GI Joe No. 260 review: A Quagmire in Shazidar
By J. Czelsch
In GI Joe No. 260, Destro charges into the heart of the Revanche, Cover Girl leads a rescue team into Shazidar, and Milo learns to scrub floors—the ninja way!
GI Joe 260, artwork by Ron Joseph, Brian Shearer, and J. Brown (Courtesy Hasbro, published by IDW)
GI Joe: A Real American Hero issue 260 “The Cobra’s Venom Part 5″ opens in Shazidar, a Middle Eastern stand-in country complete with a dictator, insurgents, and noble but naive U.N. peacekeepers. Cover Girl is leading a small team to Sharra city, where the U.N. team is boxed in alongside GI Joe’s Airborne, Heavy Duty, and Ripcord. Writer Larry Hama works to build some tension out of an ambush, but the badly armed forces of a despot aren’t a credible threat against a rescue team of America’s Elite.
Hama has a long history of pivoting his A Real American Hero comic away from the central Joe v. Cobra conflict in order to insert both sides into approximations of real-world events. In the 1980s, that meant the crumbling of the Iron Curtain or U.S. involvement in South American politics. It often led to quality stories that were, at heart, about the ugly side of U.S. interventionist military policies. There was a long-running plot about Sierra Gordo (neighbor to Sierra Muerte currently featuring in Michel Fiffe’s GI Joe miniseries of the same name) and the various forces trying to control its banana crops. It wasn’t a subtle metaphor, and Hama didn’t go easy on the U.S., criticizing our support of right-wing dictatorships who kept the banana supply–or whatever we wanted—flowing, no matter what.
U.S. military action in the Middle East is the ongoing fact of life in 2019, and it isn’t easy to justify if the U.S. military — real or fictional — belongs there. Hama’s tactic to make things feel a little black and white is to give the Joes some orphans to rescue. While Cover Girl’s team fight their way through an ambush, the U.N. workers force a promise from their Joe babysitters to take the orphans to safety: if the kids stay, they stay. This creates a logistical and political mess: GI Joe will be breaking international law if they remove indigenous children from their country. Plus, how do they do it without a vehicle? It can also be said that this issue is particularly heavy with bloodshed.
GI Joe 260, artwork by Ron Joseph, Brian Shearer, and J. Brown (Courtesy Hasbro, published by IDW)
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Elsewhere, Milo, the young defector from Darklonia, is taken to his new home, the Arashikage ninja training dojo, a longtime refuge for GI Joe-affiliated minors. It looks like he’ll become another recruit in the longtime GI Joe: A Real American Hero tradition of drafting kids into their unending war against Cobra.
The art team of Ron Joseph, Brian Shearer, and J. Brown has a lot of juggling to do this issue. There are three distinct backdrops: the Shazidar desert, sci-fi technology-laden bunkers, and the minimal dojo of the Asashikage clan. Each setting is done capably, and there’s great visual storytelling throughout the book.
GI Joe 260, artwork by Ron Joseph, Brian Shearer, and J. Brown (Courtesy Hasbro, published by IDW)
The only major flaw is that page 12 seems to have been printed at a lower resolution, as there’s some definite pixel blur. It’s unclear if this happened to every copy of the physical print run or just this particular copy, but this is a pretty big mistake for a major comic company to make.
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This chapter ends with Destro and Baroness attacking another Revanche stronghold. The pair has been tearing a swath of destruction through their robot enemy’s bases for the past few issues, getting closer to the top of the arms dealing automatons hierarchy at each stop. It seems they’ve punched above their strength in Kansas, though, and have fought their way into a trap set by the Revanche Core Entity. Because this is an attack by Destro’s MARS (Military Armaments Research Syndicate) corporation and not a Cobra strike, it looks like Destro and Baroness will be dealing with it on their own in issue 261.