Truthfully, I thought I was done with G.I. Joe. The flood of other nostalgia comics killed what nostalgic fondness I had for the idea of new stories, and the new stories, while decent enough, weren't great enough to make my monthly reading list. However, this "reload" of G.I. Joe piqued my attention with the Cobra Reborn one-shot and nabs it solidly with the new introduction to the G.I. Joe team. Ney Rieber's story presents a small core team made up of classic early members and later joiners as the new founders, and I like his choices, as well as his slight tweaks of their origin stories or characters to fit into this more modern milieu. I've got my complaints, including some unnecessary identity confusion resulting from both story and artwork and the fact that this isn't a complete story, while the Cobra Reborn one-shot basically was, but I'm definitely curious to see where G.I. Joe Reloaded goes from here.
Ney Rieber has got an interesting cast here, including the most popular founders but clearly thinking more in terms of a general small special forces unit in terms of what to include. The decision to include two heavy machine-gunners is a little puzzling in those terms (except that both characters are way cool from a Joe fan perspective), but otherwise, he's got a close-combat specialist, a ranger, a strategist, a covert op, a trainer and a medic. Not a bad little start to the unit, and it doesn't hurt that the cast of the characters includes a few of my underused favorites, including Stalker and a neat little twist on "Doc," in amongst the big popular ones like Duke, Scarlett and Snake Eyes. Actually, the way that Snake Eyes is introduced, as an outside player with his own agenda, is a lot more cool and fitting with his character than having him be an army regular, and his shadowy confrontation with Storm Shadow is one of the more fun moments of the issue.
As Paul Jenkins did with Cobra Reborn, Ney Rieber uses a structure that largely spends a few pages introducing each character in their own place in the world before putting them together as a unit. So rather than hearing about Scarlett and her brothers in her file card, we see her training with them and see her as the most talented martial artist. We're introduced to Stalker and Lady Jaye as they bicker about inter-departmental cooperation and have their first encounter with Cobra. We learn more about Rock and Roll than just his choice of weapon or love of music. And we see right off the bat that Doc is a talented risk-taker, rather than just an average field medic.
Ney Rieber makes sure the reader knows that this team is made up of highly qualified and motivated individuals, and gives us individual characters so that when we see them in action, we don't just see them as green-clad bullet magnets. This goes to the heart of what I like about G.I. Joe Reloaded so far, and it's the same thing I liked about Cobra Reborn. Just as Cobra is a more dangerous, slightly more serious terrorist organization, so is G.I. Joe a more clear-cut covert ops unit. Ney Rieber gives the codenames a slight real world twist, leaving no doubt that this team is made up of black ops and not army regulars with Duke's "no rules" speech.
Artists Joe Bennett, Javier Saltares, Ruy Jose and Andrew Pepoy do a pretty good job with the art, avoiding the usual traps that plague multiple artist books. The realistic (and cool-looking) military gear, the detailed faces and especially the storytelling are top notch, with the silent infiltration of Snake Eyes into Scarlett's room being particularly nice (and perhaps a bit of a nod to the classic G.I. Joe silent story?) They could maybe use a more distinctive look for Duke, Beach Head and Hawk, who are easy to mistake for one another, but generally the costumes and slight differences (like hair color) clue the reader in.
There are still some goofy elements to G.I. Joe Reborn that keep it from being taken entirely seriously by everyone. Some of the codenames, though beloved, are outright goofy, and I'd rather Ney Rieber hadn't introduced them outside of being useful for team operations (as he did for Roadblock and Rock and Roll). In addition, the phrase "Armageddon in a box. Black Dragon Six" reads more like goofy parody than ominous cliffhanger, which adds to my annoyance that Ney Rieber ends this pricey one-shot special with a cliffhanger in the first place rather than making it fairly self-contained. Still, overall, my impression is that all that I thought was cool about Hama's G.I. Joe is to be found in these pages, and for the moment at least, I'm interested to see where the story goes from here.
