 Alright, hello everybody. Thank you for being here on our disassembly required panel in Des Moines, Iowa. We just finished watching a panel that had Josh Playlock which has been a big part of us being making books. So, does everybody here in the audience, does everybody know about us after X report? Do I need to explain the books or anything? Does everybody know? Okay, so we're going to skip that part. And that's what we want to do quick. Now we'll skip it. Alright, so we'll introduce ourselves. So I'm Josh, this is Roger Taft and we are the main co-authors of all this action report stuff that we got going on. In 2020 he called me and says, hey you want to do a project, it'll take a year. It's 2023 and now we're at four books. Well, one book took a year. One book took a year. We got four books. And I'll let Roger talk a little bit, but this is Greg Augustine. He's helping us and making a book that he started 10 years ago called Command Piles. It's a G.I. Joe character guidebook and this is the first printing proof. That's what happens. So to my left is Park Sanders of Rising Sun Publishing, who's been helping us a lot with getting these books made a tremendous amount. So Roger, your turn. Talk about how you're the cheerleader of our crowd. What was I really supposed to talk about? So my joke with him is that now he has to have pom-poms and he has to go, A-Raw, A-Raw, A-Raw, R-Raw, R-Raw. Not going to happen. I got last in the audience. I got last in the audience. Okay. You're going to do something. I'm Roger Taft. I came up with this idea like in 1999, but didn't have the ability to do it because I wanted to do an all-inclusive book of everything G.I. Joe. They kept making G.I. Joe at that point, so it wasn't going to happen. So in the meantime, a bunch of other guidebooks came out. A bunch of friends made guidebooks and none of them had made anything about comics and I thought, well, if they can do it, then why don't I do it? So here we are. Now we've made five books and we're working on the next one. Hey, Greg. Greg, my turn. How I got into Command Piles as Josh was saying. I saw there was a kind of a void in terms of G.I. Joe Encyclopedia out there. I don't think there was anything published officially since, like, 2008. So I wanted to do a guidebook. I mean, there's stuff from Star Wars and Avengers and X-Men had these guidebooks out there for characters. And I, for myself, just for my personal kind of entertainment, I decided to design files that represented Encyclopedia entries for G.I. Joe characters. The first one I did was like Gunpo in 2013. And I just started posting them on Instagram, on, like, his tank and sharing them out on a Facebook group. So I started to amass a bunch of character designs over the years. And I am amassed over, like, 10 years, like, 200 ones. Joe's, Cobra's, et cetera. And one after one day in July, I posted something in the Facebook group was just some sample pages. I did it in a mock, like, digital book on a Facebook group to get some kind of feedback on it. And one of the people, Josh, who's in there and says, hey, that's a book that we're all waiting for, we want. So he tagged a lot of authors of current G.I. Joe books from, like, the toys and kind of how to make Joe's and said, you know, that's, like, the missing thing in terms of all these publications. And so we got to talking. And by the time 2023 came around, February, and almost the day that I posted my first profile, 10 years later, we kickstarted the project. It was like, it was pretty successful, most received. I mean, we funded his May, June timeframe. And, and even before that, Joe, I was here a year ago, pitching this concept to most of you guys and my new face and meeting all the guys and all the Joe fans and saying that they hate what they want this book. And so here we are a year later at AR 2023. This is technically the printer book. This is our printer proof. So, I mean, I literally just saw this yesterday in my hand and I'm going through this. I can't believe my, like, pretty impassioned project was here in my hands. Thank you to the Joe fans that they invited me that they wanted something like this. And they saw that, literally, this is something that all-encompassing. So, the basis of this is basically the file card. So, when we bought our toys back then, and we needed a story about the, like, Rock and Roll or Flash or Charlotte, the background, that was everything that we, that bounced off of, you know, what we on the layer on the road, the file card. But that was like the launching pad for the cartoon for the comics and all the other kind of iterations. So, I wanted to capture that in that book. So, over the 40 years of Joe history, what you'll have here is the baseline file card story. But I'll also have a presentation of what Duke looked like in Sunbug, what he looked like in the Resolute miniseries, correct the miniseries of the deep version and all the other, even Sigma-6's in here. So, I wanted to do a little nod and almost a thank you to the fandom. And also the creators of the G.I. Joe War and the mythology all in one book. So, that's what this is represents. It's volume one. There's three more coming. Yeah, as I said, I have like over 200 characters and the page count for action, after action report books is like 144. So, I had to split in the middle and say, I'm going to put half the characters volume one, half the characters volume two. But when I realized working on volume one, I had so much information, so much research that I did to put this book together, we actually, even though we promised Kickstarter backers, we'd have 144 page book. We ended up with 180 books. 180 pages. 180 pages. 40 pages. 40 more content. 