I'm roughly a year into a rekindled obsession with G.I. Joe, one that was ignited as part of a midlife crisis and/or coping mechanism for personal tragedy. Sometimes things happen and you end up spending all of your spare mental energy figuring out what size screws to buy to give rusty, 40-year-old figures a makeover. Happens to the best of us!
Learning the ropes of any fandom, especially one that you gracefully peaced out of a few years before the first AOL CD-ROM mysteriously arrived in your house, comes with a bit of a learning curve. It's like moving to a new city. You have to find your grocery store, your comic shop, your ... what's a third place? God, we all need more places. Essentially, you have to find where you feel most welcome.
As a gay man in the world of "geek stuff," that unfortunately involves popping your head in, figuring out if there are bigots in the room, and ducking your head out of sight, hoping no one spotted you. This is why I'm immediately wary of any guy who, uh, looks like me (white, male, cis, 40-ish) shouting into a camera about toys. You never know if you're just a video or two away from hitting the "anti-woke" portion of their YouTube playlist.
Once you strip away all the fun stuff, G.I. Joe is a franchise about the United States Armed Forces. The line's heyday was in the '80s — the conservative, jingoistic, capitalistic era of Ronald Reagan. I love the '80s. I wouldn't be here if the '80s hadn't happened. That's why G.I. Joe kinda has the reputation it has for being a plate of macho nachos, topped with 2nd Amendment sauce and pickled no-homo-peños, as found at the food court in a Bass Pro Shop.
Mind you, this is the kind of reputation that all pop culture from our youth has amongst people who loved it once and didn't think about it again until they were an adult. "Wow, G.I. Joe was really right-wing propaganda" is about as insightful as "Velma was totally a lesbian" or "Batman is the 1%." Yes, sure, okay. All of that is more or less true, but it also erases all nuance in an attempt to appear, like, a real deep-thinker, man.
This is why I didn't really flinch when I saw this post on Bluesky:
It's not wrong! The vibes are right. And I get it, and I get that pop culture can be interpreted (or co-opted) to mean a lot of things that the authors never intended. But I want to talk to y'all about the G.I. Joe that I know — specifically the one that I'm reacquainting myself with right now, in the week since reading that Bluesky post.
First — if you want an overview of G.I. Joe's very real gay appeal, focusing on the '80s cartoon and toys, please watch this video. I'm not like other collectors my age, because when I shout into a camera about toys, I'm dressed as a woman!
Today, though, I'm here to focus on another pillar of the G.I. Joe fandom: the G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero comic book series by writer Larry Hama. Initially published in 1982 as the official tie-in comic for the relaunched G.I. Joe toyline, Marvel Comics' G.I. Joe series is essential to understanding why this '80s toyline outlasted every other '80s toyline (even Transformers had to stage a comeback during G.I. Joe's initial, uninterrupted heyday).
This wasn't just a tie-in comic; the comic was an integral part of the toyline well before the cartoon. Hasbro, the toy company behind G.I. Joe, essentially teamed up with Marvel Comics to not only create the comic, but to create the characters as well. Marvel editor Archie Goodwin is credited with suggesting the Joes have an army of archenemies and naming them Cobra. Larry Hama, a Marvel editor trying to get a foothold as a writer, got the job of writing not only the comic, but the file cards that appeared on the back of the toys themselves. This created an airtight continuity between the toys on the shelves and the comics on the spinner racks; all of it came from the same brain. This just so happened to be the brain of a 33-year-old Japanese-American Vietnam veteran and ex-actor born and based in New York City.
The cartoon, also titled G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, would premiere a year and a half after the comic in fall 1983. It's primary creative driving force: Steve Gerber, the creator of Howard the Duck. That ... is a whole other article.
G.I. Joe (the comic) ran for 155 issues before concluding in late 1994; Larry Hama wrote nearly every issue, a nearly unheard of feat in work-for-hire comics. This was the very first comic book that I ever collected, starting when I was seven years old with issue #119. I hung with the series off and on (hard to catch every issue when your proximity to comics is dependent upon trips to the grocery store) until the very end. That's why this trip through Larry Hama's G.I. Joeuvre, now that I'm an adult, has been so revelatory. I'm reading almost all of it for the very first time as a 40-year-old, and the rest of it I haven't cracked open in 30 years — and surprise, surprise, it sure as hell ain't conservative.
In fact, the Republican party of 2025 is pulling directly from the classic Cobra playbook, except they're doing so with infinitely less charisma, uniqueness, nerve, or talent. Honestly, modern day conservatives snatching these ideas from Cobra? It's disrespectful to Cobra. Cobra at least didn't pretend to be anything other than evil. They sure as hell didn't pretend to be Christian. Even when they were lying through their fangs, they were still being 100% honest.
