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'G.I. JOE AMERICA'S ELITE: WORLD WAR III' COMMENTARY WITH MARK POWERS | | The writer dishes on the entirety of his 12-part Joe epic from the cover of issue #1 to the last page of the final chapter | | | By Steve Sunu | | Posted 6/23/2008 | |  | |  Welcome to the G.I. Joe America's Elite: World War III commentary with scribe Mark Powers. The first in a four-part series, you can catch an in-depth look into each and every issue leading up to this week's final chapter and on Thursday Powers delivers more commentary on the event's stunning conclusion! Yo Joe!
[WARNING! This commentary reveals spoilers about Parts 1-3 of World War III. If you haven't read them, consider yourself warned!]
THE COVER
POWERS: This was really Mike [O' Sullivan's] idea—to have all these Joes here to kick off this event and to have them all in one cover. To be honest, when he first mentioned this to me, I thought that since it was the beginning of this big storyline, we should really do something that's actually more connected to the storyline that would be more symbolic of what the story actually is. To Mike's credit, I think he's got a great instinct for what G.I. Joe fans want and what would be commercially appealing. This was really his idea. He wanted them all on this cover, and it's the big 25th anniversary, let's get them all on there. That's really where it came from. It came from Mike and he definitely was proven right because people loved it.
THE APPROACH
POWERS: Before I started working at Devil's Due as an editor, I had never read G.I. Joe. I had never seen the cartoon, I had never had the toys except for one. I would always joke around with my friends who were into G.I. Joe that to me, G.I. Joe is 12 inches tall and has a kung fu grip. That's G.I. Joe to me. I never was a fan of the property at all until I started working at Devil's Due. A lot of what I did in the book came out of that. I was approaching it as someone who was fresher to it than someone who's been around from the days that they were little kids.
THE RECRUITING OF NICK BAILEY
POWERS: Well, part of it was an opportunity to portray Cobra Commander in a certain way, another aspect of it was just symbolic. When I first started working on the book and even before then, my stereotype of G.I. Joe and Cobra Commando is that it was kind of dopey. [G.I. Joe] fought the same guy every month. How could Cobra and Cobra Commander possibly come across as scary or genuinely threatening, because they just lose every month, they just never win. Once I started working on the book, I got to know the characters more and I got why this is interesting, but I still never liked the version of Cobra Commander where there was something almost comical about him. He's shaking his fist and he had become a caricature.
I really liked the book I read when I first started working at Devil's Due that made me get Cobra Commander and realize the potential of how cool he could be. Paul Jenkins wrote this one-shot called "Cobra Reborn" that was an "Ultimate" version of G.I. Joe and Cobra. So you got to see a newer version of Cobra Commander gathering his forces, but the character's portrayed in a much more interesting way. I really wanted to do that when I started working on the book. I wanted to portray him in that way and even take it further. I wanted to have a scene where it establishes off the bat that Cobra Commander is scary not just because you know he's willing to do anything to win, but if you were in a room with him for ten minutes, you might walk out of that room on his side voluntarily. He's that charismatic, he's that disarming. We wanted to also portray the fact that his vision is so complete that he is over recruiting this guy and has presumably had his eyes on other people that he might want to bring into his organization for years. He was in contact with Nick Bailey for years and years and years because he knew [Bailey] had this great potential as a soldier and [Cobra Commander] wanted him as part of Cobra. [Cobra Commander's] been in touch with him on and off for years, knows how to push all his buttons, knows all the things that Bailey is angry or upset about that motivate him. We wanted to see before our eyes a guy who was really a noble person at heart. We wanted to see Nick Bailey, a very good soldier, become a member of Cobra and how and why that would happen. We also wanted to show that Cobra Commander knows how to push the buttons and he's also totally full of sh—.
In this scene, he very charismatically and dramatically pushes Bailey to do a certain thing that he knows is going to be the last straw as far as getting him into Cobra. Later in the book, you see that the very thing he was using to push Bailey is little more than a tool to him. He really doesn't care, he doesn't care about Bailey's brother, he doesn't care about any of that stuff. He's using it all for his own ends. We wanted to really show Cobra Commander as this really complex guy, but we wanted to see him as cold as he could possibly be.
