JoeCanuck.com

After-market decals are there to make whatever stuff you have in-hand right now look better ( or like new).  That alone would be a selling point in the future, should you decide to sell, even if the items are repros.  Most original decals/stickers end up looking like crud on the toys after a few years anyway, and they are not always applied properly to begin with by the original owners.

I say this: spend the $$ to get the nicest repro stickers you can and use them as you please. Clean up the toys  to your liking, getting rid of the crummy old stickers and replace with them the new ones. There's ain't gonna be no "sticker-police" coming to your house to call you out on it.

I had this on order a few months back, it came in today.
This is a reproduction portfolio of the original art pages from the Marvel GIJOE Yearbook #2--the October Guard story, as drawn/inked by Michael Golden.
The portfolio contains all the pages from said story, in unbound page-by-page format, scanned and printed at the actual drawn/inked 11x17" size.  The format has the cover and the interior art pages, but the interior pages have a surprise: they are double-sided with one side being lettered, and the other being the unlettered art.
I have a couple of the artist edition books that IDW has put out and this is the first portfolio edition I have bought from them. The scans are from the original art, and done in colour--which is to say it' black and white art, but you can see all the paste-up, white-out, smears, stains, smudges and crud that the art has at present. The scans are good enough that this is like owning a set of the original art for this coming--I often find myself running my fingers along the pages thinking that I can feel the white-out or paste-up.

Now, what's the scratch??   $55, give-or-take depending on your LCS or your discount there. You cannot score even ONE of the actual pages from this issue for anywhere near that price, and via this format you can get the entire story in as-good-as original art prints.
I'm sold on the format and one what IDW is doing with these editions......if you can get your hands on this portfolio--do so.

Here's a tip for those that are interested in the Mattel 4" superhero figures that have come out over the past year.
TRU has 4" Green Arrow figures in clear baggies apparently offered with a purchase of the Injustice video game.
If you plan on buying the game, be sure to ask for the figure. If you know someone who works at TRU, see if you can sweet-talk them into one of these freebies.


These are articulated figures in the 4" scale, much like the Hasbro POC Joes. The outfit is Green Arrow's from the Injustice game, and he comes with a bow accessory.

Wave 2 is now appearing in my AO as well, picked up Ninja Duel Snake-eyes and Battle-Kata Roadblock. Both are just great figures.  Snake-eyes is really nice, but I really don't need or like the pulley gimmick items. Frustrated a bit that SE comes with an extra sword and small knife, but not place to stow them on her person---of course, that is nothing unusual. I don't get the point of the extra back scabbard when all it does is add some bulk but doesn't hold anything but the other thinner scabbard......of which also fits on SE's back on it's own. It'd have made sense if the bulkier scabbard held the extra sword in addition to the thinner scabbard, but it doesn't.

 Roadblock is quite impressive, as all the kata-gear fits on his person. The holsters are initially quite bulky and large, but with the pistol-units and kata-grips in them they don't seem too bad. As with Wave 1, these figures seriously miss having battle-stands, but I have plenty of extras on hand. As many have said before these two renditions are THE versions to get, so far....and I agree.

Well.............


...to quote Mr. Horse: "No sir.........I don't like it."

I think there was an okay movie somewhere in there, it was just mudsucked by BS.

My main problem with the movie was the 3D.  The AVX showing I saw convinced me of one thing: I'm now an avowed opponent of 3D films.  The 3d gimmick made watching all the action sequences difficult. Hard to focus on anything, hard to keep track of anything.

It committed the unpardonable sin of cinema: it was distracting and it took me out of the story and the rapport for the characters. I gave up......repeatedly, in watching this thing....told myself I'll give it a go when it comes out on Blu-Ray in a few months. A movie shouldn't do that.
We waited 9 MONTHS for this nonsense........and, well, I'm glad it didn't give me a headache.

Story-wise.....it was a TV movie plot with a feature film budget. Its plain to see they mudsucked GIJOE: Renegades for this movie......pulled the same basic premise from the cartoon. I kept asking myself, is that the ONLY story they could come up with??
There's a lot of really bone-headed things in the movie.....the one big one that struck me, made me actually laugh is right at the climax: COBRA's Zeus orbital guns blow up when Roadblock stops the countdown.

