Comic-Con has always managed to coincide with some sort of financial crunch that meant my discretionary income was always spoken for by the time I got down to San Diego. So, I never fretted about not having time to shop, since I didn't have the money anyhow.

Well, this past year was different. And I spent a lot of money filling in some gaps from my childhood.

My fanboy love for G.I.Joe: A Real American Hero rivals Star Wars. By the time I had put the original trilogy to bed in 1983, Joe was waiting for me, with all those points of articulation! (Beat that, Kenner!)

I couldn't afford to build the army that I always wanted, but the comic book kept me imagination-deep in Joe adventures every month. I outgrew G.I.Joe in the early 90s, abandoning the series by the time it had reached the early 110s. And when G.I.Joe came back in 2001 from Devil's Due Press, I started regretting abandoning my old love. I had purchased the sporadic missing back issue every now and then, but the last dozen or so issues were impossible to find.

So, this past Comic-Con I did it. I bought the last issues I was missing. I won't get into the grisly details, but I spent over $200 for 3 issues. And I bought about 20 of them.

But I had done it. I had finally completed my collection and owned all 155 issues of the original Marvel Comics run of G.I. Joe. When I got back from Comic-Con, I started reading them from #1.

That was back in July. I finally finished #155 tonight.

It was a real trip. A total regression to the simpler school yard days. #1-155 ... 1982-1994.

The very first comic book I owned was G.I.Joe #10, and I still have it! It has a restapled cover, because in my childhood zeal to read and re-read the issue, I had worn it to such a degree that the cover came off. There's even a sticker on the cover with my name scrawled on it in my childish handwriting. I remember that my mom wanted to make sure my precious comic didn't get mixed up with someone else's collection.

These characters -- Hawk, Scarlett, Snake Eyes, Cobra Commander, Destro and Zartan -- are as real to me as Anakin, Luke, Han and Threepio are.

Part of the fun was reading the letters pages from back then, from when there were no message boards and blogs. There was a slew of nitpicky emails about little goofs that always depressed me, because these guys never saw the forest for the trees. I remember always hoping that writer Larry Hama doesn't only get mail demanding No-Prizes*.

In reading the mail, I kept an eye out for names of fans that I had since come in contact with due to my association with Star Wars. I recognized Alex Newborn. And James McFadden. (James, if you're out there, what did they send you for pointing out that the cover to #147 matched the cover to #7?) ... and I even got a letter published -- the only letter I had ever written to a comic.

One common topic beat to death was fans writing demanding realism. I always felt that wasn't the point of the story. Joe was, for lack of a better term, Military Fantasy, and for that I was ready to forgive any hard-to-swallow exercises of creative license, because the stories were compelling enough to get me coming back.

Yet, I couldn't say the same about that awful cartoon. Any Joe fan worth his dogtags will tell you without hesitation that the comic was better than the cartoon, and they'll often point to "realism" being the reason, so clearly there's a middle ground that we're orbiting around and never quite reaching.

Another observation was just how dated the Marvel style of comics seem. I can't imagine trying to write a comic in this fashion.

Basically, the writer sends a rough plot of the page to the illustrator, who draws the artwork, and then the writer returns and fills in the word balloons. There is absolutely no sense of timing in this method. And it may be a fault or peculiarity of Larry Hama in this case, but you could actually detect where he added in dialogue to account for something in the illustration he wasn't anticipating. As a result, these comics read as very blunt and broad. The issues that are most nuanced are the ones that Hama wrote and illustrated himself, since he was creating it from the ground up.

And the best issue of all time, #21, doesn't have words at all. But Hama's fantastic artwork.

So, you'll forgive an old-timer for waxing nostalgic, but it's not every day you complete a 12-year journey through your past.

ph
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* the No-Prize. An invention of Marvel. In response to nit-picky readers who would point out mistakes in their comics, Marvel created a policy wherein they would "award" a No-Prize to the vigilant reader who would uphold Marvel's spotless reputation and concoct a reasonable reason as to why an error only APPEARED to be an error, but in fact was not.

Marvel would accept an explanation, and tell said faithful reader that their No-Prize was in the mail. Cute idea, but in the case of G.I.Joe it backfired, since the letter columns would get clogged with people spamming their mailbags for No-Prizes, scouring their issues for mistakes and sending in their half-baked theories. It got so bad that G.I.Joe editors had to put all sorts of provisions on their submissons: it had to be a postcard. It had to be received during the time that said issue was on newsstands. Lettering and coloring mishaps don't count. Yadda yadda yadda.

And what is a No-Prize? It was an empty envelope. No Prize.

ph