G.I. Joe Compendium hits $1.4M on Kickstarter

I have a special fondness for 80’s cartoons and comics, particularly G.I. Joe. I started reading Marvel comics “G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero” with issue 49, which featured the debut of Cobra villain Serpentor.

My rendition of Cobra villain Destro!

What motivated 13 year old me to chase this issue down was, of all things, a TV commercial. Yes, back in the early to mid 80’s, Marvel would run 30 second television ad spots for the G.I. Joe comic book during the weekday ‘after school’ time slot. The ad spots would run for each issue, from #1 through #80. This is pretty remarkable, considering A) a comic book had never been advertised on TV before and B) new commercials ran for a period of almost 7 years!

Thanks to Youtube, you can relive the very ad that got me excited enough to seek out the comic book.

Why am I sharing this? Because for the next 25 days, Skybound Comics is having a Kickstarter campaign that offers 4 compendium volumes that collect the Marvel series. I have many of the issues as stand alone comic book “floppies”, all I am missing are issues between 16 and 29, and most of the issues towards the end of the run. (I did pick up the last issue, #155, when it originally came out.)

The campaign was funded in 6 minutes, reaching its $50,000US goal. What’s crazy is that, as of this writing, almost $1.5 million dollars has been raised. I have backed the campaign to score Compendium 1 (with Cobra Commander on the cover), which collects the first 50 issues of the series.

Whether you enjoyed the comic book series, or the cartoon, this campaign is definitely worth backing. Yo Joe!

-Krishna