I Was a Teenage Sunbow Intern

The story of how G.I. Joe got me into comics may need a rest for now, so here’s a different story:

 

I WAS A TEENAGE SUNBOW INTERN

In college at RISD I majored in Animation.  It was a great four years.  While the Alumni and Career Services office did have some 3-ring binders of information on companies offering jobs and internships, I barely spent any time looking.  And while our professors did give us much in the way of problem solving, technical skills, and creative thinking, landing an internship was not stressed.  That’s not a complaint.  (It’s a recent requirement for upperclassmen at my school, and I assume RISD Animation has moved in this direction.)  It’s not a complaint because at the time it did not seem like a deficiency and because I stumbled into an internship anyway.  Here’s how.

 

Summers in high school were a mix of wasted relaxation and real art productivity.  A portfolio class helped prepare me for college admissions.  The summer after that first year of college I vacationed with my family, drew comics, and attended BotCon.  No job, but something would coalesce.  In the fall of college sophomore year I took Animation I class, and worked weekly in the Film Animation Video equipment lock-up office.  There I gabbed with J. Gaston (Hi, J.) and tried not to do any work, instead letting J. fetch all the Bolexes and tripods while I doodled.

 

Someone who may have been Dee Boyd (Hi, Dee), my TA from Animation I class, mentioned someone else in our department had had an internship the previous summer at a studio in New York.  I don’t know how this came up in conversation, but as sometimes happens during the exchange of equipment and a liability signature, someone will talk about some project they’re up to, or some accomplishment a friend has made.  And while I don’t think I was talking about G.I. Joe and Transformers that day, I was starting to be known as a G.I. Joe and Transformers crazy person.  (Freshman year I had hosted a screening of Transformers: The Movie and 15 minutes of Transformers toy commercials in a dorm lounge with a big screen TV.  For the next three years I hosted it in the RISD Auditorium, where I sold shrinkwrapped VHS episodes I had imported from Canada since they were long out of print and unavailable in the States.  I also made a half-hearted attempt to secure a film print of TF:TM since we were equipped with two 35mm projectors, VHS looking only so good on the big screen.)  So Dee or Unnamed Upperclassman mentioned Sunbow, and probably something about how it wasn’t impossible to get the internship, or how it was interesting, or how I might follow up and try myself.

 

An internship at the studio that had produced my favorite cartoons ever?  And also such notable shows as My Little Pony, Visionaries, and The Tick?  Wow!  But how could I ever reach out to such an institution?

 

Tune in next time to find out! 

Hit & Run’s almost-1995 transformation

In 1988 Hasbro released a stunning G.I. Joe figure called Hit & Run.  Here’s a not-professional photo by me for context.

No flesh tone, just green and black camo all over — his hands, his face, and his clothing.  Fun fact:  Hit & Run is [EDIT: one of] the only Joe[s] with whites-of-his-eyes.  All other figures 1982-1994 are flesh tone plastic with a paint detail in black, brown, blonde, or red for eyebrows and retina.  [EDIT: Two others have whites-of-eyes].

Here’s his turnaround, drawn by Mark Pennington, with machine gun, duffle bag (taking the place of a backpack), and accessories.

Many Joe fans know that Real American Hero ended in 1994, and the planned 1995 line was scrapped, although images of package artwork and product samples have circulated.  Did you know Hit & Run was destined, in a way, for a return?

Indeed!  According to this memo from Greg Berndtson, Hit & Run, whose figure was never recolored or re-released, was going to be re-used for the ’95 line as the Stealth Tank Driver!  REVELATION.  Here’s his turnaround.

You’ll note it’s just a photocopy of Hit & Run’s, although a few specs have changed, which I have highlighted for clarity.  This looks to be early enough in the process that our new tank driver doesn’t yet have a codename, or if he does, as of June ’94 that’s happening in Marketing and Legal and the R&D guys don’t have the final name.

So what would he have looked like?  Kurt Groen’s breakdown tells us, even if it doesn’t show us:

Using these codes as a guide, I’ve taken the liberty of coloring that sculpt input myself.  So here for the first time ever is what the unnamed Phantom X5-3 Stealth Tank driver would have looked like:

I’ve taken a small liberty here.  For clarity I used a dark grey rather than black, and I’m approximating “LT YELLOW GRN.”  “IVY,” as well, but that’s less up to guessing.  After the sidetracks and excesses of ’91 – ’93, the ’94 line was getting back to basics and ’95 would have only continued the trend.  That it never happened has always been a little sad, although the Real American Hero line certainly surpassed all expectations by lasting twelve years.  I hope you’ve enjoy this look behind the curtain at what may have been.

