 Hello, everybody. Hooded Cobra Commander 788 here. We are in Cobra Convergence 7. We've got more Cobra Convergence 7. And today, we are talking to Talking Joe. We are talking to Talking Joe. We have Mark and Tim here. So Mark and Tim, please introduce yourselves. Tell everybody who you are, what you do, and where to find you. Hey, so I am Mark. And I guess I'm the half, that's gonna say. I'm the guy who comes up with a lot of the driving direction for Talking Joe, lining up things. Tim joins me and adds brain and thoughts to the conversations that would otherwise be brainless and thoughtless. So I've been doing this for a few years. Originally Talking Joe was originally started by a guy called Chief with his buddy Ben. And their mission really was, at the time, was to start with a G.I. Joe real American hero, issue one from 1982. Read that, record what they thought about it afterwards, and try and get all the way through to the end of 155. And they accomplished and kept on going. And along the way, Chief Broke had replaced a number of his co-predenters. And somewhere along the way, I was at the replacement. And when Chief ran out to batteries, I just picked up the baton and kept on going. So we've been reading issue by issue through all of the IDW Hammer Run, all the way through to issue 300. In tandem, we've started on the Devil's Jew era. And we're sort of just made our way up to the beginning of the Joe Casey run at the moment. And along the way, dipping into all sorts of other things. Besides, we've spoken to Larry Hammer and Jim Shooter and Ron Ruddatz and all manner of artists and creators along the way. So we typically will drop a weekly episode and you can find out all of the details over at TalkingJoe.co.uk, which is the website which has links to YouTube's, podcasts, social media, all of that stuff. Tim, I think I've used up all the things that you would have had to say. Mark is the producer, creative director and editor of Talking Joe. And Mark knows and loves GI Joe comics very well and I show up and talk, but I have made comics, taught comics, I own a brick and mortar comic book store so I sell comics. And so we are interested in analyzing is such a strong word, but examining the ups and downs of art and color and story and storytelling and lettering and along the way, Mark has lined up some wonderful guests most of whom are directly related to the issues that we are reading. And in the case of someone like Jim Shooter or Rod Wiggum or Ron Ruddatz, someone who historically is important to GI Joe and since we just got through the 40th anniversary, it made sense to line up a bunch of those guests. That is awesome. And I think it's fantastic that you're looking at the legacy of GI Joe and the people who helped create it. So Mark, it sounds like you kind of inherited Talking Joe and Tim, it sounds like you have a significant amount of comic book knowledge. So that's a great foundation. That's a fantastic foundation. How long have you, the two of you been working this show together? How long have you been doing that together? I think it started just before, just in the before times, right Tim? So it was, I think it was like towards the beginning of 2020, I want to say. Just, did we start just before lockdown? And then... I have a planner right here. I think, who did it cover commander? What happened was Mark did an interview with me where Mark was the only host because for many years I had been researching and writing a history book on GI Joe. So before Talking Joe, my presence at GI Joe conventions or online was linked to a real American book, which is the title of my book and also my website if you added.com at the end. And so I was a guest on the show and I talked for so long. Mark broke it into two episodes. Did we, was that interview December? I feel like that was December, 2020. Okay, I'm probably getting my years mixed up then. So... I think we've been doing this for two and a half years. And then very soon after, because Mark, you had just reviewed issue 275 and done the big Robert Atkins interview. So very soon after, Mark said, hey, you like to talk about GI Joe? Would you like to talk about GI Joe every week or sometimes five out of six weeks? And this was now, this was now everyone was stuck at home now. And I thought, that might be good for me. Awesome. Yeah, real American book is a fantastic resource. I hope everyone will check that out. I will make sure that there are links in the description of this video. Please check out those links. Fantastic resources and a great show. So thank you guys for all the work you do. You've done a tremendous amount of work and it's a great asset to the community. So thank you for that. Thank you very much. Let's talk about, let's go back to the early days. So I think it's fair to say both of you are GI Joe fans. How did you first get into GI Joe? Like way back when, what was your first experience with it? Did I go first Tim? Okay. So you might have detected that I'm a