded me a bit of the original 1981 Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends cartoon, in which what looked like an ordinary rec room could be transformed into a high-tech superhero HQ when a lever concealed in a sports trophy is pulled; you can see it during the show's opening sequence here on YouTube, if you weren't around and watching cartoons in the early '80s...) 

•In the Gulf of Mexico, aboard a ship we will later learn is called the G.I. Jane, we meet a handful of new Joes, as the team prepares to investigate the sole clue found on Storm Shadow when he was apprehended: That he had something shipped to Chokoloskee, Florida.

The new Joes? 

Well, there's Cutter, a Coast Guardsmen in a Boston Red Sox ball cap, whose figure came packaged with the Killer WHALE hovercraft (That's "Warrior Hovering Assault Launch Envoy") but who is here captaining the Jane; Deep-Six, a quiet. even anti-social guy who Wild Bill describes as "the best diver and deep water man the Navy has" and whose figure came packaged with the "flying submarine" the SHARC (Which stands for "Submersible High Speed Attack Recon Craft", although Hama's script doesn't point that out; these were pretty cool ships that looked slightly Star Wars to me, and could dip in and out of the water); and, finally, Mutt and Junkyard, the team's extremely ornery dog-handler and his remarkably friendly dog, respectively (Note Rock 'n Roll and Trip-Wire's discussion of this pair: "Notice which one of 'em is wearing the muzzle?" the former says, while the latter replies, "The one that bites--").

•Snake Eyes brings a cup of crawdad gumbo to Gung Ho in the hospital, where the Cajun marine is recovering frow a sword wound delivered by Storm Shadow. When he catches a glimpse of Snake Eye's tattoo, he comments that Storm Shadow had the same one and that maybe they went to the same tattoo parlor, but Snake Eyes completely disappears from the room mid-sentence, the way Batman is always disappearing on Commissioner Gordon. 

•The Joes manage to insert the team of Torpedo, Trip-Wire, Mutt and Junkyard via helicopters, but not without the bad guys noticing them on radar, giving Hama a chance to demonstrate the over-the-top accent of one of Zartan's Dreadnoks. 

Here is Buzzer, who apparently can't or won't pronounce "H" sounds: "'Eads up, Zartan! We got 'elicopters comin' in low and suspicious-like! You want me and the boyos to cook up a reception party with a couple o' 'eat-seekin' missiles?"  (By the way, I just looked him up online, and apparently, he's from England and fell in with biker gangs in Australia, so he's accent could be either, or some kind of combination, I suppose).

•Cobra's Water Moccasin, the Joes' Dragonfly helicopters and the SHARC all engage in a short battle, but like the majority of Cobra vs. Joe firefights, no one is killed or injured during it.

• Back at Alcatraz, Storm Shadow's cell is found empty; he has apparently already made good on his promise to escape. And then, back in Florida, we get another demonstration of just how anti-social Deep Six is:

•In the swamp, Junkyard catches a scent and runs off, treeing Cobra agents Firefly and Wild Weasel, who had of course managed to abandon the Water Moccasin just before the SHARC had blown it up and, just as Mutt and the Joes capture them, Junkyard runs off again...this time arriving at Zartan's headquarters! Uh-oh.

•Just how evil is Zartan? Evil enough to shoot a dog? Kids in 1984 had to wait a whole month to find out, as these were the last panels on the last page of the issue. Lucky for us, we only have to wait the turn of a page or two...

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #26 (1984)
Art by Larry Hama and Steve Leialoha

•How's that for a cover? Artists Mike Zeck and Bob Wiacek may not have drawn an action-packed image here, but you could scarcely ask for a more dramatic cover, hinting as it does at Snake Eyes' origins...and a connection between he, Stalker and Storm Shadow....?

•The first page splash is interesting too, mainly due to its credit box, which tells us that this issue was both scripted and the art broken down by Hama, while Leialoha handled the "finishes." This is the exact same team, we got on issue #21, the silent issue. 

•This is a pretty big issue, with a whole lot going on, and one that does indeed begin to tell the origins of Snake Eyes, just as the cover promised. 