I'm going to zero in on one issue, which can be perceived as Trump, Johnson, Musk & Co.'s urtext: G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero #100, "Seeds of Empire," cover date May 1990. This was Cobra Commander's big return after spending the previous three years presumed dead by readers, with an imposter named Fred VII masquerading as the leader of Cobra.
Just an aside: Larry Hama's G.I. Joe is deeply satirical, weird, and campy — so much so that all of the humorless men in literally every issue's letters page decrying a loss of "realism" really seem to have missed the point of this comic entirely. The same holds true today, with fans decrying a loss of realism in a franchise where one of the OG villains is a green-eyed punk rock shape-shifter who's allergic to sunlight. Realism where?
Anyway — Cobra Commander is back and his big move is to take over the factory town of Millville, brainwashing everyone into being Cobra loyalists and using the factories to make cheap munitions. His appeal to the citizens of Millville sure does sound familiar!
Just look at what Cobra Commander is doing in this double-page spread. He's making a bunch of vague, empty promises specifically designed to target the insecurities and fears of working-class Americans. New prosperity, new jobs, new industry, new commerce, an end to crime and immorality — wow, sounds great! Have any specifics? Any plans? And "immorality" as judged by who, the guy in the hood? All this will cost is the "curtailing of a few insignificant personal freedoms that you won't even miss that much."
Oh — and on the off chance that his appeal to the people of Millville could read as genuine to new readers who were unfamiliar with G.I. Joe and just the fact that hoods = evil, Hama starts the issue off with Cobra Commander literally kicking a dog.
Cobra Commander says that the residents of Millville will get all of these hand outs what they're owed without having to pay any taxes. Isn't that the conservative promise? All your dreams will come true and you won't owe the government nothing? A promise technically ain't broken if its still unfulfilled. The citizens are on board, with one saying, "It can't be any worse than what we have now!" Familiar sentiment amongst the "hold my nose and vote Republican" crowd.
When an actual veteran speaks up and says the obvious, that Cobra is a terrorist organization, that Americans can't "sell out your heritage of freedom" for a bunch of empty promises, CC pulls from the Republican playbook. He demonizes the critic, calling him a "low-life" and "chronic unemployable with psychotic tendencies." Strip all naysayers of their humanity, thus making it easier to hate, attack, or even deport them.
Undeterred, Cobra Commander tells everyone to sign up inside of one of the absolutely not ominous Cobra trailers that've just been set up.
This is the story of America over the last decade, as millions upon millions of people repeatedly step on the Republican rake, getting smacked in the face. Why? Well, as one guy in the crowd says, "It's about time that somebody really did something for the little people!" Conservatives keep believing Republicans when they lie and say that they care about — not just the little people, but people. They're in charge right now. Do you feel cared for?
And then it's all made clear: The promises were lies meant to get the population into those trailers for brainwashing.
Not even expensive brainwashing, either. Just cheap, dirty brainwashing that turns people into "obedient sheep." We all see the parallel, right? Fox News? Facebook? Worse? Those are Brainwave Scanners, and they've brainwashed at least one person in all of our lives. Maybe they got the expensive brainwashing, where they still act like themselves but have an unshakeable loyalty to the Republican party even though they claim to disagree with their policies. Maybe they got the cheapo kind of brainwashing and they're just gone.
The heartbreaking thing, where Hama and artist M.D. Bright twists the knife a bit, is where he has one old man (the uncle of G.I. Joe's Mutt) realize what's going on a second too late. He realizes he's been duped as his wrists are strapped in. The look on his face, it's haunting.
And this is where I push back against anyone who says that G.I. Joe is right-wing. It was absolutely a capitalistic toy commercial designed to get kids hyped and make parents part with money, but so was everything in the 1980s and 1990s (and, uh, the 21st century). G.I. Joe differed from other toylines. It had staying power, because of the work of aggressively creative, progressive-minded creators like Larry Hama. This comic, which outlasted two iterations of the G.I. Joe cartoon as well as the toy line itself, had a very clear political stance rooted in morals that, in 1990, we all agreed stood in firm opposition to dog-kickers. Now? One half of our whole political system wins elections by kicking puppies — and yeah, I know, plenty of G.I. Joe enthusiasts vote for 'em.
But my G.I. Joe — and I'm arguing G.I. Joe as a franchise, period — is not pro-dog-kicking. I believe that if you dig just an inch under the franchise's jingoistic surface, this is the ethos G.I. Joe is built upon: stand up for what is right, oppose tyranny, defend the defenseless, speak truth to power (I haven't even gotten into the comic's depiction of government corruption!), and war is hell (Hama devoted the entire last issue of the first G.I. Joe comic to this one maxim). A few of those are ideals that maybe when G.I. Joe #100 was published in 1990, both political parties could more or less agree upon. Now? Cobra is literally in charge of the country, and it's not the flashy, campy, toyetic Cobra that you love to hate. Dumb Cobra is our real government, and G.I. Joe is still just a toy.
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