The reason I hit up a bunch of comic shops on my 40th birthday — which I was spending away from my home and husband in New York and in Tennessee with family — was because I wanted to finally buy the G.I. Joes I never had nearly 40 years ago. Feels wild to act like I was ever deprived of anything G.I. Joe related. When I was a kid and looking for a specific figure in my big pit of figures, I had to use my arm like an excavator to move metric tons of Joes and Vipers out of the way.
I was very fortunate ... but it was still impossible for me to have the collection that I dreamed of having. Y'see, kids, back in the '80s, you either had to be there or be out of luck.
I was born in 1984, so the earliest Joes I had were from 1988 (Hardball, Repeater, Lightfoot, Toxo-Viper). The last wave of Sunbow animation-era Joes shipped in 1987; I just missed them. The repaint waves of the late '80s, Tiger Force and Slaughter's Marauders, ensured I had A-list cartoon characters like Flint, Roadblock, Low-Light, and Barbecue (albeit covered in tiger stripes or decked out in camo-colored green, brown, and blue?). But Scarlett? Lady Jaye? Alpine? Gone, and I didn't have an older brother from whom to steal figures. Nowadays Hasbro keeps on-model versions of characters in rotation, so that kids can go to a toy aisle and reasonably expect to find a Spider-Man who looks like Spider-Man and not like Chasm. Even though the Sunbow cartoon, with all of those OG Joe designs, was in daily syndication, I had to wait years for the drastically radical '90s iterations to get my faves.
My Cobra Commander had a red face.
My Firefly — covert Cobra saboteur — was neon green.
My Snake-Eyes was less militaristic ninja, more professional paintballer.
My Zartan, intimidating kingpin of a swamp-based biker gang, had a road-cone orange mohawk.
I still never had Zarana or Baroness. No disrespect to the DIC cartoon that ran from '89 to '92 — but the '80s Joes were still my Joes.
I didn't plan on spending my birthday in Tennessee. If my dad hadn't quite literally dropped dead without warning in late March, I wouldn't have been in Knoxville killing time. This G.I. Joe obsession wouldn't have become a thing, because I wouldn't have been in Tennessee for my birthday — my first without my dad, whose 40th I remember in vivid detail. His friends and family came in from all across Tennessee to throw a surprise parade around our block.
Me? On my 40th? I decided I could start buying G.I. Joes again — a solo mission that I gave myself, a problem I could solve, something I could do for me.
I'd actually spent the week prior to this dreaded milestone — my last week as a thirtysomething — rewatching the original G.I. Joe cartoon for the first time as an adult. Hey, the whole thing is available for free on YouTube! (Thanks, Hasbro!) Now I was in Tennessee with the accessories needed to carry out my mission: free time, a rental car, and close proximity to a lot of comic shops.
I went to the first two shops and struck out. One of them was literally named Snake Eyes, but they had zero '80s Joes to buy. And then shop #3, Krypto Comics, was turning out to be a bust. No Joes in sight, so I picked up a random comic (a '90s issue of Punisher guest-starring X-Cutioner, an obscure X-Men character who I like more than Punisher) and headed to the checkout. And then ... in the most dramatic turn of events possible in a story about buying toys, there they were. The old G.I. Joes were on mobile racks, hidden beyond a few layers of stretch wrap to keep them secure during the ride to a weekend convention. The shop owner graciously cut the wrap open to let me browse, and I bought two of the all-timers: Lady Jaye and Alpine. The rush! This was huge for me, a grown man spending his first birthday without his dad alone looking for old toys.
I will admit: It took a while for me to connect the fact that this obsession was tied with my 40th birthday, thus making it the most me midlife crisis possible. My midlife crisis looks like buying an obscene amount of vintage G.I. Joe figures. I say "obscene" because even one 40-year-old action figure is one too many when you've spent the better part of the year in various states of grief and financial panic. The former means I should absolutely buy a bunch of old Joes, whereas the latter means I should sell the toys I already have. I have now devoted hundreds of hours of my waking life and even more hundreds of dollars on these 3 3/4" pieces of improbable engineering. An entire figure? Held together by a rubber band? What bizarre architecture!
