Snake-Eyes #8 – Review

By: Chuck Dixon (writer), Casey Maloney (pencils), Juan Castro & Chris Dreier (inks), Simon Gough & Romulo Fajardo, Jr. (colors), Neil Uyetake (letters) & Carlos Guzman & John Barber (editors)

The Story: Snake-Eyes and Duke try to find a cure for a Cobra engineered bioweapon.

Four Things:

1. Generally been enjoying GI Joe comics recently. – I don’t know how this happened.  I read some of the old Marvel GI Joe series when I was a kid and had enjoyed the GI Joe/Cobra series from IDW featuring Chuckles as a spy within Cobra.  But, something clicked in me that I needed to read this Cobra Civil War series a few weeks ago and via the beauty of digital comics I was able to mainline the whole story in a week or so.  And, it’s a really good and strong story.  There’s one big caveat with the books that I’ll get into below, but the storyline behind the GI Joe books is pretty hot.

2. Snake Eyes busting the place up. – This story is pretty basic: Cobra has released a bioweapon and Duke has also been infected.  So, Snake Eyes and Duke go charging into the Cobra lab facility to find the cure.  Duke has some kind of armored hazmat suit that’s kinda cool.  And they fight all kinds of Cobra troops with Snake Eyes being all bad ass, and that’ definitely cool.  There really isn’t a whole lot of subtlety to a comic like this and there are plot holes galore (what happens to the Vipers if they shoot Duke’s suit and the virus spills out?), but it is exciting to read.  Duke is in really bad shape and IDW has demonstrated that they’re not afraid of death.  A LOT of GI Joe’s have been killed recently and a few “named” Cobra guys too.  So, this issue isn’t something you can read thinking, “Oh sure…..Duke will be fine in the end because it can’t end any other way.”  That threat of DEATH adds some weight to these scenes of Snake Eyes fighting all these Hasbro-toy-line inspired Cobra bad guys.