Captivating Cover: The Spy Eye
Here’s another excellent book cover from the Marvel storybook series. The Spy Eye gives us some familiar Joes, but also a character and a vehicle that wasn’t part of the toy line. Who is that on the right side of the page? And dig the VTOL carrier they came out of!
I enjoy these early efforts, and you see the same sort of thing at the beginning of other multimedia properties like Star Wars and Masters of the Universe. Before the modern style-guide concept ruled all of the packaging and marketing for a brand, it seemed like the tie-in world was a Wild West, and open to any concepts that might fit in. Sad to say a bit of creativity is lost these days.
That character looks familiar to me, and that VTOL thing, looks like an earlier concept design of the Tomahawk.
Colonel Hawk,Flash,Steeler,and an unknown?-Good to see that the Series 1 Joes receive their fare share of display credit.”
Bit hard to tell who that other guy is. Clutch…maybe? Or Spirit. Depends when the book was released
With my experience reading the find-your-fate books, I’d expect this to be a pretty dull story. High quality art for the cover, though.
I love this early, non standard artwork. It made G.I. Joe seem bigger than a few figures and vehicles and more able to fight the Cobra legions.
It might have been done as I haven’t followed the comics, but it would be cool to see fill in stories of Joe starting in the 1982 timeline. You could see some other characters who didn’t make the cut. And, the early Cobra had lots of nasty looking officers who disappeared. What happened to them?
The guy on the right? Clearly that’s “Ensign Leibowitz, the sacrificial [Joe] for the [mission].”
If you read that story, I think the only other Joe is Ace, and being so new, perhaps, he doesn’t have his final outfit. It’s possible that guy is just a generic Joe, but I think that could be seen as Ace. That does kind of look like a flight suit.
You could be right. That could be an earlier design for Ace. And that does look indeed like a flight suit. Good eyesight. He also looks like Matt Dillon.