Brit. So my first encounter was with Action Force. So that was being published in the pages of a comic called Battle Action Force, which was initially, you know, focusing on all of the Palatoy toys. So the Red Shadows and Zed Force and all of those guys. And so you'd see that in like in the news agents being released weekly. And yeah, I was bought that by my dad a couple of times and I was like, whoa, this is the stuff. Then I saw some of the toys in the shops and like, yeah, Mind Blown, these are amazing. And so yeah, that combination of comic and toy together sort of, you know, really cemented it. So I followed Battle Action Force until it's demise. It was terribly, and demise of, you know, Palatoy Action Force and it was terribly, terribly disappointed and sad and, you know, that lovely thing that I love so much has gone. And then randomly sort of just, you know, without sort of knowing that it was coming to sort of happened upon sort of the newly relaunched version of Action Force under Hasbro and Marvel UK. And yeah, kept on going from there really. So yeah, collected all of the weekly Action Force Marvel UK issues, which I think there was like if the issues, I wanna say, which, which, you know, had these original stories, but also the Larry Hammer reprints, then over time as well sort of got to track down all of, all of that material and filling all of the holes in that, that collection sort of sporadically. And, and yeah, kept on going really. Didn't, didn't stop too much apart from the dark times when I had kids and thought, yeah, let's just sell all of those toys because I'm an adult now. I'm not gonna ever play with those again. So that was the, that was the only blip. But generally, G.I. Joe's been a big part of my life, most of my life. My brother asked for the Sky Striker and my parents said no. We had a lot of Lego and Matchbox and Hot Wheels. And he said, no, no, no, it's not, I'm not gonna get into a new toy. It's just cause it's a jet cause my brother was big into planes. And so was my dad. And I don't remember catching the first mini series on TV, but I remember catching the second mini series on TV and my first figure was Blowtorch. So I got in in 84 and my brother and I got really big into the toys. We had, we had Transformers, we had Playmobil, we had Lego, we had these other things, but G.I. Joe was the best. And it was supported by this amazing show, which had superior artwork and superior writing and it was on five days a week. And then in 89, I was at a bookstore at the mall and I saw issue 90 on a spinner rack. And the show was over, the show was in reruns, right? I didn't know that geek episodes were coming. And I had this need for more G.I. Joe stories and on the cover was Road Pig. And Road Pig had never been on the show and I've looked through that issue and I saw all sorts of things that I would not see in the show and specifically characters who had not made it to the show. And it was only a dollar, which was one third the price of a figure. And I said to my brother, look, he'd actually read a few issues at his friend's house and he and I had sort of bought an issue or two before that but it sort of didn't know what it was. And he said, a dollar, don't buy that. And he was doing the math. What he was actually saying is, right, that's one third of another figure. So save that dollar. And a dollar wasn't actually that much. And I read that comic so many times and in it was an ad for a mail order company, East Coast Comics in New Jersey and they had many cheap back issues. And so that was the beginning. And that got me into all comics. I think this sort of line is pretty standard where a kid in the 80s starts reading the Marvel comic either cause they've seen the TV ads or cause it's somehow in front of them and then they sort of remember the TV ads. Oh, I've been told to buy this for the last five years and then we got into sort of what's the book that's most like it, right? The Punisher or the Nam. And then X-Men and Wolverine cause someone at school kept talking about Wolverine and then Ninja Turtles cause that's in the air. And then that summer is the Tim Burton Batman movie. And so the world of comics opens from G.I. Joe. Yeah, I think you're exactly right. A lot of people got their introduction to comics in general through G.I. Joe and a couple of people that I've talked to in these interviews have said the same thing. That G.I. Joe comic book series I think may have inspired a lot more comic book artists and writer careers and other involvement in comic books in general than maybe acknowledged that a lot of people started right there. And Mark, I'm glad you mentioned Action Force because I'm enjoying seeing a lot of people outside of the UK now discovering Action Force and really loving it, especially like the toys, a lot of which were just a little different from what we got in North America, but different in some really fascinating ways. So I'm really delighted that people are discovering