Gary Collinson reviews G.I. Joe: Special Missions #8….
“A peace-promoting diplomat is gunned down and barely escapes with his life. The world watches as the man lies at death’s door in a high security facility. COBRA is watching as well and mounts an all-out cyber-assault to take their target down once and for all. Mainframe and Dial-Tone are the last line of defense in a deadly chess game with COBRA’s entire cyber-war division. The Joes pray for peace but program for war in DENIAL OF SERVICE!“
Coming off the back of two multi-part story arcs, IDW’s G.I. Joe: Special Missions reverts to the old Marvel Comics formula of stand-alone tales for issue #8, as G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero artist S L Galant joins regular writer Chuck Dixon for ‘Denial of Service’, which sees the team trying to prevent Cobra from carrying out an assassination on a United Nations Envoy looking to broker a peace deal between two warring former Soviet states.
When traditional assassination methods fail and the diplomat is left injured after a shootout at Charles de Gaulle, Cobra resorts to cyber-warfare in an effort to finish the hit with an unmanned drone. As Dial-Tone attempts to locate Cobra’s hacker, Mainframe has to work out a way to stop the drone, which is complicated by the fact that it’s armed with an EMP device and is flying low under the belly of a passenger jet slap bang above the centre of Paris.
After a somewhat underwhelming last issue and a couple of story arcs that seemed to drag on a little longer than they should have done, G.I. Joe: Special Missions #8 certainly offers a welcome change of pace and it’s nice to get a story that’s wrapped up in a single issue, even if it’s not a particularly exceptional one. Still, it’s not a bad one either and there a few more positives, such as the solid artwork from Galant and a brief but all-too-rare appearance from Cobra Commander. I’m not sure it’s quite enough for me to stick with this continuity after the final issue of The Cobra Files, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.
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 October 9, 2013. Updated April 12, 2018.