Lady Jaye and Alpine came in little plastic clamshells (see photo above), which I appreciated because — well, let's just say that The Container Store is my new Toys"R"Us because vulture capital wouldn't let the actual Toys"R"Us be part of my middle-aged life. The more Joes I bought, some came with accessories and some without, it became imperative that I keep all of these artifacts straight. I did try scrawling the figures' names on the clamshells in sharpie, but immediately regretted it. It looked tacky. These are the figures I'd waited my entire conscious life to own, and they deserved to be treated better than this.
I hadn't held an '80s G.I. Joe in my hands for, wow, a quarter century at least at this point. They're smaller now that I'm 40 and not 4, and somehow delicate despite being made of plastic that is far sterner than any figure on toy shelves today. G.I. Joes were marketed as paragons of machismo — although the amount of bare-chested, codpiece-wearing, mustachioed men in berets makes adult me realize that G.I. Joes were also incredibly camp. '80s G.I. Joe is basically if the Village People and WWF were drafted to fight a war against Paul Lynde, KISS, and the Tom of Finland army. It's just as much gay culture as straight culture.
Still — G.I. Joes were remarkably delicate. I can't think of any other action figure line that had so many incredibly specific ways to break apart. The thumbs could break off, the legs and arms could become as loose as a fidget spinner, the crotches could pop off without warning, and — most disastrously — the O-ring at their center could violently snap, causing the Joe to drop dead. With a pop or a snap, a figure would be done.
I don't know the grim specifics about what happened when my dad died. I know he was at the hospital, but that he didn't think anything was that serious — I mean, he went alone. It was a check-in, weeks post-surgery. I don't know who was with him, where he was standing, if he was standing. But in my mind, it's just like — pop, snap. One tiny moment, and it's over. I don't know, and I don't want to know. Knowing would be the entire battle.
G.I. Joes were the only action figures I grieved over as a kid. But the old figures in my new collection were resilient: hands ready to grip, limbs ready to lock into poses, crotches (and dignity) fully intact. Their O-rings hadn't snapped. They could still stand tall, even at 40 ... but they needed to be taken care of. They needed a little love, an embrace of their campiness that was as insane as the '80s cartoon.
So, naturally, I obtained some extra clamshells and started designing inserts using each figure's original '80s packaging art.
I bought thick paper, too — feels much more expensive and holds the ink better.
I affixed the art to the clamshell, using clear packing tape as a kind of lamination.
The reverse side has their allegiance and name on it.
The finished product makes me really, really want to open a vintage toy shop.
Each figure, that original packaging art, affixed to the clamshell with clear packing tape "lamination." Would I be hanging these figures up? Absolutely not. My figures live on display, baby, with these custom containers stacked under the clear acrylic risers, providing visual interest.
This evokes a G.I. Joe display that I remember from my childhood. It belonged to an older kid, a member of a family whose house my mom cleaned, and it was in his bedroom — a kind of school project-ish Tetris block pyramid shape against his wall, next to his closet, a Joe or Cobra terrorist on each rung. And I remember that being the only time I saw figures for Dusty, Major Bludd, the classics. Having mine on display, with these custom clamshells feels complete, respectful.
And now I'm months and months in and dozens of figures deep, most of them purchased on eBay (always aiming to pay $10-$20). And when I turn off my office light at night, I look at them, and I feel happy. Because? Because I am giving my adult self something he wanted as a kid, something I know my mom would've given me if time travel were real, if she could scold Father Time like he were a store manager.
And my dad — Dad didn't show love with presents. I knew to not even try if he took me to Hills instead of mom. He was sure I was being spoiled (I was) but he also knew that I wasn't exactly the most outgoing, social kid. Those Joes, as off-model as they were, were my friends. They went with me to the ballpark while my parents played co-ed softball, where Spearhead and his bobcat kicked up dust in a brawl against Gnawgahyde and Darklon.
But I remember as I write this that, while my mom was the architect behind acquiring even the hottest of Joes in time for Christmas morning, it was my dad who always built the vehicles for me. It was my dad who actually liked putting the decals on all those toy planes and tanks. My mom gave them to me, and my dad — even if just in passing, for a very brief moment — took care of them for me. Maybe that's why I spent my 40th birthday, the first without my dad, searching for this lost piece of my childhood, so — while trudging through the fog of grief — I could give myself a gift, like my mom, and apply the decals, like my dad.
