3 out of 5

Comics are so funny.  After a huge push for a relaunch of G.I. Joe with Fred Van Lente scripting, he exits after a couple years with ish #11, and Paul Allor closes things out.  What’s nice is that Allor wasn’t required to do some fireworks display conclusion – he can just tell a tale.  And though it would’ve been nice with an extra issue or two to pad some of the character developments, he structured it well, and gives us a surprisingly nuanced, and emotionally affecting Joe story (not to me, ’cause I’m a tough guy and shit, I just mean that the heroes don’t come out absolutely on top, and maybe that makes some lesser men – or you twinkly female Joe readers out there – tear up with the tears.)

We start out with Cobra Commander striking a deal with new member Siren – no idea if she’s new here or was introduced previously – in exchange for running a specialized PR campaign for Cobra, the group will help Siren find her kidnapped son.  Issues 12 and 13 pair Siren up with main bitch Baroness to kick ass tracking down clues to the missing kid.  Along the way, Siren, using information gleaned from Cobra’s written history, to which she was allowed access, tells stories that preach the ideologies of Cobra to other criminal organizations, much to the annoyance of Baroness.  This is Siren’s PR task, however: not to tell the public about the group, but to remind those who run in the same channels how deep the organization goes, and how razor-edged are the concepts by which it abides.  The stories are pretty masterful, honestly, certainly presenting the right bloody dash of twisted evil, but presented not in the overwrought narrative of a villain, but in the slick staging of a PR person.  The rescue of Siren’s kid ends up underlining the very lessons she was preaching: Cobra finds the kid, lets her see him, then sends the kid of for Cobra programming.

Issues 14 and 15 flash forward a few months and flip to Joe’s perspective, where new member Hashtag uses her computer savvy to decode a message which ends up being from Siren, pleading for help rescuing her son from Cobra’s hate camps.  Hashtag pisses about for an issue, getting upset about Joe’s inability to come out of any operation with a truly “clean” victory, and then convinces her superiors to follow up on the message.  Double-edged sword again: the kid ends up being too far gone in the programming, and Joe is only able to rescue other children who want to leave.  Siren chooses to stay with her son.

The two halves are certainly meant to mirror each other, showing the gains and losses relative to good and evil, and the overall theme does work.  But the 2 Siren-focused issues are so smart narratively that Hashtag’s half feels rather empty in comparison, and her character doesn’t have nearly as much dialogue or interactions to make her an equally rich juxtaposition to Siren.  So instead of a parallel, issues 14 and 15 seem sort of like an after-the-fact response to issues 12 and 13.  A well written afterthought, just not directly impactful.

I also didn’t mention the art.  This isn’t to discredit any of the several artists / inkers / colorists who worked on the issues (each short story in ish’s 12 and 13 had different artists): nothing was disruptive.  But nothing truly struck my eye, either.