There are three strands to the story. First, there's the action in the swamp, which takes up relatively little page space (and doesn't involve Snake Eyes in any way, shape or form). Second, an old, overweight Japanese man running a Cuban-Chinese restaurant in Spanish Harlem we will soon learn is known as "The Soft Master" is approached by Snake Eyes, and he begins telling Snake Eyes elements of his own origin story, one which Snake Eyes knows just about every aspect of, so the retelling is apparently for the benefit of the readers. And third, Stalker, Hawk and Scarlett, all gathered in the Pit around a computer monitor with the red hexagram from the I-Ching that Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow have tattooed on their arms, tell one another about the parts of Snake Eyes' past each of them know.

•There's a lot of plot and backstory here, obviously, and this post format isn't a good way to share it. Presumably, you've already read this issue. 

If not, as briefly as possible, the Joes part of the story involves Stalker, Snake Eyes and a Japanese-American with an "unpronounceable" last name that everyone called Tommy, all soldiers in the Vietnam conflict. They are boarding a helicopter when Snake Eyes is shot in the face and though Stalker commands Tommy to leave him, Tommy nevertheless risks a hail of gunfire to retrieve Snake Eyes and get him aboard the copter. (Throughout this section, Snake Eyes wears a wide-brimmed hat that casts the upper half of his face in shadow, so that even though this is prior to his disfiguring accident, we don't really get to see much of his face here either. After he's wounded in battle, his face is swaddled in bandages; these facial wounds aren't the real bad ones though, the ones that he would later sustain on a G.I. Joe mission, which we've already seen dramatized). When Snake Eyes arrives back in the states, there's no one there to meet him at the airport...Hawk is the one that eventually tracks him down there, and has to deliver the news that his whole family was killed in a terrible car accident.

The Soft Master's story involves Snake Eyes coming to join "the family business" in Japan, a position that Tommy had promised him. This was that of a ninja clan, led by The Soft Master, his older brother The Hard Master, and their nephew Tommy, aka The Young Master. Snake Eyes trained with them for two years, and had begun to surpass Tommy's skills, so much so that The Hard Master spoke to Snake Eyes of having him replace The Young Master, something that Tommy had overheard. And then The Hard Master is killed by an arrow. Due to various ninja techniques, it appears all that certain that the person who shot the arrow was Tommy, as he had mastered "The Ear That Sees", allowing him to kill a target outside of his line of sight, based solely on his sense of hearing. And it seems clear that the intended target was Snake Eyes, as the Hard Master was using a different ninja technique to mimic Snake Eyes' heartbeat at the time he was shot. Pretty strong circumstantial evidence!

Both Tommy and Snake Eyes disappeared after that. Later, a ninja turned up in Cobra's employ using the name "Storm Shadow", the translation of the family's name, the "unpronounceable" "Arashikage." Storm Shadow then, is Snake Eyes' old friend from the army and ninja training.

As for the swamp storyline, that's much more simple and straightforward!

Mutt, who seems to have removed his muzzle between issues, is pissed at Junkyard, who he thinks has betrayed them.

(Destro has talked Zartan out of shooting him, noting the oddity of the dog's presence in the swamp, and asking, "Why does he look expectantly out into the cypress groves?")

But the dog is playing the long game, and leads the Cobra high command—Cobra Commander, Destro, The Baroness and Zartan—out into the swamp...and directly into quicksand!

Amusingly, not only does Hama continue to portray Mutt and both more temperamental and less clever than his dog, but despite supposedly being his partner and handler, Mutt never seems to have any idea what Junkyard is up to.

•By the way, dig Snake Eyes' disguise when he goes to visit the Soft Master: A long coat and a wide-brimmed hat. Apparently, he gets his disguises the same place that The Fantastic Four's Ben Grimm and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Raphael get theirs...

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #27 (1984)
Art by Frank Springer and Andy Mushynsky

•Alright, if Mike Zeck's cover for the previous issue wasn't exactly action-packed, Michael Golden makes up for it with this one: Ninjas fighting on an elevated train, while a helicopter gives chase!

•This issue, entitled "Snake-Eyes: The Origin Part II" obviously continues the origin of Snake Eyes, but Hama and Leialoha have turned over art duties. (Oh, and yes, there's a hyphen in Snake Eyes' name here; you'll notice that hyphen seems to come and go; it's not just me spelling it differently in diffeent instances.)

