GI Joe

Sometimes you get into the hype. And so I did when I picked up GI Joe: Best of Snake Eyes (IDW). This reprints the Marvel Comics stories featuring the mysterious but cool Snake Eyes, sort of the Wolverine of GI Joe.

Was never a fan of Joe in its original Marvel run in the 1980s. (only had #3 in my early comic book collection) Too much of a comic book based on toys thing for my liking. But reading these now made me realised how much killings and deaths were in the the Joe comic books for a Marvel title then. Remember the big deal about Wolverine slicing up the Hellfire foot soldiers in Uncanny X-Men #133? That's nothing compared the violence here. Maybe it's because this was an army/soldiers comic book rather than a superhero comic book...

Larry Hama is underrated. His Joe stories may not be top-notched. But just check out his Nth Man: The Ultimate Ninja (1989-1990), probably one of the best things Marvel put out that year.

Alright, let me go back and read the Image run of Joe (Front Line) from 2002 that I just picked up...

p/s: for fans of Fables, Steve Leialoha is the inker for some of the stories here. He also drew the Firestar mini-series and also also some issues of The New Mutants in the 80s.