By KansasBrawler While I may not have had the Air Commandos figures growing up, I’ve always been fascinated by obscure Joes, and that definitely describes that particular subset. Personally, I always liked Skymate the best, so when I saw that he was a souvenir figure at Joe Con 2016, I was really excited. He’s by no means a household name
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By Past Nastification The further away from it we get, the more quality I find in the New Sculpt era. This isn’t a whitewashing of the badness, but a taking in of the good despite the bad. Ripper made his NS debut in 2002. Unlike many of the NS figures, this one has no real proportion issues. It smoothly bridges
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By KansasBrawler When I got back into Joe collecting during high school, YoJoe exposed me to a lot of interesting figures I didn’t know existed. Growing up in Kansas and South Dakota, there was some Joe stuff that just kind of slipped by me. I think that geography is what helped me find earlier figures like Lady Jaye that wound
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By Past Nastification Introduced as a Target exclusive for the Rise of Cobra line, the 2009 Grand Slam is my favorite version of the character. The previous 25A-style Grand Slam had silver colored pads instead of this one’s metallic ice blue ones. The silver pad Grand Slam also shared a head with 25A Flash, making it a head-to-toe repaint. The
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By KansasBrawler Going into Joe Con 2016, I had some pretty strong ideas about what the souvenir sets were going to be. However, I was almost completely off base compared to what the GIJCC actually did. The one exclusive that I really didn’t have any idea how they were going to handle was the annual parachute drop figure. My best
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By Past Nastification Slice and Dice were the early 90’s Cobra ninja team of the ARAH run. That is to say they were the mid-quality ninja team. If you needed a ninja team that could probably accomplish their mission, Slice and Dice were it. Their introduction in the late Marvel run wasn’t fully fleshed out, and poorly drawn. It gave
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By KansasBrawler When the Sky Patrol theme was announced for 2016, I was excited by the prospects of what the exclusives could be since I was actually going to be attending for a change. I held out high hopes that the Heli-Vipers might be making an appearance. I know that’s an odd thing to hope for, but I’ve been kind
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By Past Nastification Almost a decade before American children were exposed to the visual poison that was Robojoe, our UK counterparts’ eyeballs were devastated by the Action Force figure Kiwi. Kiwi was the Space Force engineer. “Space Force?” What? If you’re not familiar, I’ll explain. If you are, skip this paragraph. The ARAH GI Joe team started life as one
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By KansasBrawler As you could already tell from the photos of what I purchased that I posted during my Joe Con After Action Reports, the GIJCC really managed to hit my nostalgia buttons with their choices for souvenir sets. When I went in 2009, I was really only interested in one set. However, in 2016, I snagged everything but the
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By Past Nastification Hawk is my favorite of the OG 13. But so is Stalker. And Scarlett… and Steeler, and Short-Fuze, and Grand Slam. It’s a good problem to have. When the 25th Anniversary/modern era figures launched in 2007, Hawk was missing from the lineup. Sure, Hasbro rolled Duke towards kids and collectors, but the character most deserving of getting
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