 Hello everybody, Hooded Corporate Commander 788 here, and this time we're doing another comic book review because in the last video people overwhelmingly said they wanted to continue with the comic book reviews once a month, so we're going to go ahead and get started with the next issue of the G.I. Joe comic book by Marvel Comic. Before I get started, I'd like to say a special thanks to Mark Sandroni for help scanning the pages for this review. Thank you very much, sir. Let's start this review at issue number 14 by recapping the events of issue number 13. A lot happened in the previous issue. The Joes escaped the South American country of Sierra Gordo and they retrieved a micro dot which includes some secret Cobra plans. Little do they know that Cobra Commander planted that micro dot with false information in order to misdirect the Joes away from Cobra's plans. Snake Eyes, the mercenary Quinn, and the Cobra scientist Dr. Venom are presumed dead, sunk to the bottom of a river in a sealed bunker. However, tapping coming from the inside of the bunker suggested they might still be alive. That brings us to issue number 14. On the cover we see an image of Destro and a bunch of Cobra troopers attacking the Joes on their APC. This is the first full comic book reveal of Destro. When he first appeared in issue number 11 we only saw him in shadow. We did not see his shiny metal mask. This might be considered anti-climactic since this reveal was fully on the cover rather than inside the comic book. By this point though kids had probably already seen the Destro action figure and maybe seen TV commercials for Destro. So by issue number 14 there probably wasn't much more of a surprise. On the splash page we have an image of Dr. Venom, Snake Eyes, and Quinn in the sunken bunker and water is leaking in from many cracks. And Dr. Venom is about to swing a chair at Snake Eyes. He says it's because he caught Snake Eyes trying to signal other GI Jo team members. Quinn rightly points out that really they need to be rescued and who cares who rescues them. We have a title of Destro attacks so between the cover and the title we know Destro is going to feature prominently in this issue. We have a creative team of Larry Hama, Scripter, Mike Vosberg, Penciler, and John D'Agostino Inker. On the next page Dr. Venom will not listen to reason, swings a chair at Snake Eyes. Of course Snake Eyes makes quick work of it and he's about to implode Dr. Venom's face when Quinn stops him. Quinn insists that they have to work together if they're going to get out of that predicament alive. Dr. Venom reveals that he still has the plague toxin that Cobra had been developing. In the previous episode the Baroness thought she had gotten away with the plague toxin but Dr. Venom still has it. But if the Baroness doesn't have the plague toxin, what does she have? In a very brief scene we go back to the pit where the Joes are trying to decipher the coded information on the micro dot. Back at Cobra headquarters Destro and the Baroness are having a deeply personal conversation and it's very clear that they have a long history together. Destro is finally fully revealed within the pages of the comic book. From there we jump back to the bunker with Quinn, Snake Eyes and Dr. Venom. You might notice that within the last two pages we have jumped between three different story lines. Each of these story lines are sort of cut together within this comic book. It might be easier to just separate out these different threads and review each of them separately. But I'm not going to do that. The pacing for this comic book was deliberately chosen so I want to preserve that for this review. However I will have some comments about it later. Dr. Venom opens a valve and starts flooding the bunker with water. Meanwhile Clutch is delivering General Flag to the G.I. Joe's secret base under the motor pool at Fort Wadsworth. General Flag was dragged out of a conference with the Joint Chiefs of Staff for this so it had better be good. Hawke says the secret Cobra micro dot revealed a map that leads to the little town of Springfield, Vermont. We know from previous issues that Cobra's secret hidden headquarters is in a small town called Springfield. Is this the same Springfield? Back at Cobra headquarters Cobra Commander is having a conversation with the Baroness while shooting at targets with a machine gun. According to Cobra Commander and the Baroness the micro dot that they gave to the Joes indicated that the Cobra secret base was under the Chaplin's assistant school in Fort Wadsworth. Okay there's something wrong here because we just saw in the G.I. Joe headquarters that the micro dot pointed the Joes to Springfield, Vermont not the Fort Wadsworth base. Also of all the random places Cobra could have tried to misdirect G.I. Joe they chose the place that is actually the secret base of G.I. Joe. That is just too much of a coincidence and maybe this is intended to be ironic but I'm just not buying it. One more peculiar thing about this scene Cobra Commander and the Baroness are having a casual conversation while Cobra Commander is firing a machine gun. That machine guns are really loud. Do you know how difficult it is to have a gun when somebody is shooting a machine gun a few feet away? Cobra Commander does believe he has the plague talks and mentioned by Dr. Venom so we'll have to learn what that's about. Elsewhere in Cobra headquarters Destro is chatting with Scarface while gripping Scarface's collar you know as you do. It turns out Scarface under the direction of Destro switched the micro dot which explains why the micro dot G.I. Joe has different information than what Cobra Commander thinks it has. For some reason Destro wants to direct G.I. Joe to Springfield Vermont. Back at the bunker Dr. Venom is letting in water to equalize the pressure so the door can be opened. Quinn will still be the only one strong enough to open the door and he will have to leave the guns and flashlight