By KansasBrawler Last year’s 50th Anniversary assortment was a bit of a high wire act. There were quite a few good figures, but there were also quite a few more head-scratchers than the previous year. I really wanted to like Hit & Run, but there are some strange choices that make me unsure what to think of him. I like
Read more
By KansasBrawler Joe Con 2009 was a fairly exciting time for me. I was very happy to learn that the GIJCC was using modern style figures. I hadn’t totally committed to them yet, but most of what was on my display at my place in Manhattan, Kansas was modern stuff, so it was nice that the set I was getting
Read more
By KansasBrawler If you’re going to make a subgroup called the Crimson Strike Team, tapping Tomax and Xamot for inclusion in the team is a no-brainer. The GIJCC did that with their first iteration of the Crimson Strike Team and it makes perfect sense for them to do it with the modern versions. The Crimson Twins are always working their
Read more
By KansasBrawler I’ve mentioned a couple of times already that 2009 was the first time I was able to go to Joe Con. Before that, I’d always admired their impressive figure sets from afar. However, the 2009 set was controversial for a couple of reason. First of all, it was the first time the GIJCC went with the modern style
Read more
By KansasBrawler Store exclusives are sometimes the bane of my existence. First of all, it’s kind of annoying when you can only get a figure at one certain store. It’s even more annoying when the store is not in your town, and it’s even more annoying when there’s only one of those stores within reasonable driving distance. That being said,
Read more
By KansasBrawler By my nearest estimation, I must have seen G.I. Joe: The Movie for the first time sometime in either 1989 or 1990 on the USA Network during their afternoon block of cartoons. Since then, I’ve been obsessed with Cobra-La. I don’t consider many figures “missing” from my childhood collection, but I remember being disappointed as a kid that
Read more
By KansasBrawler Sometimes the Joe line surprises you. I’m honestly a bit tired of seeing repainted Snow Cats. I’ve never really liked that vehicle, yet I have three of them now. The Wolfhound was a clearance impulse buy (seriously, I think I got it for five bucks somewhere during a post-Christmas inventory sell down), the HAVOC was a brilliant cross-sell
Read more
By KansasBrawler As much as I personally prefer Lady Jaye, Scarlett is, and probably always will be, the first lady of the G.I. Joe brand. It’s such a shame her figures have always had one or two problems that kept them from being really good. The original was nicely detailed, but the head sculpt wasn’t that great. Her second version,
Read more
By KansasBrawler Sometimes, figures you don’t expect to show up in your collection do. The 25th Anniversary Tiger Force Duke is the clearest example of that phenomenon in my collection. I passed on him a lot of times. The 25th Anniversary Duke mold had a lot of problems and Tiger Force Duke really didn’t do much to fix those. However,
Read more
By KansasBrawler I think every Joe fan out there has that one figure that makes them realize the brand is doing something special. I don’t know what that figure would have been for me in the vintage line, but during the relaunch era it was probably Barrel Roll. That figure was the perfect combination of design and character and it
Read more