G.I. Joe!

 

This may not be the GI Joe you were looking for. I am a bit older than the Real American Hero version. Not that I don't know them. I do! I had the comics and some of the toys, but I didn't watch the cartoon. That cartoon really made the toys sell from what I understand and may be the best example of the "synergy" to sell toys. He-Man was certainly another one, but I never had a He-Man toy, nor did I ever watch that show. But what if they had used that same strategy a decade or so earlier?? We didn't get cartoons based on toys at the time because the FCC made it illegal to produce them as it was deemed to decisive a marketing ploy. This was repealed in the early '80's. GI Joe got its first re-brand in the early 1970's with the advent of the Adventure Team. The company had been losing money on sales of "war toys" due to the reaction and sentiment of the Vietnam War and pivoted Joe away from being in the military and made him and his team adventurers instead. Now, I already had the war versions as my father had brought them home for my brother and me. They were used and given to him from his friends at the Knights of Colombus whose own children had outgrown them. So, when these new ones came out, with "lifelike hair", "eagle eyes", and especially "kung-fu grip", we wanted them. I am pretty sure EVERY kid I knew had at least one GI Joe figure!! Now I didn't have the vehicles and such, but you could still have hours of adventures with everyone on the block making up adventures!! 

I had posted previously how I learned much later in life that my friend Brian's grandfather had worked for the company and designed some toys and illustrated the Peter Pan Record books. When I reacquired some of those, I started thinking that I wanted to draw a GI Joe picture.

I was also inspired by the packaging art that appeared on the toys as well. I believe that these were painted by Don Stivers. 

So, for my picture, I was initially going to mock it up like a Saturday morning cartoon ad like I had done previously, but then decided that this one looked better without all the type and such. Here is some of the sketches done for the figures seen in the final.

I also had to re-create the logos. I did take some liberties with the full logo combining the military stencil font with the later red/blue version and I substituted the "Adventure Team" disc for the floating head that went there. I also moved the "adventure team" line above the logo for compositional reasons.