•In the swamp, Zartan and The Baroness fire on the fleeing Junkyard, but Destro aims a wrist-rocket at the base of a nearby tree, knocking it towards them so they are able to climb out of the quicksand. The Joes continue to give chase to Firefly and Wild Weasel, who had escaped their temporary capture...and prepared a deadly Malayan tiger gate for the. ir pursuers. Luckily, Junkyard manages to rush ahead and set that off, without getting impaled himself. That dog's really the MVP of this mission, so far. Once Zartan and the others arrive though, Junkyard and his human helpers are outnumbered, and they all flee the swamp.

•But let's return to Snake Eyes' origin, shall we? 

The Joes keep story-swapping. Six years after Hawk saw Snake Eyes at the airport, he and Stalker started putting together the G.I. Joe team. They managed to track Snake Eyes down to a town in the High Sierras, which he apparently visited once a month to pick up his government check. The local lumberjacks told them that Snake Eyes lived in a little cabin up in the mountains and, further, that he was a werewolf.

"A what?" the Hawk in the flashback story says. 

"A werewolf," the mailman Hawk questions says. "Fur. Tail. Bays at the moon. Even got some sort of mark on his wrist. Don't pay it no mind. Just logger talk, that's all."

•This exchange leads to my favorite panel in the G.I. Joe series so far, though. The pair go up to Snake Eyes' cabin and, within, they find a wolf, so naturally Hawk addresses it:

Stalker is right, it is not Snake Eyes, but a wolf. Snake Eyes himself soon enters, wearing a wide-brimmed hat that keeps the top half of his face in shadow, and carrying a pair of rabbits, which Stalker notes he has apparently hunted down...without a gun. 

•Snake Eyes climbs into the back of their jeep, and Hawk looks over his shoulder at the wolf, now outside the cabin. "He's going to leave that poor animal behind all by himself?" Hawk asks, to which Stalker replies, "Hawk, that 'poor animal' is a wolf. He don't need no walkies, and he thinks Alpo is for sissies." 

I imagine this is first appearance of Timber, the wolf that Snake-Eyes kept as a pet in the cartoon, and which came packaged with the second version of the Snake Eyes action figure, the one released in 1985 (That's the Snake Eyes figure that came with the cool visor, like the one you might see on a medieval knight's helmet, instead of the goggles we've seen him wearing up until now, and it's the one that young Caleb owned). 

I'm not sure if Timber will show up in the comic again after this, but, following Junkyard, he's the second Joe "pet" to show up in the series. I'm now wondering if we'll see others, like Shipwreck's parrot Polly, Spirit's bald eagle Freedom or Law's dog Order...

•Scarlett then tells her part of Snake-Eyes' origin story: How she met him in the early days of the G.I. Joe team, how they talked and became friends and how she wanted to be more than friends, and was thus "miffed" when he told her that she reminded him of his sister (In these flashbacks, we don't hear any actual dialogue from Snake Eyes of course, we just get yellow narration boxes of Scarlett summarizing their talks and relationship as she tells Stalker and Hawk about them.

And then we get to the recounting of the accident in which he lost his face....and, apparently, his ability to speak. During a helicopter accident, Scarlet was trapped in one of the choppers, and Snake Eyes stayed behind to save her, taking a face full of burning fuel in the process. He saved her life, but at great cost to himself.

"He spent six months in the hospital and all the best plastic surgeons tried every trick in the book but there was nothing in the world that could ever make Snake-Eyes look human again," she says. 

I wonder if he ever approached that discrete plastic surgeon in Europe, the one who put The Baroness back together, hotter than ever, after she was blown up....?

Anyway, he wasn't any more into Scarlet after being disfigured and rendered mute than he was before:

His injury was such that he could have gotten complete disability, but he had no family (except maybe a wolf?) and nowhere to go, so he stayed on with the Joes.

•Back in Harlem, The Soft Master is finishing up his story, telling Snake Eyes how he is searching for Storm Shadow, who he believes murdered his brother The Hard Master, when guess who appears...? Storm Shadow snatches the arrow that killed The Hard Master from the hands of The Soft Master, and flees, with Snake Eyes giving chase. 

•Soon, we have a white ninja running through the streets of New York City, while a masked man in black toting a machine gun gives chase. It's a fun scene; note the little kid who sees Storm Shadow and calls out "Moon Knight!", a so far relatively rare instance that this is a Marvel comic (though presumably not set in the Marvel Universe proper):

What a tableau! Breakdancers, a three-card monte game, a fruit stand...what more could you ask for in a chase through the streets of New York City...?

