G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero Pt. 9

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #37 (1985)

Art by Frank Springer and Andy Mushynsky

•In this issue, writer Larry Hama introduces several characters and vehicles from the toy line (and, by this point, the cartoon). Most prominent among them is probably Flint, whose action figure referred to his role as "warrant officer" but who was one of the main characters in the cartoon's ensemble cast, where he played a leadership role and was romantically paired with Lady Jaye.

And then there are Tomax and Xamot, the Crimson Twins. Identical twins and circus acrobats/lawyers, they were colorful characters even by Cobra standards. On the cartoon, they generally finished one another sentences, and had the unusual (but, for the Joes, convenient) ability to feel one another's pain. They were also the leaders of the Crimson Guardsmen, although in the comics the CGs were introduced prior to them. (Their action figures, by the way, came together in a two-pack; I had these figures when I was a kid). 

•Most of the action in this issue is set at The Arbco Bros. Circus. Joes Gung-Ho, Ripcord and Blowtorch are smuggled into the circus by Bongo the balloon bear, who met in issue #33, "Celebration." Here she tells someone the soldiers are helping her with her balloon delivery given that they owe her after absconding with her vehicle previously. 

She also takes off her bear head and tells the stranger her real name is Candy, to the annoyance of Ripcord, who she wouldn't share her real name with, because he won't tell her what his is ("I told you, I can't tell you my real name--" he protests; I don't suppose he could have just made up a normal sounding name, or used his middle name or something...? Sharing his codename "Ripcord" with her sounds like a security breach in and of itself, doesn't it...?)

•By the way, this isn't mentioned in the comic, but Ripcord's real name is Wallace A. Weems, and he hails from Columbus, Ohio.

•As to why the Joes are interested in the circus, aside from the fact that "Arbco" is an anagram of "Cobra", well, they are there to investigate a meeting of the Young Executives for Community and Home (Which, yes, acronyms into YECH). They suspect correctly that the groupe is a Cobra front. 

•Tomax and Xamot aren't exactly undercover. They wear matching uniforms, each of which are mirror images of one another, with prominent Cobra sigils on their chests. Tomax sits at a card table in a tent where the YECH meeting is scheduled, while Xamot is keeping watch from the track of a roller coaster. They seem to communicate psychically with one another, talking to one another from far away in dialogue balloons distinguished by red, wavy borders. They also seem to be able to see through one another's eyes here. 

•On a nearby testing range, Lady Jaye (still spelled "Lady J") and Roadblock are piloting captured Cobra HISS tanks as part of a test of some sort of super-speedy new tank. It manages to dodge their fire, close the distance and scrap both tanks in 22 second flat. The tank in question is the Armadillo mini-tank, and it's being piloted by Flint, whom both Duke and Roadblock seem to already know. 

These panels are interesting, I think, in that Flint and Lady Jaye's romance is anything but love at first sight in the comic (It will develop pretty damn fast though, and I wonder if that was Hama belatedly following the cartoon's version of their relationship or not).

That, and because they use the words "obstreperous" and "bailiwick". Good vocabulary for the kids, Larry Hama...!

•At the circus, Ripcord and Bongo/Candy are attacked by what looks like dozens of Clark Kents in the hall of mirrors. The Clark Kents will strip off their blue striped suits to reveal red uniforms and don still not quite on-model masks and helmets to reveal themselves as Crimson Guardsmen.

•Enter another new Joe: Footloose. Wild Bill's dialogue in that last panel sounded so much like something Foghorn Leghorn might say that I imagined the cartoon rooster's voice coming out of the Joe helicopter pilot for the rest of the issue.

•Not a very flattering angle for Gung-Ho, is it...?

•In short order, Flint and Footloose in the Armadillo join the fray, forcing Tomax and Xamot to flee on another new vehicle from the toy line, this one a Cobra one: The Ferret, an ATV that holds two action figures (perfect for the Twins, then!) and has a big red gun and a couple of red missiles on it.

•Although no one is killed or even hurt, Bongo/Candy, who was already annoyed by Ripcord's secrecy before a huge action scene exploded around her at the circus, decides she doesn't want anything more to do with him. 

As Ripcord stutters "Does this mean...", she finishes his sentence for him, and proceeds to tell him off pretty good:

Goodbye? No, that's too nice! This is drop dead, don't bother to call and don't expect a Christmas card!

Ouch. 

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #38 (1985)

Art by Rod Whigham and Andy Mushnsky

•Warning: This is a pretty damn eventful issue. Kids sure got their seventy-five cents worth from this one. 

•We haven't heard much from Cobra Commander since it was revealed back in issue #33 that Billy, the Springfieldian child rebel who tried to assassinate him, was actually his own son. That changes with this issue, as we open with the trail of Billy! Oh, wait, actually Cobra Commander specifically says that this is an inquest and not a trial, since everyone presents saw Billy attempt to shoot the Commander and that they all know he is therefore quite guilty. Still, Destro acts as something of a prosecutor as he leads the proceedings, and the rest of Cobra high command all seem to look like they are on jury duty in this image.