with Dr. Venom. The Joes board the APC they're going to go check out this clue in Springfield Vermont. Where they drive the APC onto a baseball diamond where there's a game being played so they can be helicopter airlifted out. This is a very weird scene. If a top secret military unit really has no other way to airlift vehicles off of their base then they're not going to stay secret for very long. Back at Cobra HQ again Cobra Commander is preparing to fly to Springfield Vermont in a rocket plane. Our face tells Destro that the Baroness will be piloting Cobra Commander's plane. This gets quite a reaction from Destro. He thought Cobra Commander would be flying alone but no the Baroness is always his pilot. Apparently this is quite a problem for Destro's secret plan. He has inadvertently put the Baroness in danger. Great planning there Destro. If Cobra Commander is planning to fly from Cobra headquarters to Springfield Vermont then Springfield Vermont is not the secret location of Cobra headquarters. That's a different Springfield. That means the location of Cobra's Springfield has not yet been revealed. As the water level in the bunker rises Quinn dives down to the door to pry it open. As he does so he calls upon the spirit of the bear and the weasel to get him out of this situation and to outwit Dr. Venom. A rivalry between Quinn and Dr. Venom is starting to emerge. As the Joes are en route to Springfield Vermont a very fast aircraft whizzes by them. It is the Baroness and Cobra Commander. They land at the Arbco furniture company on the outskirts of town. We have this scene in which an old man flashes a Nazi salute as he talks to the Baroness over the phone. Back in these early issues of GI Joe Cobra used a lot of Nazi imagery and symbolism including the infamous salute. Why would he salute the Baroness over the phone? We can't see it but I think this scene is here to show the creepy juxtaposition of a grandfatherly old man flashing a Nazi salute. And it kind of works. It is a little creepy. Meanwhile back again at the real Cobra headquarters Destro is loading some Cobra paratroopers into a jet so he can rescue Cobra Commander. Somehow he is aware that Cobra Commander is in danger. I wonder how. The helmets of these Cobra paratroopers have a Cobra sigil with wings on them. And that reminds me a lot of the winged Cobra symbol that was on the Cobra Rattler that would come out the following year. At the bunker Quinn gets the door open and as Snake Eyes and Dr. Venom are escaping Dr. Venom beans Quinn and makes good his own escape. Snake Eyes recognizing the betrayal is about to beat hell out of Dr. Venom when he is stopped by Cobra soldiers who were disguised as renegade Sierra Gordo soldiers. These were the disguised Cobra soldiers from the previous issue and they've been all torn up by the booby traps set by Stalker. That's how good Stalker is. He can kill Cobra soldiers when he's not even in the same country anymore. The G.I. Joe APC has dropped off and they make their way towards Springfield. In the Arbco furniture factory Cobra Commander and the Baroness are greeted with more Nazi salutes and they enter a darkened room in which a man is strapped down to a table. Stalker and Gung Ho scout out the town and they find nothing suspicious except for that Arbco furniture factory. Stalker notes that Arbco is an anagram for Cobra. Why does Cobra so often use anagrams for the word Cobra in their secret operations? It seems like that would be pretty easy for G.I. Joe to figure out. But that sort of thing is not really all that uncommon in real terrorist organizations. For instance in the book Enemies Within by Matt Depuzo and Adam Goldman they note that two of Al-Qaeda's favorite code words are marriage and the wedding. Al-Qaeda often uses the word wedding as a code word for an attack even though that's super easy to figure out. As Depuzo and Goldman put it in their book there's a running joke within counterintelligence that the U.S. is lucky Al-Qaeda can't come up with better code words. So it may seem kind of silly for Cobra to use Arbco as a code word but it's somewhat reflective of reality. Since Sierra Gordo the Cobra soldiers plan to kill Snake Eyes and Dr. Venom and Dr. Venom starts begging for his life. In Vermont Destro Scarface and the Cobra Pear Troopers have landed a few miles away from Springfield and Destro decides that roads are for sissies and decides to march all of the troops over land. There's a farmer and his wife who I guess are supposed to provide some comic relief. Must be from New York everybody's crazy down there. Back in the furniture factory the Baroness is injecting this Cobra volunteer with Dr. Venom's plague toxin. This plague toxin is supposed to be harmless to the volunteer but within two weeks he will become contagious and somehow they plan to get him inside GI Joe headquarters to infect the Joes. The Joes decide to check out the furniture factory. Destro marches his troops at a merciless pace. The Cobra soldiers decide to let Dr. Venom and Snake Eyes live so they don't have to carry their bodies back to the airport. The Baroness lets the volunteer up from his straps, hawk checks a map and Destro orders Scarface to shoot a straggler. The Cobra volunteer doubles over in pain. Destro is almost there and the Joes are within sight of the Arbco furniture factory. The Cobra volunteer falls over dead. Something has gone wrong with Dr. Venom's plague toxin. Cobra commander figures out that he has been double crossed by the doctor. Finally we get a full page of uninterrupted action. The Joes are ambushed by the Cobra squad and they fight back. At last we get to see the Joes in battle and we get to see Destro in action. Cobra commander and the Baroness are alerted that the furniture factory is under attack and they had better get back to their rocket plane. When hawk sees the roof of the furniture factory opening up he thinks it's a missile silo and he orders Ace in the sky striker to take