that now and it's like a whole new world that has opened up. So Mark, you said that you didn't take too much of a break before kind of returning to G.I. Joe. Was there anything that kind of inspired you to come back in and pick it back up again? Yeah, so I've never taken a break from the comics. I've taken more of a break from I guess the community and from collecting everything with the toys and stuff. So yeah, there's I guess a few triggers I guess. So probably the biggest one was talking Joe because I'd been buying the comics but being sort of allowing them to sort of stack up and just not read them. Because the first few issues from Hammer on 155 and beyond, well not the first few issues, let's say, didn't necessarily sort of inspire me too much. It wasn't the best start to the run, I think it's fair to say. And so that sort of slightly soured me on that relaunch. And so I kind of, yeah, out of loyalty and out of knowing that I love this stuff, I continued to buy it but just wasn't inspired enough to read it. So the real thing that did it for me was Chief who was a good friend of mine, starting up the podcast and getting me to sort of read it along with the episodes as he was doing it. So before episode one, we were kind of talking about the podcast and how it would work and what we'd do and so yeah, that sort of gave the inspiration of not just hearing him do the Talking Joe podcast but also discussing it with him directly as a friend. So that got me kind of actively back into the swing of regularly reading the comics and sort of interacting with the community and things like that. And then probably the other sort of dimension to it is probably just like the launch of classified and having kids at the right age. So I've got an 11 year old now who is really into GI Joe and well, the GI Joe toys more and specifically the classified line. So he's sort of loving that and sort of buying that for him as a toy for him to actually enjoy and play with as a toy is a wild idea is just a lovely thing to see and sort of my passion for the kind of the GI Joe is a as a holistic thing, being able to sort of enjoy that as a thing with him is sort of brings a whole different dimension to it. So that's been a lovely thing. All right, Tim, did you ever take a break from it? And if so, what brought you back? I only took a break when GI Joe took a break from all of us. It did. That's not strictly true, Tim. That was you? Well, I was buying all the extreme toys and I watched season one when it aired and I got season two. I interned at Sunbow Productions, which by then was called Sunbow Entertainment when I was in college and I dubbed all of season two of Extreme for Myself. Yeah, I mean, in Mark, in 97, 98, there were those Toys R Us exclusive real American hero figures, but there was no GI Joe content otherwise. And then 98 and 99, but then the toy sort of came back properly and then Devils Do launched. I remember reading the announcement, I was sitting at my laptop in college and I saw the announcement somehow, maybe it wasn't online, maybe I was just holding an issue of the Paper Transformers Fan Club newsletter with the announcement that Bench Press Comics was going to make new GI Joe and new Transformers. I was really excited. No, my break is more that in high school and college, in high school, I transitioned from being a GI Joe toy buyer and player to being a GI Joe toy collector. And there were, it's like eighth grade, ninth grade, 10th grade where I was buying and playing with some toys, but also buying some toys and keeping them man sealed and then buying a few older ones. And the prices back then were so reasonable. And a few years after college, I sort of stopped buying the toys because I had run out of space and I was also buying Transformers. I'm a big Transformers fan, not enough to do a weekly podcast. But in some of those linear years, like in 2000, 2001, 2002, I was on a Transformers discussion board every day when I was at work. Should have been working because, you know, Beast Wars and Beast Machines and also the annual convention BotCon. And then a couple of years where there was a second convention, OT, TFCC, the official Transformers collectors convention. And my friend and I were making this hilarious Transformers fan fiction comic book called the Trans Spoof. And but whenever GI Joe comics were going to come back, whenever GI Joe comics were gonna come back, I was ready. And when there was that issue of Wizard Magazine with those pinups for like potential 80s books and then Devil's Do showed up and the cover of the issue one from Devil's Do is so great. And I, talking Joe listeners will know, did not like the first arc, didn't like the first issue, didn't like the first arc. And I bailed on that series around issue 10. So actually, I guess this is a long way of answering your question. But I was buying some of those toys then because there were those cool three packs with the figures and then later some two packs, three