Half the Battle! #26 — Storm Shadow Cheats

Half the Battle!

#26 — Storm Shadow Cheats

HtB#26

It may or may not show, but I actu­al­ly had a lot of fun doing this one.  Usu­al­ly, my favorite pan­els to draw are close-ups of char­ac­ters talk­ing, because they require the least amount of work.  I kind of dread doing pan­els that have a lot of action, move­ment or char­ac­ters, because they are not only a lot of work, but they also tend to high­light my deficits as an artist.  This time, how­ev­er, even though there was a lot of stuff going on in most of the pan­els, I real­ly had a blast putting them togeth­er.  Maybe it’s because Snake Eyes is one of the eas­i­est char­ac­ters to draw…

Any­way, if there is a face of GI Joe (and there is), it is Snake Eyes.  He has become syn­ony­mous with the brand and is by far the most pop­u­lar char­ac­ter.  As of the writ­ing of this, there are 65 dif­fer­ent ver­sions of his action fig­ure (the most of any char­ac­ter by far) and he was a main focal point of the extreme­ly pop­u­lar com­ic book from the ’80s-’90s — so much so that the com­ic was even­tu­al­ly renamed GI Joe: Star­ring Snake Eyes.  In fact, the only iter­a­tion of the GI Joe brand where Snake Eyes was not the focal point was the Sun­bow car­toon series.  In the car­toon, they did not treat him like the unstop­pable badass that you can expect from every oth­er iter­a­tion that has come before or since.  He was just a qui­et guy on the team — not above being tak­en hostage by a teenage street punk or get­ting bitch slapped by Cobra La’s roy­al guard.

Storm Shad­ow has also become a big part of the GI Joe lore.  He was Cobra’s answer to Snake Eyes, and in the com­ic their rela­tion­ship became a big part of what the series was about.  They were (at least in the begin­ning) arch ene­mies.  In the Sun­bow series, the pow­ers that be decid­ed to keep the arch ene­my thing for Storm Shad­ow, but instead of hav­ing him fight Snake Eyes, they made his arch ene­my become Spir­it — maybe because they share hon­or-bound cul­tures or maybe because Storm Shad­ow is racist against Native Amer­i­cans… they nev­er say.

One last thing to note in this strip — the last pan­el, where Storm Shad­ow and Spir­it are wrestling… that’s all they are doing.  Any­thing else you think they are up to is on you…

Now you know…

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