Okay.
So, COBRA technology throws a "tantrum" when its shut off and not allowed to do what it's designed to do??  Yeah, COBRA Quality control--right on!! Why are they a threat again???
Yeah, that's been seen before, but its still pretty stupid. And funny.
Other than that, the story is pretty light weight, the missile launch sequence and the bombardment of London was kind of neat.....but......the rest was fluff.

( and to hit THAT point home, the end of the movie has a bizarre omission: we see the mourning the loss of the Joes,  we celebrate the heroes that save the day........but what about London? Untold history wiped away, Ten's of thousands likely dead......and no mention of them after the fact. Nothing of THE greatest terrorist attack in history. Wow.)



Characters.

<Sigh>. Big beefs here. And more failed story points.

So, GIJOE is now demoted to having the mostly the supporting cast run the missions from now on? When I think of GIJOE RAH, Duke is the cornerstone. Like him or not, he's the face of it, the main guy.
But he's dead, and worse than that.......they gave him a personality in this movie and THEN they kill him.  WTF?
What was the point? Get the audience to care about a character and then yank the same character away from us? Why should we invest any rapport in the movie? Big mistake.
They could have run the story that the Joes are ALL captured, sentenced to that cryo-prison, and then have the guys that escape come rescue them. Does the same service as "getting rid of the Joes" for most of the story, but allows you to use them again at a later time. Instead......we get force-fed Roadblock.

Now, I like the Rock, he's got great charisma, and screen presence....but he was shoehorned into this movie. This is a Rock-vehicle....tailored to be "the star".  But I've NEVER seen Roadblock as a leader of the team, he's strictly been a supporting cast member to my mind.  Killing of Duke and others is like taking Batman and Alfred out of a Batman movie and running it with the rest of the supporting cast from then on.  The guts of it have been ripped out.

Why??  Its an awkward promotion for a character that.......well, is redundant.  We had Heavy Duty in the first flick, and then we get his clone in the second flick. ( Of course, I know the deal is that its the other way around: RB came first and HD is the clone, so to speak) This is the inherent problem with GIJOE's translation to live-action cinema....the roster is vast and redundant at the same time. You can plug practically any 2 or three characters into essentially the same functional role within the movie......and it doesn't take long before the question becomes......why??

And it doesn't stop with the Rock.
Bruce Willis was wasted in this movie......really quite useless.  He was a piece of furniture.....a plot device like any of the guns.( of which he has the LATEST gear tucked away all over his home. Okaaaay) His character didn't grow, change or really do much of anything that any of the other characters could have been contrived to do.  Now, the same thing is with the Rock.......he has a presence......he doesn't have a story arc. There's no growth.
The same thing with Jinx.
And Mouse.
And COBRA Commander, and Firefly--though they were just there to be the bad guys, they were pretty shallow as such.  Sure, its nice to see CC looking all properly "CC", but again.....what WAS the point. His emotional effect in the movie was the exactly same quality as in any of the pre-publicity still........he just. looked. like. Cobra Commander.
That's all he does.
No, this isn't Citizen Kane, its not high-cinema.......its a product. But it came across as pretty vapid product to me......real soap-bubble thin. All it would have taken is a couple of throw-away lines, a casual inference or three, here and there and these characters would have a modicum of ( at least the APPEARANCE of ) some depth to them.
The ONLY character with any kind of genuine story arc to them is Storm Shadow. But even then, I never really caught why he signed up from COBRA in the first place.
Zartan could also be considered to have an arc.....but he arrived at the end exactly as he started out.....still a scene-chewing bad-guy.

So, really........for me......anything this movie offered was given away in the previews before I even walked into the theatre. They held this back 9 months to give it an awful 3D post-conversion. It is exactly what I'd jadedly expected it to be: a two hour-long toy commercial with a weak fluff story, really dumb story-point /franchise choices.....and a smattering of "lipstick and mascara on the pig" to appease the fans.

I like said before...I sincerely think there's an okay movie somewhere in there, but once again, its (still) not REALLY a GIJOE movie.

Silver Snail is a prominent store in Ontario, they have 2 locations; one in Toronto and one in Ottawa. They have a sister store: The Comic Shop, located in Vancouver. The Snail will do mail-order for you.
There are many other stores across the country,  Happy Harbour in Edmonton, Amazing Stories in Saskatoon, Golden Age Collectibles in Vancouver, to name a few.