•The Joes eventually get involved, via VAMP (that's "Vehicle Assault Multi-Purpose", in case you forgot) and a Dragonfly helicopter (as per the cover), and Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes end up fighting atop an elevated train. After Snake Eyes saves Storm Shadow from being splattered when the train enters a tunnel, the Cobra ninja throws away his knife and reveals a secret to his old comrade:

It wasn't he who had killed his uncle The Hard Master, but a masked, caped assassin who escaped the scene in a Cobra helicopter. The only reason Storm Shadow is now with Cobra is that he's trying to uncover the identity of his uncle's killer. 

Snake Eyes seems to buy it, as he lets Storm Shadow go, and his fellow Joes find him sitting calmly on the train, waiting for them. 

Review: Jim Lawson's 1993 Dino Island

I've probably been looking for Jim Lawson's 1993, two-issue mini-series Dino Island in back issue bins for at least 25 years now...unsuccessfully. 

Lawson is, as you probably know, an alum of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's Mirage Studios, having drawn many issues of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series (including the "City At War" arc) and its sister series Tales of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, written and drawn the entirety of the full-color volume 2, drawn the Laird-written volume 4 and various and sundry other TMNT works, including the newspaper comic strip, a volume of the Pallaium role-playing game and the adaptations of the characters' first two films. 

I haven't exactly kept track, but I'm pretty sure Lawson remains the most prolific artist to ever draw the characters, his page count dwarfing that of any other contender. 

I've come to appreciate Lawson's idiosyncratic work more and more as time went on, and, at some point I remembered a Mirage house ad for his Dino Island in the back of some Turtle comic or another, as it was one of the relatively few Turtle-less comics Mirage published from creators like Lawson and Michael Dooney (And, for a time, Mirage was home to Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo and a spin-off, Space Usagi). All I remembered was the image of a woman atop a triceratops, and an establishing shot featuring sauropods in a pen. After reading Lawson's later Paleo: Tales From Late Cretaceous, a collection of excellent dinosaur comics seemingly inspired by, or at least made in the spirit of, Stephen Bissette's Tyrant, I really wanted to see Lawson doing a people-and-dinosaurs book.

A couple weeks ago, I got an email from Midtown Comics, telling me that books from my "wish list" were now available: Dino Island #1 and #2. To be honest, I had forgotten that I had ever even looked them up on their site or that I had added to my wish list. Hell, I forgot that I even had an account there, let alone a wish list. 

So that was a nice surprise.

Not long after, these comics, these two comics, released the same year that the original Jurassic Park film had come out, were sitting on my desk. 

Now I wouldn't be being entirely honest if I said that the 53-page story completely rewarded a 25-year wait; that's a lot of expectation to live up to, after all. But I must say that I wasn't at all disappointed, either. It was Lawson at the height of his powers, drawing a comic full of the sorts of things that Lawson seemed to like to draw: Dinosaurs, aliens, vehicles, a pretty lady. 

It also intersects with a particular interest of mine—dinosaurs, sure, but, specifically, human beings encountering dinosaurs—in what today reads to me like a very particular stylist doing a riff on "The War That Time Forgot" feature from DC's old Star Spangled War Stories series. (Which was, of course, itself a riff on classic science fiction and fantasy from the likes of Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Rice Burroughs; in fact, shortly after seeing her first dinosaurs, the heroine of Dino Island says to herself, "Thiz place is like some kinda Edgar Rice Buroughs novel.")

I would be quite curious to learn more about the behind-the-scenes of this book. As I've said plenty of times before, I would love to know more about Mirage in general, as it seems like an important story in comics history that for some reason no one has written yet. 

This came out the same year that the first volume of TMNT ended (concluding with the epic-length "City At War" story drawn by Lawson) and the second one began...and the same year that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Flaming Carrot Crossover (also, in part, by Lawson) launched. Three years later, TMNT would relaunch for its third volume...not at Mirage, but at Image Comics.

Lawson was, obviously, quite busy, and I'm curious why this book, the covers of which are signed "Lawson 92", ended up as a two-issue miniseries, rather than a more standard-length four-issue mini. It feels a little...well, maybe not rushed, but definitely compact, and it would easily, clearly have benefited from being given more room to breathe. There's definitely a point in the second issue where it seems Lawson could have used a double-page spread to express a sense of awe and wonder (something done quite effectively in the first issue), but he instead used a more standard sized panel on a single page, and the series could have used a bigger page count to explore the characters, who don't get much development in the fleet-moving narrative.

