KNOWING IS HALF THE BATTLE

A few months ago, Devil’s Due re-launched its flagship title, trimming the core cast and paring away some of the excess baggage that had built up over time. Now, we’re five issues into that experiment. So what’s the verdict?

G.I. JOE #4-5
Written by Joe Casey and Drawn by Stefano Caselli and Nelson Blake

By the end of the last volume of the book, it appeared that the JOE universe was perhaps so overpopulated and over plotted that anyone coming into the book for the first time was hopelessly screwed. Now, that isn’t to say that the book wasn’t readable; it was very readable, but much more so if you had been with it for a while, so the appearance of unfriendliness to new readers was dead on target. The solution was an obvious one: whittle the book down to the characters fans responded best to, and those who could serve other plot purposes, and work from there. Plus, add some new elements besides COBRA to the mix, so that JOE took on a bit more relevance to the real world. Writer Joe Casey was brought on board to do the job, and voila, experiment underway.

The first storyline utilizes one of those new villainous elements: a former militia bad guy buys some nasty tech from a classic JOE baddie and commits a number of horrifying terrorist acts. Perfect. The team must be brought back together, introduced to the new readers, face a worthy foe… exactly what you’d want to do right out of the gate. And early on, it was handled beautifully. There was a reality to the violence and to the plot that really worked. And as issue four rolls around, the Joes are off on a mission to stop the antagonist from putting in motion even more nasty acts of a similar nature. But oddly enough, Casey’s climax falters.

Action-wise, this stuff is good. The ex-Cobra fellow sends the militia guy some assistance, leading to an all-out bullet fest in the skies over the southwest. Cool. But the primary job of stopping the evil plan in motion bogs down, because it’s a technobabble solution, worthy of a mid-level STAR TREK episode. The action for that portion of the story is nonexistent, and worse, extremely difficult to get across from an artistic standpoint. I felt for Caselli as I read it, wondering if he struggled with drawing it.

Issue five is a traditional “clear the character decks after the big mission” piece, and is much more successful, wrapping a nice bow on the initial storyline, and setting in motion Casey’s second arc. Blake steps in for Caselli and sadly suffers in comparison, but that’s no reflection on the quality of his own work. That’s just the business of doing a fill-in job. In all, G.I. JOE remains a well-executed soap opera with a lot of shit blowing up, and if you don’t expect any more than that, you’re in good shape.

/Mason