I should be working right now. It's one of those days where I don't feel driven to do the work I'm supposed to, so I'm playing around with something else. Hopefully it'll act as a warm-up and I'll be able to draw the three other illos on my drawing table.
The guys on the always-excellent podcast Comic Pants did a program on the GI Joe comic. I was a Joe fan in the Eighties, and have mentioned how the famous silent issue of GI Joe managed to inspire my Raider series. I haven't read the book since then, and maybe it doesn't hold up, but I think it was that perfect combination of solid writing and solid storytelling that combine to make a project stronger than the whole. And Larry Hama deserves a lot of credit for wrangling a toy franchise into a darned interesting comic book, and writing something that, while it wasn't necessarily the real military, certainly felt like it. I think the big words crowd would call it verisimilitude.
My favorite character of the original set was Flash, the Laser Rifle Trooper. I dressed as him for Halloween one year, my Dad making a kick-butt costume, including a laser rifle that lit up. So, I decided to try another all-digital piece featuring Sgt. Anthony S. Gambello, and yes, I had to look that up.
And, if you get the chance, take their geektastic GI Joe Mission Challenge, where you get the opportunity to send a team of Joes to attack Cobra. Yo Joe!