30 pages. Not even that too. Remember, I worked on this for like over 10 years and created these graphics. When we went to actually putting it together, the actual book, we found that some of the graphic assets and some of the things I made were really low res. So, we decided at the tail, once we're putting this together, to reach out to some new artists to commission new, brand new artwork. So, there's like over 30 pieces of brand new artwork, character, artwork we care about in here. We've reached out to Brian Atkins, Robert Atkins, Mark Pennington, the toy designer of the late 80s for the Joe Figures, Mrs. Oh, Josh Coelac has one. He drew the fridge in this one just to let you know, which is really cool. We even have Adam Rich's drop of piece in there as well. So, I'm really kind of feeling blessed and really humbled that I got all these names, joke creators that, you know, I didn't know like last year actually participating in this book and getting their blessing on that. So, it's pretty cool. So, that's Command Files. We also have two other books. We'll get to Hawk here in a second that we need to talk about. So, Volume 3, which was kickstarted last year is, as you can see, we have it here. We're calling this the Special Edition. These are the ones that came to us rather quickly. The other ones are somewhere on the boat. So, that's Volume 3, which is 2010 to 2022. We also have the Newsstand Edition. Now, if everybody understands Newsstand, we're calling we're now calling the original version that we sold in 2020, this one here, the Direct Market Version, because it doesn't have a UPC code. Now we have a UPC code. So, and it corrected a lot of errors. Of course, it has workbook makers back in 2020. So, this has, it doesn't have any new content, but it has a lot of corrections and a new, a slightly new cover and a UPC code. I mean, come on. Isn't that cool? Okay. So, Hawk has updates on what's happening with all these other books. And then we will get to what's coming next. I want to, can I talk a little bit about this? Yeah, yeah, of course. Which one? Let me have Command Files. Command Files. Let's talk about Command Files. What do you guys think of these articles in these books? Have you all read them? Awesome. Yeah? Yeah. That's pretty, pretty amazing, I think, the articles and some of the deep dives that they were taking back into that. I was going to pull out some artwork and just roughly talk about some of the artwork that we had redone in this book. Freefall. So how many times have you seen freefall in a character design sketch? I know we talked a lot about, about not doing something that was there before. So usually when everyone draws freefall, he's, well, freefalling. And there's a song that usually plays right behind him. But what I thought was really interesting is, when we commissioned these art pieces, we were able to get some new artworks with different poses and different stuff. And it got some really unique art pieces that came out of that, you know, for it. So if you haven't seen Command Files, please swing by. I also want to say this is, this is one hell of a group to work with. These guys are awesome. Like, you know, this team right here just absolutely rocks. They got it all together. All right. Thank you. You're welcome. Now I know how you guys can see, but I'm going to hold up the file, card history page that's in this book. Yeah, so that was an added thing late. I had all this information in terms of researching this and noticed that along the way, in terms of the release of the toys, you notice the back of the designs of the fog parts changed. And again, the content changed. So I actually have a little history timeline of what changed year over year which toy release kind of noted that. Because I don't think that's ever been done before. I just wanted to lay it out. About the only place you could find it was on Yo-Jo and you had to go from character to character to see the different file card styles. So the question is, where's all this goodness, right? That's what everyone wants to know. And what is it that we have up here on the screen? So these are pictures and proof samples that were coming from China about where we're at in the process. You can see volume three up there. Second printing you can see, as well as all of the Kickstarter campaign stuff that was coming through. This is probably the first time you guys have seen this stuff or seen it in color. So you're probably wondering, whoa, okay, what is that? And we can talk a little bit more about that. I'm also going to play a couple videos and the reason why I'm playing this is we switch factories in printing. And I want to talk about that just very briefly. Stuff's coming in. We did switch factories and we had a couple of hiccups in switching factories. As you can see, stuff's printed. We just have to identify when it's getting to us and that kind of falls upon me. I want to show you a couple videos as they thumb through some of this product that you guys can take a look at. Here is... So this is kind of what this factory does. Every factory is a little bit different and they're sending me a proof copy to show that, you know, hey, here's a prototype. This is what this is looking like or here's what it is. Same thing that he's doing here. So it can be a little challenging to make some decisions off of that. But you can see that this is what we get. And, you know, they kind of show some of the process and some of the problems that they think are going on in those pages. Giving you a little bit of peeling though. The layers off the onion to show how this is done. Like any good project, and I will say this, it's always done in revision. The more revision, usually you catch more things. Typos are like dust. Hard to get rid of. Which is why we actually did the second printing. Yeah, that's right. For volume one, which is about us, yeah. This, what you're seeing right here, second printing, they've resolved a lot of those typos and issues like that. Plus we also did, thank you to all your supporters with the first volume one direct market we sold out, almost sold out. We're going to archive a bunch