it out. I believe this is the first time we've seen Ace and the sky striker. Such an awesome toy thus far has had very little to do in the comic book. We get a countdown sequence with the rocket plane about to take off, G.I. Joe and Cobra doing battle and Ace bearing down on the furniture factory. Ace fires his missiles and wait a minute now we have three sky strikers? Where did those others come from and who is flying them? The rocket plane takes off and Destro narrowly avoids the missiles as the furniture factory explodes. Cobra retreats but it's important to note that they are not retreating in defeat. Destro was successful here. The Baroness is safe. The Joes are a bit worse for the wear and any evidence they would have obtained from the furniture factory is going up in flames. Back in Sierra Gordo the Cobra soldiers are going to march Dr. Venom and Snake Eyes through the jungle. One of them asks where Quinn is and Dr. Venom says Quinn is dead. But in the last two panels we see air bubbles rising from the sunken bunker suggesting Quinn may still be alive. So how do we evaluate this issue? Well it has some really good points. It has plenty of action. It has the Joes in combat with a great vehicle, the APC. We get the first full comic book reveal of Destro and that's great. We also get some plot development on this plot line about Cobra's plague toxin. We also get to see Snake Eyes, Quinn and Dr. Venom again. That's a really good thing and it looks like something's going to happen with that plot line. On the other hand this issue has some problems and it's mainly in the storytelling. We get a lot of very quick cuts between multiple scenes and that can be very confusing. I know other comic book reviewers complain about this technique of storytelling but I don't really think that's necessarily always a valid complaint. This technique has been used to good effect in other GI Joe comic books just not this one. In comic book storytelling when you have a lot of small panels like this that are jump cuts between multiple scenes that has the effect of quickening the pace and that can be a very good thing especially in action scenes where you want it to be very fast paced. In this issue however we have these quick cuts not just in action scenes but when we are servicing the plot. So it has the effect of breaking up the exposition in a very awkward way. So we have this really quick pace throughout the entire issue when in some scenes we really should be slowing down to allow the reader to absorb some of the information we're being given. In this issue we have two storylines one in Sierra Gordo and the other one that ends up in Springfield, Vermont. And within the Springfield, Vermont storyline we have three different perspectives the Joe's, Cobra Commander and the Baroness and Destro and that's a lot to juggle. The more obvious choice would have been to completely tell one storyline finish it and then do the other storyline but that would not have worked either. That would have bifurcated the comic book and it would have made these two storylines feel completely separate when they were in fact slightly linked through Dr. Venom. In my opinion the better way to tell this story would have still been to interweave the storylines but to give us larger chunks rather than the one or two panel quick cuts which is what we got. This especially could have been done in the Snake Eyes Quinn Dr. Venom storyline which is not really very dependent on the chronology of the other storyline. The three perspectives in the Springfield storyline are kind of dependent on each other and they do need to feel like they are happening simultaneously so we could have a few more cuts in there but definitely not these quick cuts at least until you get to the action scene and then you can start quick cutting like that to quicken the pace. I've been thinking about whether the Joe's actions in this issue are even legal. They did after all blow up a building in an American town and the answer to that I think is it depends. If G.I. Joe existed in our universe and they were part of the U.S. military then no they would not have the power to act domestically as we've seen them do. However it could be possible in the G.I. Joe universe that the Joe team would be given special domestic enforcement powers. It would have to be done by Congress. The President does not have the power to do that without an act of Congress but Congress could do it. Even if that were the case in this situation the U.S. Constitution absolutely would apply 100%. We are on U.S. soil. We are dealing with U.S. citizens and property. The Joe's either would have needed a warrant or a warrant exception in order to raid that building and they could not have got a warrant because they just found out about that building and to get a warrant it has to be issued by a neutral magistrate and it has to specifically state what's being searched and what you're searching for. None of that information that Joe's had. However on the other other hand as they were approaching the building they hadn't done any search, they hadn't seized anything and they were attacked by Destro and Cobra forces and then they saw the roof of the building open up and it looked like they were gonna fire an ICBM and then you have exigent circumstances, you have self-defense and defensive others and I think they would have been justified in fighting back and taking out that building. So was the raid legal? Maybe. That was my review of G.I. Joe issue number 14. We have another G.I. Joe comic book review under our belts and we'll do another one next month but keep watching this channel because I've got a lot of great new G.I. Joe toy reviews coming up, you don't wanna miss those. In fact, you might as well hit the subscribe button. It's a good thing to do and it will make you happy. Also, I have the Facebook and I have the Twitter so check me out in those two places. I'll see you next time. Good night my friends, good night.