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C**Y
Five Stars
Lots of nostalgic fun with the Joes
T**M
A Bit Of A Mixed Bag.
The original, main GI Joe series had its ups and downs over its long run and these issues are from one of its earlier, albeit minor, down periods. The Battle of Springfield has passed and its immediate aftermath was felt in the last volume, closing off several long running plot threads. Here, the series feels like it should be striving for new momentum, but instead gets waylaid with plugging new toys.Serpentor is now running Cobra, but its clear that Hama isn't particularly interested in that. Despite the alluring possibilities raised by the opening of the Cobra Consulate in New York, Hama instead largely ignores the regime change in Cobra high command and spends more time with the presumed-dead Cobra Commander and Destro. While Destro is quickly shuffled off, CC gets caught up by the discovery of a family member, but although this seems like another exit for the character from the series, he then starts hanging about with some Cobra D-listers, so as to plug the new, redesigned Cobra Commander figure.On the Joe front, there's little in the way of new plot threads emerging. There's a short arc about Snake Eyes being captured, rehashing his and Stalker's history in Vietnam. This concludes in Yearbook #3, collected in context here for the first time, but its an underwhelming conclusion. A silent issue, it tries to put a new spin on the series' high watermark issue of Silent Interlude and while it doesn't embarrass itself (as Silence Between Borders did) it's not spectacular. The cast of Joes is choppy, as ever more new characters are shuttled in and the team's new nomad status brings little benefit to the story, instead given a nebulous feel to proceedings. The issues of Special Missions are rather better, as that series' focus on stand-alone stories with a slightly more mature and complex bent helps them to stand out amongst the treading water of the main series.As ever, this is a nice, well made, sturdy, over-sized hardcover from IDW. There are some problems though. The reproduction of the main series issues is somewhat sub-par with low resolution reproduction of the line art (the first couple of issues are very blocky, while the later ones are fuzzy in the details). This same problem was present in IDW's paperback collections of the same material and I had hoped it would be solved given the premium nature of this collection. Special Missions issues and the Yearbook are unaffected.The placement of issues follows release date, which is fair enough, although having Special Mission #3 between RAH #55 and #56 is a bit jarring given that Stalker is injured across the RAH issues and fine in the Special Missions story. It would have read better after #56 or even the Yearbook, without really ruffling any feathers.The volume also includes copious issue notes from Mark Bellomo, which have ballooned from one or two lines per issue in the first volume to often filling two or three pages per issue here. Do no take this to mean there's three pages of worthwhile information though. As ever, Bellomo's notes are patronising, asinine, nigh on unreadable in places and clearly not proof-read given the amount of errors. It may seem churlish to bemoan "value added" content like this, but they take up so much space in this volume alone that you could have got another issue of the comic included instead, which would have been nice given there's only 11 issues here (although one is the over-sized Yearbook).If you've bought this far into the GI Joe Complete Collection series then, let's face it, this review is rather moot, as you're likely going to be carrying on with it regardless. Just don't have high expectations for this volume.
Trustpilot
4 days ago
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