•During the inquest, Major Bludd's eyepatch seems to come and go, as seen in the panel. Perhaps he's not actually missing his left eye and just wears it for affect.

•Billy refuses to name the co-conspirators who set him up to shoot the Commander—The Baroness and Major Bludd, of course—and eventually Zartan suggest they use the late Dr. Venom's brain wave scanner, which we saw way back in G.I. Joe #10, the same issue that introduced Billy. If you recall, the device allows interrogators to literally read the mind of the subject placed within it, as it translates memories to images on a TV screen. Venom had tried (and failed) to get Snake Eyes to reveal the secret location of the G.I. Joe headquarters back then.

•The Commander orders Billy to be strapped in which then leads to an intriguing sequence where we see a pre-Cobra Cobra Commander, before he started wearing masks, and we get some of the series' precious few hints towards a Cobra ideology beyond, you know, being bad guys.

As Snake Eyes before him, Billy is able to block the machine from finding the memories its operators want by dredging up alternate memories (A process that Destro explains above can cause extreme physical pain).

Here we see the man who will become the Commander in a nice office ranting to his son. His animating belief, the motivation for his terrorist enterprise seems to be that he's opposed to...big government...? Does that mean the Cobra Commander was an old-school, pre-Trump Republican? Or, perhaps, a libertarian? 

There are two things worth noting in that first flashback panel. First, Cobra Commander sure looks like he's Just Some Guy, rather than having a terrible disfigurement that he needs to hide behind masks (Likewise, he doesn't seem to be anyone famous and thus needs a mask to conceal his celebrity). Second, note the "Arbco" name on the business across the street. Apparently, it pre-dates the "Cobra" organization, and therefore it is not an anagram of "Cobra", but "Cobra" is actually an anagram of "Arbco".

The flashbacks continue on the next page, where we see a first mask-less Commander continuing to talk about the government in one panel, followed by another where he has adopted his logo and hood, the latter of which he pairs with a business suit. At the beginning of the organization, presumably before they could afford blue uniforms and helmets, Cobra followers just tied bandanas around their faces and wore armbands.

•Seeing that Billy is just using the scanner to spill tea—"This is highly classified information being bandied about!" are Cobra Commander's actual words—the Commander orders him taken out of the machine and sent to a jail cell. The Baroness and Bludd (again drawn sans eyepatch) are relieved, while Storm Shadow is impressed with Billy's integrity at refusing to reveal his co-conspirators, despite the fact that they have abandoned him. 

•In fact, Storm Shadow is so impressed that he sneaks down to Billy's cell, bloodlessly kills the two guards and frees Billy...leading to a dramatic confrontation with Destro, which Mike Zeck and John Beatty captured on the cover.

Leveling a gun at Storm Shadow, Destro tells him to give up: "Even you can't outrace a bullet!" 

Destro is underestimating a true ninja master. Moving with speedlines, Storm Shadow grabs Billy's wrist and rushes towards Destro, striking his gun arm with a "SPACK" as Destro fires, the bullet going straight into the light above and plunging the room into darkness. 

Storm Shadow is now officially on the outs with Cobra, and he never did find out who killed his uncle The Hard Master and framed him for the crime.

•So that's what Cobra is up to. But what of the Joes...? Well, they have two separate missions that begin to play out in this issue. In the fist, Gung-Ho, Ripcord, Roadblock and Stalker are sent to fictional South American country Sierra Gordo on a mission to rescue Dr. Adele Burkhart (Who the Joes had previously rescued from Cobra way back in G.I. Joe #1). As for the second, a team consisting of Duke, Blowtorch, Cover Girl, "Lady J", Snake-Eyes, Mutt and Junkyard conduct a raid on a suspected undercover Cobra agent believed to have set up the ambush at the circus in the previous issue.

•Do you think Hawk added "flat-earthers" in there as a joke, or is there really a violent, militaristic flat-earther group with political ambitions in South America...?

•The Joes' jungle trooper Recondo gets a much better, second introduction here. You may recall that he briefly appeared in issue #32, where he, Blowtorch and Clutch were shown dropping off ice cream and soda for the upcoming party celebrating the re-opening of The Pit.

Here he first appears in silhouette, telling Stalker's team, "If you're going to come tromping through my jungle like mummers on parade, you gotta cut me a little slack and breathe a little more quietly. You guys are positively deafening!" They don't recognize Recondo at first, and this leads to a tense armed standoff, in which Recondo gains the upper hand when his local allies appear.

These are The Tucaros, Recondo's "Indian friends", who say what they do best is fight and sneak up on people. 

