No, I liked it. It's sophomoric prose, but it gets right going and the story is both action packed and intriguing. It's a GI JOE funny book. It is on Liefelds level.
I read it digitally last night. Some of the art is better than what Liefeld's been doing lately, but still not really "there" for me overall. Everyone besides Snake Eyes looks kinda distorted and weird.
The story is very basic cartoon stuff, but there is a bit of a fun factor there if you just like seeing Snake Eyes running around doing badass shit. That was a big part of his appeal in the 90s -- he knew that's what we wanted to see. The issues where you got to see Snake Eyes running around killing dudes were very rare, you'd usually open up an issue and see a bunch of talking heads. Good for the older reader but a kid wants to see GI Joes running around doing GI Joe stuff.
The old '80s comic is great, but it reads better when you have a whole stack of issues in front of you. Hama was great at developing those long-term arcs. He always says that he writes a page at a time, with no notion in his head how he's going to end a story, when he starts it. I feel like that must be an exaggeration, because he does quite deliberately seed things that he later pays off in the long-term.
Anyway, it's a cool read but you have to kind of invest in reading a bunch of them. A single issue is read out of context probably isn't as satisfying.
Michel Fiffe recently did a GI Joe miniseries for IDW. I assume that was pretty sweet.
But Liefeld is better than Hama and Fiffe combined, natch.
The old '80s comic is great, but it reads better when you have a whole stack of issues in front of you. Hama was great at developing those long-term arcs. He always says that he writes a page at a time, with no notion in his head how he's going to end a story, when he starts it. I feel like that must be an exaggeration, because he does quite deliberately seed things that he later pays off in the long-term.
Anyway, it's a cool read but you have to kind of invest in reading a bunch of them. A single issue is read out of context probably isn't as satisfying.
Yeah, I was talking about from a kid perspective -- I didn't faithfully read anything until my teens, I just randomly bought (or were given) issues that looked cool to me. If I flipped through it and it seemed cool, I bought it. It usually had to really catch my eye -- a premise that intrigued me, super cool art, etc.
I mainly bought comics at that age for superhero action, so Liefeld's approach of filling the pages with little actual story, but lots of shots of action and characters looking cool while posing, is probably right up the alley of what kids wanted at that time -- especially kids who were more casual about it, who just wanted something to be "cool" more than anything else. McFarlane was good at this too -- just having the cool pages of Spawn, Batman or Spider-Man posing and doing all the stuff you'd want to see those characters doing. That was the appeal of the Image guys -- they really focused on the cool stuff kids wanted to SEE, not necessarily the cool stuff adults wanted to READ.
Once I got into my teens, the art remained important but the story became more and more important. I feel like art is what hooks someone and gets the to check it out, but story and characters are what gets people to actually stay and faithfully read a series over a long period of time.
The old '80s comic is great, but it reads better when you have a whole stack of issues in front of you. Hama was great at developing those long-term arcs. He always says that he writes a page at a time, with no notion in his head how he's going to end a story, when he starts it. I feel like that must be an exaggeration, because he does quite deliberately seed things that he later pays off in the long-term.
Anyway, it's a cool read but you have to kind of invest in reading a bunch of them. A single issue is read out of context probably isn't as satisfying.
Yeah, I was talking about from a kid perspective -- I didn't faithfully read anything until my teens, I just randomly bought (or were given) issues that looked cool to me. If I flipped through it and it seemed cool, I bought it. It usually had to really catch my eye -- a premise that intrigued me, super cool art, etc.
I mainly bought comics at that age for superhero action, so Liefeld's approach of filling the pages with little actual story, but lots of shots of action and characters looking cool while posing, is probably right up the alley of what kids wanted at that time -- especially kids who were more casual about it, who just wanted something to be "cool" more than anything else. McFarlane was good at this too -- just having the cool pages of Spawn, Batman or Spider-Man posing and doing all the stuff you'd want to see those characters doing. That was the appeal of the Image guys -- they really focused on the cool stuff kids wanted to SEE, not necessarily the cool stuff adults wanted to READ.
Once I got into my teens, the art remained important but the story became more and more important. I feel like art is what hooks someone and gets the to check it out, but story and characters are what gets people to actually stay and faithfully read a series over a long period of time.
So we can agree that Li'l Jay is a fake GI Joe fan.
I mainly bought comics at that age for superhero action, so Liefeld's approach of filling the pages with little actual story, but lots of shots of action and characters looking cool while posing, is probably right up the alley of what kids wanted at that time -- especially kids who were more casual about it, who just wanted something to be "cool" more than anything else. McFarlane was good at this too -- just having the cool pages of Spawn, Batman or Spider-Man posing and doing all the stuff you'd want to see those characters doing. That was the appeal of the Image guys -- they really focused on the cool stuff kids wanted to SEE, not necessarily the cool stuff adults wanted to READ.
Here's some perfect examples of how the Image guys really zeroed in on what kids wanted out of a comic book in the early 90s. You'd open up the comic and just see page after page of characters posing and using their powers, very few pages of people in regular clothes doing regular things like talking and thinking (the stuff that actually makes a story good) --
Jim Lee was great at this as well -- almost every page had a cool shot of a hero that could be used on a poster or t-shirt --
Larsen was also really good at doing the "t-shirt image on almost every page" thing as well --
Todd McFarlane could do all that as well, but he was also good at using these symbolic graphic design type layouts to make the "boring" stuff look cool to a kid. Spawn isn't fighting or doing something dramatic, just wandering confused in the alleys -- but Todd knew how to make it engaging for a kid, so even dialogue and inner monologue stuff looked "badass" and "wicked" --
I read it digitally last night. Some of the art is better than what Liefeld's been doing lately, but still not really "there" for me overall. Everyone besides Snake Eyes looks kinda distorted and weird.
The story is very basic cartoon stuff, but there is a bit of a fun factor there if you just like seeing Snake Eyes running around doing badass shit. That was a big part of his appeal in the 90s -- he knew that's what we wanted to see. The issues where you got to see Snake Eyes running around killing dudes were very rare, you'd usually open up an issue and see a bunch of talking heads. Good for the older reader but a kid wants to see GI Joes running around doing GI Joe stuff.
I don't think I'll continue on with it though.
Not bad. I still go to the comic shop every week. I'm close with the owner, love seeing the people that work there and just the crackle of wondering what is out, and what I'm going to see.
Within that context, you'd be amazed (no you wouldn't) at how few of the comics that come out that are even comprehensible to me, or enjoyable on any level. Most of them are just garbage.
When I see something that is remotely interesting, nostalgic, heroic, whatever -- I like to try it and maybe buy it for the time being. Snake Eyes passed muster under that standard -- looked fun, was a Liefeld return project. And what I got was a decently paced start to a story that was not "decompressed" or some mood piece.
When you go every week anyway, finding a comic book or two to check out really amps up the fun.
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