Fun fact:  Hit & Run is the only Joe [EDIT: one of only two] with an ampersand in his name that doesn’t denote an animal companion.  Law & Order was Law, the MP, and his K-9, Order.  Spearhead and Max is the point man named Spearhead and his bobcat, Max.  Well, that’s the word “and” rather than an ampersand, but you get my drift.  Hit & Run is this guy’s whole name, ampersand-ed idiom and all.

[EDIT: Thanks to Tolan, who caught my two errors, as noted in the comments below.  -Tim]

Zartan’s Chameleon

…And we’re back.  Sorry for the radio silence.  Thanks to visitors who keep clicking over here.

Today’s post features Zartan’s swamp skier, the Chameleon.  No one ever called it by name in the TV show, and offhand I don’t recall it appearing in the comic, though if it did, it would have been around issue #25, and I don’t think anyone called it by name.  Here’s Wayne Luther’s design art for it, dated September 13, 1983.

Here also is a photocopy of a photocopy of an early sample of the Chameleon.  That figure looks like the HISS Driver, but I’m unsure.

Why the HISS Driver, you ask?  This photo must predate any production samples of Zartan back from China, and likely any handmade samples, so for reference, any figure was placed on the vehicle.  HISS Driver debuted a year before Zartan, so one was on hand.  (Or whoever it is.)  These photos were sent to the TV producers, writers, and artists, and probably also the Marvel offices for comic book reference.

The water cannon was used in episode #6 of G.I. Joe, but I don’t recall ever “using” it when I played with my G.I. Joe action figures.  As the Chameleon was not a robust construction, and was always falling apart, I stopped including it in my G.I. Joe games soon after getting it.

There were two TV ads for Zartan and the Chameleon.  One for issue #25, all animation.  Here’s the toy one, which uses some of that animation:

Apologies for lack of posts

Sorry for my absence, readers.  The end of school, several events at my comic book store, and the finishing and printing of my new comic have pulled away my attention from the blog.  I’ll start posting regularly very soon.  In the meantime, please enjoy this commission of Flint and the Incredible Hulk I drew Saturday at Boston Comic Con.

Photos from Larry Hama signing at Hub Comics

Photos of Larry Hama’s signing at Hub Comics in Somerville, MA, 07 April 2012, are now up here.  No log-in required.  Lots of shots of Hama sketching G.I. Joe characters.

Larry Hama signing at Hub Comics

Larry Hama may now be an annual fixture at the Official G.I. Joe Collector’s Convention, and has attended more and more conventions in the last few years what with G.I. Joe back in the spotlight, but did you know he’s never signed in Boston?  Hama’s visit to Hub Comics (19 Bow St.) this Saturday April 7th will be his first-ever Boston-area appearance!  (Somerville isn’t technically in Boston, but it’s 2 miles from Boston, and borders Charlestown and Cambridge, which both border Boston.)  The signing is from 11am to 4pm, and Hama will be sketching as well.  Bring your Wolverine, Generation, Batman, Marvel Premiere, Daredevil, and Mort the Dead Teenager comics to get signed!  And Hub Comics will have every in-print IDW collection for sale:

Metered street parking available.  MBTA-wise on the 85 and 87 bus lines/near the 91, 86 and CT2.

The Comic That Changed Everything – Part 15

Part 1 – [2] - [3] - [4] – [5] – [6] – [7] – [8] – [9] – [10] – [11] – [12] – [13] – [14]

In our last episode, Tim and his brother Kevin placed their biggest mail order of G.I. Joe comics yet, and the excruciating wait began…

My grade school had half-day Fridays every single week, so I would have lunch at Roy Rogers with Betty, my family’s housekeeper/nanny/second mom, on the way home.  And my brother, in 9th grade at a different school, didn’t get home until 4 or 5pm, whereas I was already playing Dig Dug on our IBM XT and watching Dennis the Menace at 1.  On a Friday after what felt like months, where every day I longed to see a package awaiting me at my front door, Betty and I pulled into the driveway, my neck still careening for an angle on the screen door in case THIS WAS THE DAY.

Indeed the screen door was just a tad ajar, but in no way the amount needed to make room for an eight-foot tall box of comics.  And there had been a few false alarms — small packages for my mom, or all our regular mail bundled together with a rubber band, so I wasn’t going to get my hopes up again on the short flagstone walk to the front stoop.  But there it was anyway, another modestly sized, tightly taped East Coast Comics box!