Once everyone's on the same page, Recondo and the Tucaros lead the others to the base where Dr. Burkhart is being kept prisoner. It's an imposing, well-defended fortress built at the base of a sheer cliff. 

While Stalker and Gung-Ho speculate about how many tanks and bombers might be needed to crack it, Recondo says he thinks their small team can take it alone.

"You got a plan or are you just optimistic?" Roadblock asks. He's got a plan: They will attack by rappelling down the cliff wall, which none of the guns are even pointed at, since "no one in their right mind would even try it... ...except us!"

•The other mission, back in the states, is going poorly. The Joes meet unexpectedly stiff resistance from inside the dark suburban home, although Junkyard acquits himself nicely throughout. There are a couple of cool panels showing him charging alongside Mutt and Snake Eyes, barking or howling as he does so. In the sequence above, we see him save his teammates by spotting a tossed grenade, catching it and then dropping down the drain.

•On the final pages, we see who was defending the house, when Tomax, Xamot and a Crimson Guardsmen all come crashing through the front window on The Ferret (Hey, the box said it could hold two figures, not three!). They fire a missile directly at the Joes' transport and are thus able to make a clean getaway.

•But wait! There's still a last-page dramatic reveal...! The Joes find plenty of evidence that someone in the house was definitely an undercover Cobra agent, and just then Candy/Bongo the Balloon Bear, Ripcord's love interest, pulls up. What is she doing there? Why, that's her father's house...she lives there! Is Candy's dad a Cobra agent? Is Candy?! What a cliffhanger!

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #39 (1985)

Art by Rod Whigham and Andy Mushynsky

•Speaking of cliffhangers, the next issue opens with our heroes literally hanging from a cliff, as the team on the Sierra Gordo mission rappel down the cliff face in order to sneak into the enemy fortress and rescue Dr. Burkhart. They manage to sneak in, rescue Burkhart and sneak out...almost. They're caught halfway to safety, which kicks off a big firefight. The three Tucaros, who stayed atop the cliff to pull up the Joes' ropes, save our heroes when they lay down some cover fire, but they are killed by the bad guys' snipers for doing so. 

•Meanwhile, Storm Shadow has taken Billy under his wing and begun training him. The boy seems to be a fast learner, as it can't possibly have been more than a few days that they've been together. When we first catch up with him, he and Billy are sword fighting and exchanging ninja sayings ("To triumph over fear is to triumph over death!") and then playing a chess game in their heads. I got a real superhero/sidekick vibe from the pair in this issue. Particularly in the above scene, where we see Storm Shadow has a kind of secret base inside a New York City water tower, and then they change from their ninja clothes to street clothes.

•This is kinda neat. Storm Shadow has apparently taken Billy walking around in places they are likely to meet muggers, as a test. We see what look like some middle-aged "punk" shakedown artists, and Billy manages to scare them away with the ninja art of "the dirty look." More wisdom from Storm Shadow: "The more skill you acquire, the less you have to use it" and "The only rational purpose for mastering violence is to abolish it."

Yeah, I can see why little kids in the '80s would have eaten this stuff up...

•The surviving soldiers in the Sierra Gordo bunker talk about various countries' military forces circa the 1980s after the Joes escape with Burkhart.

•After the Joes in Sierra Gordo finally get to safety, which involves a daring river crossing, they are all in a truck full of farm animals headed towards the border and a friendly airfield. During the trip, Ripcord once again expresses his feelings about the Joes risking their lives to save Burkhart, who is anti-military, and once again Stalker puts him in his place with what is some pretty pure, undiluted pro-democracy propaganda.  

It's pretty basic stuff, but damn it feels refreshing to read it in 2026, when the current U.S. government is doing so much to try to politicize the military. 

•Before the last page of the issue, in which Stalker's Sierra Gordo team get picked up by Wild Bill and Cover Girl and are told they are being flown to New Orleans, there are two one-page scenes checking in with the leaders of Cobra and the Joes. Destro and The Baroness inform Cobra Commander that Billy and Storm Shadow have gotten away and remain missing, but the Crimson Guardsman "who is instrumental to our New Orleans operation" was with Tomax and Xamot. And Duke and Lady Jaye interrogate Candy, and Duke is especially curious about her father's maps and charts of New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico.

Interestingly, during the interrogation scene, Candy says that she finds "the international conspiracy" of Cobra "a little hard to swallow." Duke explains, "We try to keep the existence of Cobra pretty secret. We don't want to alarm the populace..."

Surely Cobra has made themselves pretty well-known by this point, no? And not wanting to alarm the populace by talking much about terrorist groups...? Well, lived through the U.S.' "Global War on Terror", that was not my experience with how our military dealt with the threat...

What's all this talk about New Orleans...? What does Cobra have planned for the Gulf...? Well, I've already read it and, trust me, it's going to be exciting...!