COVER GIRL AND SHIPWRECK
POWERS: It might have appeared first in my run, but it was something that was established in a G.I. Joe one-shot, one of the Special Missions books I think that Mike O'Sullivan wrote. The book that might have been published first was a G.I. Joe issue that I wrote, but the idea originated with Mike. In the main book we wanted to play it up a lot more because they have very different personalities. They're hopefully interesting together, and hopefully funny and heartwarming together; Cover Girl is this person who is determined to show people that they shouldn't judge her by her looks. She wants to be judged as a soldier and she wants to do everything that a man can do. Shipwreck is this rough-and-tumble Navy guy and everything that goes along with the vocabulary of a sailor. That's something we wanted to start playing out more in this first chapter that we hoped a lot more people would be reading. It's a soap opera element that I felt is alluded to in G.I. Joe but never played with. There are all these relationships with the characters that we knew were there but were never played with on-panel. It was Mike's idea and we wanted to start playing it up here.
SNAKE EYES AND SCARLETT
POWERS: Scarlett and Snake Eyes is incredibly well established by Larry [Hama] and I think that it's one of those comic book relationships that is so well done it'll get anyone. You don't have to be into G.I. Joe—there's this beautiful woman and this guy whose face is horribly scarred who can't talk, can't even say "I love you" and yet nothing can separate them. That's cool. It tugs on anyone's heartstrings and we wanted to play off on that story part of it; going after Firefly and in issue #25 going after Cobra Mortal.
With Snake Eyes and Scarlett, I didn't feel like I had to do anything that hadn't been done before, because I think it's perfect the way it is. There's always a dichotomy between what Hasbro viewed the property as and what we, I think, realistically viewed the property as. They want it always to be aimed at "all ages" (which in affect means kids) and our experience tells us that the core audience are people who are teens and older. Realistically, older people in their twenties and thirties who are familiar with the book and cartoon from when they were kids. Sophisticated probably isn't the right word to describe a lot of what we wanted to do, because at the end of the day its G.I. Joe fighting Cobra, but there were at least some elements or material that may be just a little bit more than what you might want a kid to see or that they would understand. [Hasbro] was saying that you have to have G.I. Joe be positive and proactive and they have to go out and be hunting the bad guys and not waiting for them to attack. That sounds good when you toss it out in a creative meeting, but when you're doing it in a comic, in a dramatic story, its really hard to make it work because the good guys are the ones who are usually reacting. Realistically, yes, in real life the army and the navy are patrolling and stopping bad things from happening before they happen, but that doesn't make for good drama, so we had to figure out a way in those books to create drama.
Luckily, the whole relationship between Snake Eyes, Scarlett, and Firefly is so well established—there was so much there to play with that it was pretty easy. What we wanted to do in this story, at least what I wanted to do, was really play Firefly as this evil sadistic bastard—just show what a scumbag he is and how evil he is. Snake Eyes is this guy who, for lack of a better reference, is the Wolverine of G.I. Joe. No one can beat him in a fight, he's a ninja, he's a commando, he's everything. So, what we really want to get at here is [Snake Eyes] is a total bad a—, but there is this part of him that is incredibly vulnerable and that he really does feel like whoever he touches ends up getting f—ked; whoever he touches ends up getting hurt or dies, like his first protégé, Ophelia, Tommy and Scarlett. Having Firefly needle him and twist the knife as much as possible when it comes to that stuff, we wanted to play that up because Snake Eyes can't say it himself because he doesn't talk. Capping off that whole issue, we have the scene in Georgia at Scarlett's family home where Snake Eyes does open up in his own way by taking the mask off (of course, we don't see his face), accepting the fact that he's part of Scarlett's family and that he does have a family. It was trying to get at the heart of Snake Eyes in a sort of a roundabout way.
Those are the little things that are a lot more fun to write. That scene and this scene in issue 26 where Cobra Commander recruits Alexander, Destro's Son, and takes off [his own] mask, stuff like that I enjoy a lot more than all the fighting.
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Click the above link for more commentary on Parts 1-3 of World War III.
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