Half the Battle!
#26 — Storm Shadow Cheats
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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