of them and then we're going to sell the news stand exclusively. So if you're here and you want to get it online, you should order on the website. Because once we get the news stand in hand, we will retire the direct market version. Now, we know you're all complete collectors, so you've got to get them both. One more thing I want to see. And everyone wonders, what's this thing? So if you don't know this, this was part of the Kickstarter campaign. For command files. For command files, this is Joe vs. the Spy balloon, written by Roger Taft, done by Ryan and done labbing. If you don't know, you did a lot of ITW covers and it's a little bit of a political satire piece going on. So where are they at now? Well, my last communication with them, they were printed and supposedly sitting on the dock. So I'm waiting on updates for when they're actually getting to us, us. And that is completely on me, so hopefully we'll get them and get an update soon about them. But they are coming and you will receive them and they will be wonderful books for you to ponder and read and get ready for what's coming next. Right, and so just to clarify, that's volume three and second printing. Command files has not been printed. It is only the printer proof that we're showing here, so that will probably likely be January or February before it gets printed or something. We just literally got it, like Greg said, like two days ago, so we have to go through it and look at it. But it looks pretty good. It didn't seem like there's a whole lot. Yeah, if we didn't correct anything, I think it would be okay to go to print. Good news. And we do have these little ash cans. Everybody here can get one. Okay. You ready to talk about what's next? I get to parade this around like one of those models in a round set. So I started to dub after action report like the MCU. We just finished phase one. The Avengers movie has happened. This is the books that you see here. So now we're moving into phase two. So we actually kind of talked about this originally in volume one, and we put it in the back of Future, but now it's serious. So we have volumes four and five, and everybody's like, well, why, you know, what's four and five? So four and five, four is international comics year. We got a whole team of people. I got a big collection. Roger Collection and a bunch of other people got help us with this. And volume five is international edition. Also, it's called North South America plus Asia, and we'll have battle action force in there. So we're going to sneak that in. Europe has so many international comics that we can't fit it all. So we bump in battle action force to one and five. And then we're starting another chain of books called Live the Adventure. It's a G.I. Joe merchandise guy, and that's probably what, two or three? Probably going to be at least two, maybe three volumes. That'll be the Halloween costumes and the sleeping bags and games. So that's like what he likes to collect. When you go and look at his collection, he's got like sleeping bags. I'm like pillow cases and toothbrushes. And we have another guy, a big collector, his name's Dan Moore, who's also being a big part of this. And we have several other declassified guys who, when you come to these conventions and you see all this crazy shit, you know, that's beyond this. You know, comics and toys and stuff. So that's where we're going to build those guys, which again, is not really out there. And Greg, you are going with Command Files 2? Yeah, Volume 2, as I mentioned earlier, you had to split to two books. So the first half of this, basically what I call the A teams. The second half would be, Volume 2 is more of the pilots and the drivers and special sub teams like DF and Eco Warriors and so forth. And then there's a third volume. Don't forget about Cobra. So through that 10 years I've been working on this, I did do some Cobra files, so that's on its way. So Volume 3, I'll have that going too. So next, 2025. So yes, maybe by 2025 we will have what, 10? Maybe we can get 10 after action reports in four years? We've been busy. And it all happens because of the kick starters. You guys have done a fantastic job of supporting us with kick starters. And then we sell the books on the website and we come to the conventions. You know, that helps us keep going. We're not making any money on this, but we are able to pay for all the stuff, the printings and everything like that. So thank you all for your support. Is that our 20 minutes? On the button? I don't see the assembly required to blame you. So let's ask some questions. Any questions? Okay. I would like to know, Jenna Jo's lore is so encompassing that it goes into animation, it goes into other publishing areas, novels, books. Phil, is there an opportunity for this expanded universe of command files in the future if the first three volumes do well? Well, clearly a cartoon guidebook is missing in our community. We are maybe going to do that. I can't confirm because the author who's doing that is... He's debating. He's not committed. He's debating. He did help out with this book, so that will help. That will help. He's already got a lot of it built for the cartoon. Now, regarding the novels that you just asked, they are actually intermixed in some of these books. Like the Live the Adventure, Finding the Faith books are in volume one. Some of the coloring guidebooks are these. There's characters in those novels that nobody knows about. Every single novel has a different character. No one's probably ever seen it unless you've read those novels. Maybe we can get to that. Another thought everybody always asks us is the IDW continuity with the Hasbro Mountain University with the Rom and Transformers and Unicron eating everybody at the end and ending multiple continuities and stuff like that. That had been running for years. Again, you have to choose what we want to make. We are humans with jobs and other