G.I. Joe: Special Missions #1 - Video Review by 80s Comics

It’s hard work fighting for freedom over land and air. Thankfully, GI Joe is there, and GI Joe’s Special Missions are the ones we couldn’t talk about until now. What’s not to love about covert GI Joe operations with advertisements and sweet helicopters like the ones Rambo blows up with a bow and arrow. This is from October 1986. It’s a great adventure. Anything with Shipwreck is good. He’s not the best, but he is mildly amusing at least. And we’ve got Deep Six there. I used to have Deep Six. It’s incredible how that guy could spot Deep Six from a moving helicopter in the rain. The October Guard, which is the Russian answer to GI Joe, is good. They’re in this book. It’s so barren, so she’s looking kind of weird in this one. That’s all right. We’ll forgive her. Everyone’s allowed to have a bad hair day, even Shipwreck, though he actually looks very good.

I’ve been digging through all my GI Joe comics recently. I couldn’t remember which ones I had, so I’m photographing them all, reviewing them all, and adding them to my website. Hey, prizes or cash. I always love looking at these to see what kind of stuff is in here that nobody born after 1990 would probably remember at all. Hey look, the Clue VCR game, that’s fantastic. Speaking of VCR, there’s a great piece of art in here. And of course my all time favorite GI Joe vehicle, the Cobra Hydrofoil. So I guess not GI Joe, but still. Their helicopters always looked kind of dumpy, let’s be honest. The HISS tanks were cool, but their little fangs were terrible. All right, check this out. So Baroness is riding on top of the Cobra Hydrofoil, and what they’re doing here is GI Joe has to rescue a downed American submarine in international waters or something. It makes about that much sense.

Cobra and the Russians confront GI Joe. Of course, only one of them has a sweet hydrofoil. That was the best toy. I have no idea what happened to it. I had that. It was my most prized possession. Well, that and the Viper, the SR 71 thing. I think that was the Viper. The Strato Viper was the pilot. Maybe that wasn’t the flavor. Anyway, you know what I’m talking about if you know GI Joe. The hydrofoil was one of my favorites and it came with a great silver hydrofoil pilot. But check this out. GI Joe is so clever that they outsmarted Cobra and the Russians with a professional VCR. When an amateur VCR won’t do and you need to create an international incident and get away with it, only a professional VCR will work.

And I don’t want to give away the ending, but you can be sure GI Joe wins in the most amusing fashion. The art is actually really good. It’s a fun story. Like usual, Larry Hama does the script, and he gave the whole series character, a good character at that. We’ve got some good ads in here. These kids are looking tough on the back cover. I was just going through one the other day that had a Bionic Commando ad for the NES. I can’t remember which one that is. Anyway, this starts the short lived GI Joe Special Missions series. I think it only ran for about twenty or twenty five issues. GI Joe was so popular that they had to make three or four different GI Joe comic books. There was GI Joe A Real American Hero, then they had the yearbooks, Order of Battle, and they were combining it with Transformers, which obviously makes perfect sense. GI Joe Special Missions. These are fun though, a nice additional way to enjoy your favorite Joes beating the crap out of the Cobras, even though the Cobras had the coolest toys.