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The cover of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero No. 155 ½, which will be available at comics shops on Free Comic Book Day May 1.
By Brian Truitt, USA TODAY
Larry Hama, the man whose creative force turned the G.I. Joe toy line into a multimedia juggernaut in the 1980s, is being called back for another tour of duty.
Hama is teaming with IDW to publish G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero No. 155 ½ for Free Comic Book Day on May 1, and the issue will pick up where Hama's original 155-issue Marvel Comics series left off. But there's even better news for longtime Joe fanatics: IDW is relaunching Hama's series in July and making it an ongoing title starting with issue 156.
"It's like coming home again," Hama says in an exclusive interview. "It's comfortable and it's like, hey, I know these guys. I don't have to do tons of research and read tons of back issues."
Drawn by Spanish artist Agustin Padilla, the Real American Hero series adds another title to IDW's strong group of Joe books, including Chuck Dixon's flagship G.I. Joe, Origins and Cobra. The company found that older readers were enjoying the titles and they were picking up new fans, too, but saw a definite interest in the 1982-94 original series from both generations. (IDW is in the process of collecting the old comics in trade paperback form with its Classic G.I. Joe books.)
"It just made good sense to go back to the original continuity for the older fans and to give us an opportunity to show the newer fans how we got here in the first place," says Andy Schmidt, editor on all IDW's G.I. Joe titles. "Larry built that continuity up for years. It's a shame for it to be shelved permanently."
Issues 155 ½ and on take place mere months after the events of No. 155: G.I. Joe headquarters has been mothballed, and the team's been dispersed to different places all over the world. The Cobra organization is still alive and slithering, though — Cobra Commander is literally dreaming of rolling H.I.S.S. tanks into Washington, D.C. — and it takes full advantage of having no real American heroes running around.
"They have to somehow get back together, and all the Cobras are trying to track them down and do them in," Hama says. "It's everybody against the Joes."
Hama's run on a few of the initial Origins issues sparked his interest to do more. "It was the first time someone had said, 'Hey, do what you want to do,' " he says. "Other times, they'd be like, 'We want it like old school.' My comment on that was, 'Well, I don't do it that way anymore.' Doing Origins, they said, 'Just do it the way you do it now.' So I had a bit more leeway."
With this comic in particular, Schmidt says, "I think it's best to let Larry guide me. I don't force anything on him. He wrote this book for 15 years. I've been here five minutes. Larry leads, I follow."
While Hama has proven adept with military heroes over the years — he was brought on as a consultant for the G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra movie — that wasn't what he dreamed of doing initially. He was more interested in "the funny stuff," he says, like working for National Lampoon and wanting to do comedic takes on animals ("I'm sort of a duck guy," he quips), but back in the early 1980s, it was superheroes or bust.
He came to Marvel in 1980 and was hired as an editor for Crazy Magazine, but a couple years later, Hama needed a job pretty badly when he was approached to take on G.I. Joe.
"Nobody in their right mind wanted to work on a toy book," he admits. "It was considered sort of like death. They asked everybody else first, and I was the last person they asked. I wasn't getting any other freelance work. If they were offering me Barbie, I would have taken Barbie! It's not like I'd been waiting all my life to do it, but at the same time, I gave it my best shot."
Nobody thought the comic would last more than a year or two, he says. But with good guys such as Snake Eyes, Stalker, Duke and Scarlett — and Cobra Commander, Zartan, Destro, Storm Shadow and the Baroness on the other side of the moral coin — as well as great stories and a definite sense of military realism, the comic took off, and the Hasbro toy line and the animated series followed suit. "Ever year it kept on going, I thought, 'Oh, it's another miracle!' I'd breathe a sigh of relief and keep on going."
Hama did 155 issues — and wrote all the file cards for the characters' action figures, based mainly on people he knew and celebrities — but acknowledges he never knew how any one of those books was going to end until he got to the end. "Getting the story out of myself is like pulling teeth," says the writer, adding with a laugh that fear was his biggest inspiration for more than a decade.
"I remember very vividly finishing the first issue, and saying to myself, 'Well, what the heck am I going to do now?' I had no idea. Every month for years, I would have the same panic attack. My only formula was to try and get them all into a really impossible situation, and then try to get them out of it by the last page."
While Hama said he was too paranoid to ever quit a book and figured "they would have to pry it off my dead fingers," he admits that by 1994, the series had run its course, and Hama went on to write other books, such as Wolverine and The Punisher: War Zone. Other than a few visits back, like with the Devil's Due series G.I. Joe Declassified and Storm Shadow, he didn't read many Joe comics and never watched any of the animated shows. "I tried to keep my own universe as consistent as possible," he says.
That's why he's sticking pretty close to the "ensemble" of characters he left with. He's revisited the old file cards to figure out who he wants to use, and while many beloved characters such as Quick Kick, Breaker and Doc died during his run — thanks to one talked-about incident involving a Cobra Maggot tank and a murderous S.A.W.-Viper — the only one he's really resurrecting is Cobra Commander. Back in the day, he was told to kill him off so it could jibe with the appearance of Cobra-La, an unpopular group of characters from the animated G.I. Joe: The Movie in 1987.
"I told them, 'You can't kill off Cobra Commander. He's one of your most popular characters!' " Hama recalls. "Management didn't get it, and it finally dawned on them when we got hundreds and hundreds of letters from kids saying they would never buy the comic again. And sales dropped precipitously."
Hama says it's gratifying to see characters like Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow enjoy pop-culture lives beyond his comics, and he does feel protective of his characters. His storyline for the entire 155-issue run was "mostly retcon," and he came up with a lot of things on the fly. For example, the Arashikage clan tattoo that ties both of his famous ninjas together and first appeared in G.I. Joe No. 21 in 1984 — the memorable "silent issue" — was "the only thing that I had," he says.
"I didn't have any of the other stuff – all I had was they have the same tattoo. That was the big reveal at the end of the story: They both get their sleeves torn, and they understand that these implacable enemies for some reason have the same hexagram tattooed on their forearms. And so subsequently, I had to figure out why that was, and how it came to be."
Will there be anything huge that early on in the new Real American Hero? "There's a few big reveals and a few little shocks," Hama teases. "But it's more shocks about, 'Is that what was really going in with those characters?' or 'He's doing what to who?!' I try to come up with stuff like that, and then work back from it."
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Topic: Larry Hama relaunches his '80s 'G.I. Joe 'series at issue 155.5 (Read 4988 times)