G.I. Joe #17. // Review
Cobra Commander is holding a running chainsaw in one hand. In the other hand, he’s holding a fist full of hair from the head of the man whose neck he’s threatening with the running chainsaw. And though he’s clearly holding someone’s life in his hands, he’s not exactly looking too good himself. His upper body is bleeding beneath tattered rags. Desperate times call for desperate strategies in G.I. Joe #17. Writer Joshua Williamson continues and exploration of the popular long-running franchise with artist Tom Reilly and colorist Jordie Bellaire. The action continues as the five-part Dreadnok War storyline draws to a close.
Cobra Commander respects those who he has been engaging in battle. They may act stupid, but he sees through that. They have skills and instincts that seem to speak to a greater complexity than one might expect. Every time he’s encountered them they’ve suffered losses. No one has ever come as close to killing him as they have. He’s giving the Dreadnoks an opportunity that doesn’t have to involve him killing one of them. He’s giving them the opportunity.They don’t want to join him. He doesn’t want that either...he wants to hre them as independent contractors.
Williamson adds a complexity beyond the surface level of a franchise that’s been around for decades. The ensemble that have been created for the original franchise was huge. A lot of different ways to shuffle around the characters and make them work together. It's interesting to see how Williamson is putting it together for this particular incarnation. A real sense of desperation that seems to be running through every aspect of the series. This makes perfect sense as it is fused with other elements from other franchises, including the Transformers, which represent a big jump in power over the usual G.I. Joe / Cobra dynamic. Williamson does a good job of modulating between the franchises in another satisfying issue.
Reilly brings that sense of desperation to the page with a ragged poise. It might lack the poise and power of clean lines and powerful poses, but REilly’s art amplify the overall ugliness of the brutality of it. And that works particularly well with this particular storyline as it draws to equal. It's greedy and it's ugly and it's brutal. Bellaire follow the overall energy of that atmosphere and punches it up quite a bit with a blood soaked, dirt stained atmosphere at the end of very grueling storyline.
It's a very dangerous dynamic that seems to be coming through all the various angles of the various elements of the Energon Universe that Skybound is bringing to the comics page between this and a few other titles. It’s fun to watch everything collide together in different ways. There’s a lot of energy being brought to the massive shared-universe crossover that’s been fun thus far. There are a lot of directions that Williamson and company could take the series in. Given the amount of brutality that’s alreeady come across the page, things could get VERY messy in the near future.