I have no recollection of getting it inside, or forming half-words to Betty to express its significance, but soon I was kneeling on the bed in my parents’ room, an odd place for the unpacking operation, but one that makes its own sense.  Betty watched soap operas downstairs in the family room, and from an early age my brother and I knew we weren’t allowed to join in.  (At the time soap operas showed the occasional sex scene, all tastefully under the covers, really nothing more than prone kissing – tame by today’s standards.  But nonetheless we were chased out of the room if we lingered too long while fetching an action figure or an afterschool Pudding Pop.)  So that room was out.

My room was too narrow for stacks of loose comics so large they threatened to asphyxiate me should they topple over.  What I needed was a big space to spread out so I could take in all the G.I. Joe goodness at once.  We watched TV on our parents’ bed, and sometimes read for school there, so it was atop the brown 1970s bedspread and before the orange, brown, and white tulips of Vera Wang’s wallpaper that I gingerly dumped 40 new G.I. Joe comics out in front of me.

I’ve alluded to this a few times before here at Real American Book, the unattainably nostalgic feeling of reading during that first year of collecting comics.  This was when a comic took 45 minutes to finish, when I would read every page three times, and then read the comic again.  When I was legitimately concerned that whatever deathtrap or point blank pistol promised inescapable death to Snake-Eyes, to Ed Marks, to Daredevil on the cover might actually happen.  I was worried Snake-Eyes would step on that landmine on the cover of G.I. Joe #63 even though I had already read issue #s 90-95 — starring an alive and well Snake-Eyes!  (Okay, not always well, since he got hot ash thrown in his face in #95.)  But here now was an almost overwhelming tableau of those images, Marvel’s 1980s cover stock and color saturation popping off that bedspread, yellows that blinded, red that promised of blood, white in the steely eyes of determined heroes, flamboyant purples for villains, dangerous green jungles, ultramarine skies.  Like an amateur card dealer I shuffled the comics around with the palms of my hands, over and over, prepping for a game of Go Fish that would never finish, would never start.  These cover images, most drawn by Mike Zeck and Ron Wagner, are indelibly burned into my brain, and the power they hold, supported by the interior narratives, multiplied by the unassailable guilding of nostalgia make most other comics dissatisfying by comparison.

There would be no buyer’s remorse for this splurge.  Only the satisfaction of having half-completed an entire run of Marvel G.I. Joe in one fell swoop.

I must have spent a half hour just looking at them, moving them around, arranging them, picking some up, flipping through them.  Looking at them.  Looking at them.

While I was still curious how 40 comics hadn’t needed a box bigger than a coffin, that concern faded, and the entire stack went with me into my bedroom.  I sat propped up against two navy blue pillows on my lower bunk bed, Prince’s Batman soundtrack playing on my boom box.  (Oh, how I’ve tried to keep the ‘80s from overwhelming every paragraph of this blog.  Oh, how I failed on that last sentence.)  And there I read comics for hours.

I should note here once again how memory misaligns.  For years I’ve remembered this big order as my second, but the date (12/15/89) on the one I showed in part 14 of this story means this bigger order had to be our third.  And I remember it arrived in the spring of 1989, but the Batman album didn’t street until June 15 of that year.  And I wouldn’t have bought it opening day.  But school got out in early June, and not only did I come from school that East Coast day, I must have told Will all about it the following Monday.  Right?  So how was I listening to an album that I hadn’t bought yet?  Could I be conflating a later reading session with this victorious day of postal receipt?

Regardless of the answer, I have no memory of Kevin coming home later, and me telling him the good news, and him sorting through the stack, taking in the pulp bounty for himself.  But I do remember both of us spent hours that weekend reading, me prone on the family room floor, elbows digging into our soft yellow shag carpet, and Kevin lying on the couch, a tall pile of comics on the coffee table between us.  The coffee table where my father kept his coffee table books, the ones that indirectly seeded the idea for A Real American Book.

And though the dual afternoons offered us much in the way of thrilling narratives, double crosses and death-defying escapes, it doesn’t quite compare to that break in the tension storm when my months-long anxiety at last broke, and that giant East Coast Comics order finally arrived, on a spring Friday afternoon at the end of 6^th grade.

I still think about that day when I listen to Batman.

Part 1 – [2] - [3] - [4] – [5] – [6] – [7] – [8] – [9] – [10] – [11] – [12] – [13] – [14]