things, life's going on. By the way, I want everybody to give a big yo-jo to Greg because his mom just passed away last week. Let's give him a big yo-jo. That kind of stuff keeps us getting in the way. We keep pushing through and Hawks helped out a lot. Everybody's helping out. In order to get to the IDW continuity, probably in 2025, we'll probably get there at some point. It also is still relatively new. It's only like six years ago. Fifteen. Does that answer your question, David? I think the IDW liked the number of different series they did and the restarting things and the sheer volume of varying covers. I don't think we need to do a less than two volumes. At 144 p.m. We've been debating that at the table. How do we get through this starting to eyeball it and figure out what that's going to take? Yeah. Like I just said, we'll depend on demand if enough people want it. These people want it. This group. Everybody here wants it. You want the IDW continuity starting in 2008. They ended in 2019. You want that whole series? All those cover books. All those cover books. We can talk about this last night, but if you all were to do an omnibus, what would be in it? What would you cover? What era is it? Clearly, Carson set the standards for that. A huge book. Obviously, the amount of numbers that he got well beyond his regular books that he got. We're kind of in the same category with Dan Kay and Carson on the small books. His big book just blew the hell up. It is amazing. I don't know if you guys have seen any of the stuff he's posted lately, but that book is unbelievable. To do that, I don't know if we have the skills. Maybe we can hire Carson. Or at least we can get him to do it. I would think that somewhere along the line we could probably do omnibus. Any guys get the ideas? My overall feeling is that we'll probably reach 10 after action reports, not command files, because that's a separate thing. That's a separate thing. But I like the comic guides. If that reaches 10, a volume of 10, I think we can do two omnibuses, the first five and the second five, with a little bit more content in each of them and some updates as we go along. Because even after we finish books, we occasionally still find more information. So we did correct that. And some of it's redundant because it appears in more than one book because it fits and we would eliminate that so it would be just in the one book, in there one time for that volume. So it'd be that kind of thing. A little bit of streamlining with a little bit of new. But more than likely no more than five books per omnibus. I would like to do it all in one but have it on a luggage cart and handle so you can just kind of tilt right into the ground. Yes, wheels and all. Let me show you my chicken and Joe collection. Look at all these check marks I've acquired. My collection is full. I mean, is that like, because something like that then is you're probably price point wise talking, you know, what, $80, $90, $100 minimum. It would probably be like a $150 range. Yes, some of it would be redundant if you had the soft covers. But we, you know, we could mix it in there. I mean, obviously, you know, if you, you know, if you, you know, obviously, you know, if you want to post on our Facebook group, you know, the after-action report group maybe we start a thread there and see what people want, you know. After-action report, the history of comics. And of course, you can always go to our website and buy the books. Now, Greg has also been handling our website. So this is one of a new announcement that we're going to do. In volume one and in volume three, we, between that we spent more than nine pages talking about number 21 silent interlude second printing. Nine pages for one comic that is like a total big mystery and this actually, Roger and I started this in 2020 before we even did these books and a hunt for to try to find out this, figure out this mystery. So, whoa. Greg and I are going to do is take all this new information that we found and we kind of figured out and I actually Tommy Hazleton who has written an article and is kind of like a number 21 second printing expert found some. So we actually have some in a bag. I have one in my collection now and Roger has one in his collection that kind of helped prove this and then we're going to put it on the website and we're going to build these pages and we're going to be, after-action report we're going to be the definitive place to go to find number 21 second printing information because nobody knows and we've been able to piece it together over the last four years now and we're going to put it up there. So that's like a new announcement there for everybody. And if you're on Facebook and any GeoComic group every two weeks somebody asks that question. Where's the second printing? What is the second printing? Why is there a third printing? We're going to build this page hopefully in the next month or two and put that up there so that will, obviously it's on a website so it's not going to be in the books but much, much of this information is already kind of in our books first. Yeah, it will be correlated into something you can link to. And then you can link and be like, I know what to answer to the biggest mystery in G.I. Joe Commons. What happened to that second printing? I don't know. I personally think the biggest mystery is who's the best you want. He's just standing there. You never see him again. Alright, there we go. Who's going to investigate that? Mark? Alright. We'll put that in command files before. Write a song about it. That was actually a toilet library. He infiltrated the base. He was a little addressed for the toilet library. That's right. Any more questions? Seems as if the next panel probably could get ready or something. Oh, hopefully they didn't call my number. Alright, absolutely. Come to our table and ask more questions. Thank you. Oh, come up and meet your free stuff. Yes.