Weekly Comic Book Review

By: Chuck Dixon (writer), Alex Cal (artist), J. Brown (colors), Neil Uyetake (letters), Carlos Guzman (assistant editor) & John Barber (editor)

The Story: Cobra has taken command of a piss-ant country.  Snake Eyes & his team go in to cause them trouble.

Four Things: 

1. Pretty simple & linear story. – This is kind of a weird issue.  The main thrust is about Snake Eyes taking out a bunch of Cobras.  His team is there with him, but he does the killing himself.  And, there’s nothing wrong with that.  The action scenes have some imagination to them and are pretty well-drawn, so if you like watching a cool ninja dude who is equally adept with guns as he is with swords, then you’ll have fun with this.  But, there isn’t a lot of meat on the bone.

2. Just barely tied into Cobra Command crossover. – This Snake Eyes series is so close to being a stand-alone.  Ya know, read GI Joe and Cobra for the “main” story, but the real Joe fanatics will want to read Snake Eyes too just to see him killing things on the periphery of the “main” story.  But, there are just enough little niblets of the “main” story in here that you’d be ill-served to miss this issue and just read the other two GI Joe series.  That’s really a mixed bag for me because most people will get sick of seeing Snake Eyes stabbing stuff and it’d be nice for that to be optional.  But, if IDW is going to include this as a numbered part of the Cobra Command Crossover (it is Part 2), then it better tie into the main story (and it does).  OR give Snake Eyes a more important mission than killing random Cobras!

3. Crossover story is slowly paced. – This crossover is 9 parts long, and I guess I question why that is necessary.  It better be EPIC at that length or IDW is just milking a 4-6 issue story to sell more issues.  There was nothing in this issue that made me feel like the overall story was EPIC.  It’ll be really disappointing if Issue #1 lays out Cobra taking over this country and then we get 5-6 nothing issues before the big battles in issues 7-9.  Make those middle issues relevant!

4. Alex Cal is doing pretty well on the art. There are minor quibbles (i.e. Agent Helix should be MUCH hotter and the art is unnecessarily highlighted) and from a personal taste standpoint, I’ll never fall in love with art this realistic, but Alex Cal is doing a pretty good job steadying the art across the GI Joe lineup.  The Joe books are about the basics from an art standpoint: Can you tell the characters apart?  Can you tell a sequential story?  That stuff matters a LOT more than doing awesome splash pages.

Conclusion: Enjoyable enough for Snake Eyes fans and it does advance the Cobra Command story a little bit.  The art is pretty solid.  But, there’s nothing in this issue that gets above the level of “average comic book”.  So, buy it if you love GI Joe and skip it otherwise.

Grade: C

-Dean Stell

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Filed under: IDW Tagged: | Alex Cal, Carlos Guzman, Chuck Dixon, G.I. Joe, J. Brown, John Barber, Neil Uyetake, Snake Eyes #9, Snake Eyes #9 review