Gary Collinson reviews G.I. Joe: Special Missions #7….
“ZARTAN makes his escape from the DREADNOKS’ desert lair with G.I. JOE hot on his trail. Will anyone make it back from the back of beyond? A blistering chase under the Aussie sun as the Special Missions’ team second outing goes horribly wrong.“
And so we come to the end of the second story arc of Chuck Dixon and Will Rosado’s G.I. Joe: Special Missions, and like the climax to the first arc, things draw to a close with another fast-paced, action-packed issue. Unfortunately, unlike issue #4, the action in question here isn’t particularly engaging or exciting, whilst story-wise I found myself feeling pretty unsatisfied by the entire arc by the time I’d reached the final panel.
If you haven’t been keeping up with the story lately, a Special Missions team has been dispatched to the Aussie Outback to recover a downed Cobra satellite, but of course the mission has went wrong and half the team has been taken captive by the fearsome motorcycle gang the Dreadnoks. As the other Joes launch a rescue mission on the Dreadnoks’ base, Zartan flees his brethren in an effort to reach a Cobra lab where he plans to use his DNA to build an army of Super Zartans. Cue a chase across the desert, a fistfight between the Joes and Dreadnoks, some cowboy heroics from Roadblock and… well that’s about it for this issue really.
Aside from a nice little twist at the end, there’s really no meat to the story and everything just seems to fizzle out, especially the battle between the Joes and the Dreadnoks. While it’s not a terrible issue by any stretch, it’s hard to describe G.I. Joe: Special Missions #7 as anything other than average, and sadly that’s also starting to sum up this series in general. We’re seven issues in, and it really doesn’t seem we’ve come that far in terms of story. Hopefully that will change with the next couple of issues, which are reverting to the original Special Missions format of self-contained stories, otherwise this could soon be the second of IDW’s relaunched G.I. Joe titles I’ll have dropped from my pull list.
Gary Collinson is a writer and lecturer from the North East of England. He is the editor-in-chief of FlickeringMyth.com and the author of Holy Franchise, Batman! Bringing the Caped Crusader to the Screen.
Originally published September 24, 2013. Updated April 12, 2018.