Also, surprisingly, the book could have used more dinosaurs...I mean, with a title like "Dino Island", one might expect a little more dinosaur content than we end up with. (As for why Lawson went with Dino Island rather than Dinosaur Island, well, the latter was apparently already taken, by a Fantagraphics-published book from 1991 that I have never even  heard of...but now want to read. Maybe I should add that to my wish list...)

While Lawson wrote and drew Dino Island, he does have a pair of collaborators here. The color is provided by Mary Woodring, who also colored that Flaming Carrot crossover, and it's lettered by Mirage's regular leterrer Steve Lavigne. Given Lawson and Lavigne's presence, it thus looks and feels like a Mirage book, despite the bright, poppy colors...I'm not sure if it's particular to Woodring or not, or perhaps the technology of the era, but, like the Flaming Carrot crossover, this book felt more colorful than most color comics to me. Of course, that might also be because I am so used to seeing Lawson's art in black and white. (I should note here that the panels below are ones I scanned from the comic using the scanner at the public library where I work, and they never seem to look quite right to me, so please be aware that the colors in the actual book are a bit better than they look here). 

The first issue opens with a full-page splash of a woman in flight gear in the cockpit of a plane, which we will later learn is a P-51D Allison, if that means anything to you guys. She's blonde, with red lips and spots of pink blush on her cheeks, and she is staring down at her instruments with a look somewhere between sadness and concern. At the top of the page, the date "October 19, 1942" is written.

We quickly learn that she's attempting a trans-Atlantic speed record but that hr instruments are behaving strangely, when she radios "Bermuda Naval." Soon, her compasses start acting up, and then she sees something that makes her say "No...", and she's bathed in a bright light. She awakens sometime later, still in her cockpit, and sees land below where there shouldn't be any.

In short order, she collides with something but doesn't see what. Given the title, we see enough of the object to realize what it is right away, even if she doesn't.

She manages to land, repair her plane, and then starts to explore, finding some strange footprints: "Wow...These are the biggest damn bird tracks I've ever seen!"

Soon, she climbs up a ridge and looks over to this fantastic double-page splash reveal...

It's a whole herd of triceratops! Peter Laird's favorite dinosaur! (And, obviously, this looks better if you're holding the book in your hands, than a scan of it does.)

She's barely taken a moment to consider how insane that image is ("I must be completely bats!") before she rescues a triceratops from a pair of raptors. It then returns the favor when they turn on her. When she spies a plane fly above, she mounts the triceratops and heads in that direction. Some miles (but just a few pages) later, there's a splash of her atop the dinosaur regarding some kind of little village built between a battleship and the coast, with a pen of dinosaurs. This is apparently the image used in that house ad I saw all those years ago.

There she meets a friendly man who she introduces herself to as Amelia (I assumed it was that Amelia, but, checking the date of her disappearance online later, I see this comic is set five years after that Amelia's. Lawson probably should have given her any other name then, really). The man then introduces her to a Captain Errouck, whose battleship is part of the settlement they've formed and named Plymouth.

In short order, the captain explains that Amelia is now part of their society, which he is completely in charge of, and he offers her their best theories about the place: They think the Bermuda Triangle is some kind of dimensional gate, and it has transported them all to an entirely different world, based on a geological clue (the rocks have no strata, it seems). A professor offers to show her "The Convincer", but that has to wait until part two...

Once again mounting her triceratops, which she has named Spike, Amelia and the professor head out...and he shows her a gigantic rectangular monolith, its gradient colors including violet, blue and green, and its size and perfect shape proving that it's no natural occurrence (This is the instance where a splash page might have been a good strategy to emphasize the bizarre nature as well as the importance of the object).

As they explore, and Ameila learns that no one has been to the top because it's too big to climb, the two red, horned therapods on the cover of the second issue attack, killing Spike. Amelia and the professor might be next, but a Jeep from the settlement arrives to rescue them, as the captain needs the professor immediately.

If the story moved fast up until now, here it starts speeding. 

The captain has a strange, humanoid alien bound to a chair in a room; it was apparently found disemboweling one of the town's sentries using tools from some sort of medical kit. The alien has a strange, vaguely mushroom-shaped head, with its eyes high atop that head, orange skin and strange-looking hands and feet (You can see its fellow alien, which looks exactly like it, in an image below.) Despite being questioned, it won't talk. 

We then jump immediately to Amelia's plan to explore the monolith, as the professor flies her over it and she parachutes to the top. Finding a disguised entrance, she journeys within, where she meets an alien identical to the first. There's a four-page conversation, in which this very chatty alien explains everything to Amelia in plain English, including the nature of the world they are in; I won't get into it here, but I will note it will sound familiar to anyone who has read a particular popular science-fiction comedy novel from England. 

After what I am assuming is a weird coloring mistake (note the purple rectangle in the first panel on the page below, overlapping and partially obscuring the dialogue balloon), this alien tells Amelia that her fellow humans must release the one they are holding, or else "the project will be abandoned."

Which, here, means the end of the world.

The professor picks Amelia up at the foot of the structure, which we now understand the nature and purpose of, on another dinosaur, but it's too late for her to plead for the release of the captive alien: "The alien's dead," they're told as soon as they arrive back at Plymouth. "Errouch was slapping him around- I think he broke his neck."

In the very next panel, a strange ovoid shape appears in the sky. In the next panel after that, it fires a green ray at Plymouth, creating a fiery explosion.  The aliens are attacking! Amelia manages to steal her confiscated plane back and get it up into the air, leading to a rather beautiful four-page plane vs. flying saucer dogfight, one that ends when she strafes the ship, and we get a close-up of a dead, shot-up alien in its strange cockpit (This one wears a green jumpsuit rather than a yellow one, and is thus presumably a different one than the one she met inside the monolith...that, or, perhaps, he changed into a different jumpsuit to pilot his craft, having gone on the attack as soon as he learned his partner had been killed). 

The time then jumps ahead two weeks, to a dour epilogue. With the aliens gone, the world is dying. The atmosphere is degrading, the plants are dying off and the dinosaurs are following them. 

Is this the end? Yes, probably. 

"Maybe," Amelia tells a man. "Or maybe this is just a transitionary period while the planet adjusts..." 

In the meantime, she advises they start building underground shelters, because "Soon it will be too hot to stay up here."

And those are the last words of the series, which ends with our heroine, all of the characters and apparently all the dinos facing almost certain death.

It's not all that unusual for stories in which modern humans discover a lost world of dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures, only for that world to "end" as they escape at the end of the adventure—think Conan Doyle's Lost World, 1933's Son of Kong, 1951's Lost Continent—but this is different, darker, as the outsider, human characters seem like they are doomed to go down with the lost world and its inhabitants. 

Dino Island is a pretty fun, old school adventure story, full of well-made and quite striking imagery. It's also an example of an auteur seemingly following his bliss, making a comic full of things he likes, the appeal of its components proving infectious to the reader. I certainly wouldn't have objected if there were two or four or 20 more issues of it. 

I'd say to look for it in any back-issue bins you may come across, but, in my experience, it probably won't be there. So, I guess you could add it to your wish list...? Or perhaps hope that IDW, who has republished so much of Mirage's output, decides to collect it at some point, maybe with Lawson's Paleo under a title like The Dinosaur Comics of Jim Lawson or something...? 

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I didn't notice this until I set the comics side by side to take a picture of them, but the covers actually connect to form a single image:

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The house ads in Dino Island are for a new color series of Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III film, an "all-new color 17 x 22 poster by Todd McFarlane" featuring his image of Michaelangelo from TMNT #50 and for an upcoming Michael Dooney superhero series called Xeno-Tech ("Some heroes are born... Some have to be made"). 

I've never seen Dooney's book in the wild, but the Grand Comics Database says it lasted four issues, and was apparently published as "Xenotech," sans the ad's hyphen. I'm not surprised it didn't catch on given all the competition for superhero comics in those glut years, but I'd still be interested in seeing what Dooney might have done with the genre (He did a couple of Turtles comics which played the characters off of more traditional superhero comics types).

There was also this page which, had I the money as a high-schooler in 1993, I would have ordered pretty much everything from it that I didn't already have:

Looking it over now, it looks like I have all of the comics listed here in one form or another, save for Mark Bode's Times Pipeline TMNT special (which has never been collected or reprinted?), Gizmo, Gizmo & Fugitoid, Bade Biker, Grunts and Space Usagi.