G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero #310 // Review

Springfield is a mess. War has broken-out between a few different forces and there’s a great deal of human life on the line. It’s all a colossal mess of great danger and no one seems to truly know what it is that’s going on. Cobra is involved. They find themselves up against one of the most elite groups of military personnel in the U.S. as the battle rages on in G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero #310. Veteran writer Larry Hama continues his epic run on the long-running series with the aid of penciller Paul Pelletier, inker Tony Kordos and colorist Francesco Segala.

Somewhere in the midst of the mess there’s Zartan is trying to get Baroness to an emergency room. Given the nature of the mess, he’s not going to be able to get there alone, so he’s going to need some help moving forward. Storm Shadow agrees to help him get her there, but it’s not going to be easy. They’re going to take a tremendous risk what with the sheer confusion that seems to be dominating the entire area of Springfield in the midst of the battle that sems to be going on. Things are ugly and they’re only going to get uglier.

Hama continues to grind through a battle on U.S. soil with some of the more recognizable heroes and villains in the action. Hama theoretically could amplify the intensity of the plot if he was able to simplify the action just A BIT, but the fog of war would lose a little bit of its power if Hama were to try to reduce the complexity on any kind of a serious level at all. Hama has been handling the momentum of the situation with a great deal of power as the series has continued over the course of recent months.

The art team handles the chaos of things in Springfield quite well. The overall momentum of the action is maintained by Pelletier’s framing of the action, but the chaos of the battlefield lacks the kind of focus it needs to really drive home the intensity of the action. Zartan’s need to get Baroness to medical attention really SHOULD hit the page with a bit more intensity, but it lacks the kind of punch hit would need to hammer things in in the right way. Though there ARE some serious moments of intensity, the art team matches the script’s march into a fog that lacks the potential intensity it could have managed.

It would be really nice to feel a sense of continuity that bridges the entirety of the 300+ issues of the series that reach back decades. Ideally that’s what one would hope for from sa series that is still being written by the guy who created most of the characters in the ensemble more than 40 years ago. Hama’s latest entries in the series lack that sense of immensity of the ongoing saga. It’s cool to read a comic that the author has been associated with for nearly half a century...it would just be really, really nice to have more of a sense of that author/series connection in every single issue.

Grage: B-