G.I. JOE Cobra Civil Wars Issue 0
By Tao Mori
May 4, 2011 - 13:15
IDW Publishing
Writer(s): Chuck Dixon, Mike Costa
Penciller(s): Javier Saltares, Antonio Fuso, Agustin Padilla
Colourist(s): Romulo Fajardo, Jr., Arianna Florean, J. Brown
Letterer(s): Shawn Lee
Cover Artist(s): Tom Feister, Gabriele Dell'otto, Antonio Fuso, Javier Saltares
$3.99 US
![]() |
I've been following the new G.I. JOE series by IDW since issue #0, and I liked the direction they took with the series. It was different from the Marvel storyline, but it wasn't such a great departure from it that made it hard to G.I. JOE fans to support, like G.I. JOE Reloaded was. I was at first disappointed that they decided to cancel their original run and come out with this series G.I. JOE Cobra Civil Wars, which really is a merge between the G.I. JOE Cobra series and the mainline run of G.I. JOE. This line will probably end up being pretty good, but they should've just kept the main line, instead of coming out with a whole new series with a new flashy title. I always thought that a strong comic was defined by how many issues it had, the higher number, the better. Here we go starting all over again from 0.
When I think of the term civil war, first thing that comes to mind is the American Civil War, which is perhaps strange considering that I'm Canadian. Nonetheless the point I'm trying to make is that, usually Civil Wars include two or more parts of one group fighting against one another. So far in Cobra Civil Wars we have not seen that. As the Cobra Council (whoever they are) have said that the new leader of Cobra will be determined by whoever can kill the most G.I. JOEs. That's not a civil war at all, that's a competition, completely different thing. Granted this is only issue one and things will change, they should change otherwise the name is a complete misnomer and misleading. It's not like G.I. JOE fans don't know what a Cobra Civil War is as we had one back in the day in the original G.I. JOE Marvel series, in issues 72 - 76, those might not be the exact issues but it was around then. What happened then was that Cobra separated into two factions one led by Serpentor and one led by Cobra Commander and they fought each other with their armies. So far there has not been any Cobra blood spilling Cobra blood. SO FAR.
![]() |
The back of my issue of Cobra Civil War suggests that the characters that I named to be potential leaders of Cobra are not the only ones. The others that could become the new leaders of Cobra are Destro and Major Bludd. This comes to me as a surprise, for one Major Bludd failed in his mission to Destro and Cobra Commander didn't seem happy to me. I guess there's more to that than we knew. Still Major Bludd rarely pulls anything off successfully, so I doubt he'll be our new Cobra leader. Destro is an outsider and somehow his standing in Cobra in the IDW series has been very small as well. Destro's also the new guy in the Cobra group, I wonder if he's a realistic candidate to be the leader of Cobra considering that he doesn't know much about the organization yet.
I'm putting out my prediction of who will be the new leader of Cobra as Serpentor, for obvious reasons. He's not as badass as he was in the Marvel run since he's not the amalgamation of dozens of historic warriors, but he does have the ability to get fanatical devotion and let's face it, that's some powerful stuff. My second choice is Khalikhan and my reason for this is because of the writer's emphasis on him so quickly in this first issue, but for those same reasons we could also think that Krake and Vargas are going to become the leader. Khalikhan, however, has got some ninja power and somehow ninja trumps soldiers with guns, which doesn't make sense really, but that's G.I. JOE for you.
![]() |
All in all I think the comic was good, but not fantastic, then again this was just to give us a taste of what's to come. I would recommend everybody who likes G.I. JOE to go out and buy it and start reading it. You probably don't need a lot of backstory to really understand this series, if you're not familiar with G.I. JOE I would recommend getting your hands on the paperback versions of IDW's G.I. JOE.
Rating: 8/10
Related Articles: