Having mentioned the letter I wrote to the Walking Dead comic that didn’t get printed, I have opened things up so I can write about the letter I wrote to the GI Joe comic that, as far as I know, also did not get printed.
To try to figure out when in my life I wrote this letter, I looked at the covers of issues of GI Joe to see what was most familiar from my childhood. The winners are some Destro-focused ones that came out in 1991. That surprises me because in my memory the GI Joe letter was sent AFTER the one I sent to Blaze, but Blaze was three years later than than these Destro covers.
Still, it’s possible. 1991 is around when I was first getting into comics and GI Joe was a franchise I was familiar with thanks to the cartoons. I could have been drawn to it and misremembered that Blaze was actually later. And I remember the latest parts of my reading GI Joe before dropping off having the Eco-Warriors and searching for them tells me they were in comics in 1992. So I guess I have once again proved that memory is unreliable and I probably wrote this before the Blaze letter.
As for the content of the letter, I don’t remember most of it. Vague praise of the comic, I assume? An insistence that I loved the Joes and they were my favourites that would ultimately be proven untrue when I dropped it in favour of other things? More than likely. The only thing I remember for certain is that I asked that they would use Bazooka more often, because he looked like my father. And it’s true, my father was indeed a white man with a dark moustache. I suppose, if I was ten when I wrote this letter, as I have learned I must have been, I probably gave it to my parents to send and if my father saw that he may have withheld the letter and just told me it was sent. So we have three possibilities: 1) I sent the letter and it was not printed. 2) I sent the letter and it was printed and I’ve just never found out. 3) My father never actually sent the letter.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Writing that letter was a part of my childhood, but GI Joe has simply not lived on in me as a nostalgic franchise. I like some of the designs of the characters and vehicle and stuff, but mostly I just don’t care. Even as an adult I sat down and read the first hundred issues of this comic, and while I could respect what Larry Hama did there, it felt like homework to me and I decided not to continue. It’d be funny to learn that if I had I’d find a letter written by me as a child.
You can tell a lot about someone, I assume, by what kindsa stuff they gots in their room. We have only ONCE in all his nearly fifty years of existence seen a room that we could call Rocket Racer’s room. Well, let’s take a look at it.
First, it’s worth noting that this is in Brooklyn, which is where Bob was born and raised, but not where his family actually lived when he became the Rocket Racer. This is definitely not the small apartment the family lived in when Spider-Man came to visit. I suspect it may not be an apartment at all. I have to assume that at some point Bob made enough money as Rocket Racer to invest in a secret lair. Maybe it’s one of those ones that looks like an abandoned warehouse outside, or maybe it’s an old garage, who knows? All we know is its in Brooklyn.
Now, this is Rocket Racer’s room, sure, but it isn’t his bedroom. This is the room where he kept his mother while she was in a coma. We don’t actually know much about this period in Bob’s life. Emma has had health problems as long as we’ve known her, but last time we saw her she was up and about, and the last time Bob brought her up to a friend he said she had “good days and bad” and those bad days must have got more common, because suddenly she’s in a coma. What we know is that Bob was not able or willing (presumably because of finances) to keep her in a hospital, so he has her in a rigged-up situation at his secret lair. It’s not ideal, and I’m sure he knows it. Incidentally, where are the other Farrell kids during this era? We don’t know! They tell us almost nothing about them ever, so this is no different. I assume that the second sibling (let’s call him Josh) has reached adulthood by this point and is taking care of the kids. Probably there’s friction between Josh and Bob.
But that’s not this room! Let’s look around the room!
We’ve got:
Blueprints and tools. Half-finished projects in progress.
A lot of racing stuff. Magazines, model cars, a poster.
Model planes as well. And vehicles that are either models or toys (A-Team van, Optimus Prime). Whatever that spaceship is.
A bunch of Japanese-inspired media (the Mazinger Z poster, Optimus again, probably that little chibi-style mech toy).
Unpaid bills (seen in the one other panel with this room.
So what do we learn from this? Bob’s a broke nerdy guy who likes racing. Alright, thanks, PDR. Definitely breaking news with this one.
Okay, maybe there’s nothing surprising here. But hey, that’s the point of the creators decorating the room this way: it’s shows Bob’s character. I like it.
The circus is in town and Lois Lane doesn’t love it. She has been sent by the Daily Planet to review the circus, a job she clearly considers beneath her. But then a little monkey accidentally releases Gigantic the Gorilla and a rampage ensues! Lois’s day is saved! Hooray!
Some other circus animals are also involved in the rampage, so Superman gets to catch a panther and some lions (though I think one lion is still on the loose at the end of the cartoon), but the real feature here is Superman versus Gorilla. I’ve made a big deal about how most of these shorts lean into Superman versus some Sci-Fi concept, but this one continues the trend of last episode of pitting the hero against Nature. Now, granted, I argued that the the T-Rex should count as a sci-fi thing because they were relatively recently discovered at the time. And yeah, gorillas had only been accepted by the scientific community as existing for less than a century at the time of this cartoon’s creation, but still, this is post-King Kong. A regular ape is not sci-fi post-King King.
Does Lois wind up in distress in this one? Of course she does. Is it because she’s inherently a weak, feminine figure? No, it’s because she rescues a little girl from Gorilla Attack. Good for you, Lois. She earned her scoop on this story.
Also worth mentioning: the little monkey that incites the problems in this one is dressed like a bellhop. I’m pretty sure this design will be reused as a toy owned by Titano the chimp in the 90s Superman cartoon.
Now, this is the last of the actual Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons. After this they are taken over by Famous Studios. I remember the general opinion being that quality drops after this, but there are several things that haven’t happened yet that I remember being good. Let’s find out if I still think so as we continue down the path, I suppose.
One thing about David Vincent is that he is an extremely direct person. I’ve faulted him multiple times for being so open about his fighting of this alien invasion. Well, in this episode he actually uses an alias to disguise his identity! Daniel Baxter he says he is! He gets a job as the driver of the wife of the guy is suspects and says a fake name. He’s learned how to be subtle.
And then he gets to the place he wants to investigate and immediately just runs into rooms he’s not supposed to be in and gets caught. But he’s learning.
Anyway, Vincent read reports in the newspaper of a guy who died claiming he’d seen alien things in the headquarters of Vikor Industries. Vickor is run by George Vikor, a former war hero who has sold out his species and is working alongside the aliens. Posing as her driver, Vincent befriends Vikor’s neglected wife Sherri and brings her up to speed about the invasion and how her husband is a traitor to humanity. They try to reason with George, and it seems like it could work. George lost a leg in Korea, and got a plate in his head, and was lauded as a hero. But still, when he got back home things weren’t enough for him. He may be the owner of a successful company, but it isn’t enough. The Invaders can let him be a ruler of what remains of humanity in the world they conquer. That power is what he needs.
Anyway, thanks to some truly impressive quick-draw-shooting Vincent manages to escape. He leaves a phone message with Vikor Industries thanking Vikor for helping him escape, which the aliens believe and they kill Vikor. Unlike last episode, this time Vincent does report to the FBI, though the aliens have cleaned up Vikor Industries, so there remains no proof that any of it happened. Sherri survives, though. Another in a growing list of potential allies for Vincent, or potential victims for the Invaders.
I need to note that the head villain in this one is pretty good. He’s even got a cool name: Mr. Nexus. He survives at the end and would be great as a recurring opponent for Vincent, but having spoiled myself that we don’t get returning characters for a long time yet, I guess it wasn’t to be.
For the record, they do have the finger thing again in this one. Good.
