Having mentioned the letter I wrote to the Walking Dead comic that didn’t get printed, I have opened things up so I can write about the letter I wrote to the GI Joe comic that, as far as I know, also did not get printed.
To try to figure out when in my life I wrote this letter, I looked at the covers of issues of GI Joe to see what was most familiar from my childhood. The winners are some Destro-focused ones that came out in 1991. That surprises me because in my memory the GI Joe letter was sent AFTER the one I sent to Blaze, but Blaze was three years later than than these Destro covers.
Still, it’s possible. 1991 is around when I was first getting into comics and GI Joe was a franchise I was familiar with thanks to the cartoons. I could have been drawn to it and misremembered that Blaze was actually later. And I remember the latest parts of my reading GI Joe before dropping off having the Eco-Warriors and searching for them tells me they were in comics in 1992. So I guess I have once again proved that memory is unreliable and I probably wrote this before the Blaze letter.
As for the content of the letter, I don’t remember most of it. Vague praise of the comic, I assume? An insistence that I loved the Joes and they were my favourites that would ultimately be proven untrue when I dropped it in favour of other things? More than likely. The only thing I remember for certain is that I asked that they would use Bazooka more often, because he looked like my father. And it’s true, my father was indeed a white man with a dark moustache. I suppose, if I was ten when I wrote this letter, as I have learned I must have been, I probably gave it to my parents to send and if my father saw that he may have withheld the letter and just told me it was sent. So we have three possibilities: 1) I sent the letter and it was not printed. 2) I sent the letter and it was printed and I’ve just never found out. 3) My father never actually sent the letter.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Writing that letter was a part of my childhood, but GI Joe has simply not lived on in me as a nostalgic franchise. I like some of the designs of the characters and vehicle and stuff, but mostly I just don’t care. Even as an adult I sat down and read the first hundred issues of this comic, and while I could respect what Larry Hama did there, it felt like homework to me and I decided not to continue. It’d be funny to learn that if I had I’d find a letter written by me as a child.
