By KansasBrawler When I was a kid, I never had that strong of a tie to the hooded Cobra Commander look. I grew up on the cartoon and I remember seeing the battle helmet a lot more. Plus, my first Cobra Commander was the awesome 1987 battle armor version, so the hooded look just really didn’t interest me all that
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By KansasBrawler I don’t know why, but I’ve always had more of an affinity for the Cobra figures than the Joes. Don’t get me wrong, the Joe characters were great, but I thought the Cobra figures looked more striking. I always liked the more fantastical elements of the Joe line and, generally speaking, the Cobra figures were allowed to be
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By KansasBrawler The first wave of 25th Anniversary comic packs relied pretty heavily on repeated characters. As such, I wasn’t super into them since I had most of the figures in better color schemes thanks to the box sets. However, since I wanted 25th Anniversary Colonel Hawk, that meant I also wound up with another 25th Anniversary Scarlett. This is
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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
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By KansasBrawler I think my favorite part of the 2000s Joe relaunch was the new uniform the artists at Devil’s Due Publishing designed for Storm Shadow. It was a unique look, but it really worked well for the character and it was honestly a pretty cool design. I was kind of shocked that, considering all the versions of Storm Shadow
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