packs with comics and then later two packs with comics with the 25th anniversary bodies. So, but the thing I really want the cartoon to come back and there's no way that, you know, I mean, the 80s, 90s comic gets continued. There's no way that the 80s cartoon gets continued. You know, Disney Plus is sort of making a sequel to the 1992 Fox X-Men cartoon. And it's called X-Men 97. And that's, you know, that's not gonna happen with G.I. Joe. And, you know, Renegades isn't gonna come back. And so I'm not a toy buyer these days because I also switched in the last 15 years from buying cool things where there are many, many of them, like 10,000 or 100,000 units to original art or artifacts from animation cells or, you know, original artwork from Hasbro, partly because I wanted it and partly because then it can go in my book. Awesome. Yeah, that's, and again, it's a great resource. Please check out the website. The link will be in the description. Anybody who hasn't seen it yet really should. And Tim, you talked about being into Transformers and kind of being in that community. Mark, is there anything outside of G.I. Joe that inspires you? Anything beyond our Joeverse that you are also interested in? Yeah. So I'd say sort of like generally the world of comics is sort of my sort of a parallel passion to G.I. Joe. So I'm sitting in front of my library and these aren't just G.I. Joe comics there. You've got some other non-G.I. Joe things in there. So I think part of what I bring to Talking Joe when I'm reading the Talking Joe comics and discussing Tim is a kind of broader awareness and knowledge of comics outside of G.I. Joe. And what we try and do is sort of look at them sort of slightly objectively and rather than saying, this comic's cool because it's got my favorite G.I. Joe character in it. We'll kind of dissect a little bit what makes it a good or less than good comic and try and sort of make things a little bit objective about, you know, bring the subjective to the objective. So Ron said, we don't like something. We'll try and explain maybe what is it about the story or what is it about the arts that particularly connects or sort of disconnects with us. And one of the joys has been coming back to the devil's due comics and doing a read-read through of those and coming to, you know, for me one of the joys have been that I read them 20 years ago and passage of time has meant that it's entirely blurred in my memory and I can't remember any of the specifics. So it's fun to kind of rediscover the comics. And for Tim, someone who was originally not a fan and let me know if I did my best Tim Finn impression and be like, these aren't written by Larry Hammer. I don't like them. So 20 years later, coming back to them from a slightly different place and reading them with a slightly different eye of that, you know, at the time it's like, these are the only GI Joe comics that are coming out. Take it or leave it. If you don't like them, tough because you're not getting any other GI Joe comics. Now they've been out for 20 years and it's like there's plenty of choice and what you can be spending your time and energies focusing on. So it's that passage of time, I think sort of softened things and allowed Tim to come out of place of coming at them slightly objectively and getting some level of enjoyment out of the process of looking it together even when maybe the substance of the comic itself isn't always necessarily to exact taste. Tim, I'm talking for you. So if you can... No, that's... In your own words. So I think of myself as a historian and I've done a lot of interviews for my book and I read history, read history books on comics and animation. I don't read novels. I watch some streaming shows that everyone watches. I watch the Star Wars shows. I watch the Marvel shows. But because I have for many years wanted my students to see a continuum in the history of animation in America and in the world. I taught a comics class for many years and it was not a history of comics class but for a week or two I would do a lecture and there are threads and there are connections and I don't mean something like, Snake Eyes' origin is in 26 and 27 but then you also have to read 144. That's at the surface level. So what I'm interested in and what Mark is also interested in and game for are sort of threads and context. So for example, as we're reading an issue either Mark has found interviews with the person who drew that issue or the person who wrote that issue and sends me the link and says, oh, we can talk about this also because this answers some questions we have. Why didn't this person draw the whole issue or what have you? But also what is happening elsewhere at Marvel or at Devil's Do in the 80s and 90s or in the 2000s? What's happening in the comics market? What is happening in larger pop culture? What's happening in to some extent geopolitical the geopolitical arena? If you were reading the Battle of Benjean in Marvel issues 112 to 117, you