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This month I'm straying away from the news,
because news gets boring even though you people
seem to eat it up. This month I'm going to talk
about my first love, the GI Joe toy
line that ran from 1982-1994.
As the Collector Times toy guru and GI Joe 3.75"
Fan, I get asked when the GI Joe toy line went down
hill. A lot of my fellow fans say somewhere around
1986-87 when they went "High Tech." Some others
will say about 1991 when in the Marvel comic book
they killed off a bunch of characters at the hands
of the SAW Viper; this was probably the most
shocking thing to happen to the GI Joe team in the
9 years it was published. For me, I look to the
next and subsequent years, 1992 until the end of
the line, mostly because GI Joe had gone from
being a strictly military organization to a
gimmick organization of Astronauts, DEA Agents and
anti-Pollution agents.
With the fall of Soviet Russia and the end of the
Cold War, they let some October Guard (the Russian
equivalent of the GI Joe Team) serve with the GI
Joe Squad. That did not happen until about 1991
when they introduced the character Red Star to the
toy line. I'm not sure if they introduced the
character in the comic or not because my
collection gets spotty around that time. That is
okay though because they did not get gimmicky
until 1992.
The comic had a good run as well, running 154
issues, a spin off series called GI Joe Special
Missions, and 4 Yearbooks (kinda like Marvel
Annuals that told 4 stories in one issue). If you
are at all interested in GI Joe, Marvel has put out
the first 50 issues in Graphic Novel form in all
their four color glory. I'm not sure if there are
4 books or 5 books in the series thus far, but I
know they cover the first 50 issues. At $25 a
piece they are a good buy, considering that back
issues of the original series are starting to rise
again after many years of being some of the lowest
priced back issues you could find. Hopefully they
will reprint the entire series in graphic novel
format, so those of us with limited incomes (or
those of us who don't want to ruin our back
issues) can afford to get this comic in it's full
glory.
That's all for this month. If you have any article
ideas, comments or questions by all means send
them to my editor and she'll see that I get them.
I try to answer them within one week (sometimes
even one day) even though there are some things
that may require researching.
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