would of course say to yourself, oh, this is Larry Hama's analog for the actual Gulf War. It's not Iraq and Kuwait and also Cobra's involved. And so you can do a little or a lot of that with G.I. Joe comics and it might be something like, oh, well what was the best selling comic that month or that year? Oh, it's this Batman event. It's this X-Men event. It's the Spider-Man event. How might that affect Devil's Do? Or now how might that be affecting IDW in the last 12 years? So in addition to the nuts and bolts of, I like what this character is doing or I don't like what this character is doing. It's why might the writer be making this decision beyond a creative decision? Why might the publisher be making this decision beyond sort of we've got 22 or 20 pages to fill? And some of that we can get from people who were there and some of that we can get from reading around it and reading up on it and some of it we can get just from sort of looking really carefully on the page and putting our heads together. And I think there are, one of the reasons why I'm so pleased to have joined Talking Joe is that there are a lot of places online in text and in video or in audio where someone will talk about a G.I. Joe toy and I think I was waiting for someone to talk about G.I. Joe comics the way that I wanted to talk about G.I. Joe comics and it turns out Mark and I can talk about G.I. Joe comics. I can talk about comics the way I want to talk about comics. I mean, that's why I'm writing my book, right? I thought 23 years ago, why isn't someone writing this coffee table history art book of real American hero? Well, thank you. Thank you for you guys for what you're doing. We are about at time, but before we wrap up, what I would like to do is just kind of turn the floor over to you guys for any final words to our audience and remind everybody that Talking Joe is in Cobra Convergence 7. Again, there will be links in the description of this video. At the time you see this, their presentation should be out now. So go right away and check that out. Subscribe if you haven't already and check out the rest of their catalog. They've got a very deep and rich catalog of material and content that you will definitely want to check out. But to wrap it up guys, I will turn the floor over to you for any final comments to our audience. Yeah, I mean, just to echo what you said really, I mean, your theme this year sort of gave a good springboard for something that I wanted to talk about anyway. So yeah, tune into today's episode to find out what we think, because I don't know what we think yet because we haven't recorded it yet, but it's the mysteries of time. But so that's been a great prompt to look at something that we were meaning to and hadn't got to yet. So that will be a lot of fun to do as an experience for just me and Tim and hopefully for the, yeah, sort of a rare little golden nuggets that maybe sort of G.I. Joe Comics fans aren't familiar with. But beyond that, yeah, we sort of put out a weekly podcast most weeks. We started at issue one. We've worked our way through to issue 300. So you can join in the experience, read along, go all the way back and start at the beginning or just delve into some of those more recent ones where pretty much for the last run of IDW month by month as those issues were coming out, we would be talking to the creators involved because when they moved into those kind of untold tales type arcs, it was a new artist each week, each month. So it meant that we could be very regularly talking to the creative team and meant that we talked to an awful lot of people about G.I. Joe how much G.I. Joe meant to them or not and their sort of creative process for sort of putting all of those issues together. You can also delve into the devil's due eras with a read along on that and explore the back catalog to hear from various luminaries such as one of my favorite artists, Rod Wiggum that we had the great privilege of speaking to not so long ago. So that in a nutshell, is it like and subscribe, he says. I've talked for a long time. I have nothing to add. Mark, that was great. All right. And thank you. And thank you, Hooded Commander. Oh, and also best jingles in the business. Absolutely. Oh, thank you guys. I really am grateful that you're involved this year. Thank you again. Thank you for all you do. Thank you for being such a great asset to the community and providing so much information that is useful. So thank you, my sincere thanks to you. And I guess that's it for now. Thank you guys. Once again, everyone, links are in the description. Go right now, check out what they're doing and make sure you subscribe and check out everything they have done over the last few years. You will not be disappointed. There's a lot to see there. So thanks, everyone. Thank you, guys, and we'll see everybody soon. Thank you so much. And thanks for all you do as well at bringing us across the community together. Thank you, Hooded Commander. Thank you, guys.