A Favorite Character and Why, or; The only Person I'd Hire as a Tour Guide in Thule, Greenland

Hey all! It’s been a while since I wrote anything on this here blog…since just a few weeks after Crusade’s release. In that time I’ve had another novel come out, another coming out later this year, and lots of exciting stuff going on in that world.

In the past four years I’ve come to realize that, given the existence of my day job, I can either write novels, or I can write blog posts, and I know which one i’m going to pick. Maybe someday that will change, but not yet.

For now, I just want to write a few words about one of my favorite G.I. Joe Characters and why. So if toys and 80s nostalgia and G.I. Joe don’t interest you, check out now!

I have and still have very specific favorite Joe characters. I can’t always articulate why or how they become a favorite, and that’s sort of what I plan to talk through here. So without further ado, let’s talk about G.I. Joe’s original Salt, Hector Delgado, AKA SHIPWRECK

Original 25th Anniversary Version (V 11, 2007) V13 from a 2009 5 pack, and V12 from a 2008 Comic Pack with Copperhead.

As my collection does not currently feature any vintage Shipwrecks, and really very few vintage figures at all, I’m starting with the basic Shipwreck that came out in 2007 as the 25th Anniversary Figures suddenly ignited collecting fever in new and old Joe fans. Sharp-eyed collectors will notice that I customied this shipwreck a little bit, popping off his closed-fist hand and replacing it with another gloved hand because, well, I didn’t want one of my favorite characters to have only one weapon-grasping hand. Also few if any of these guys are carrying their actual original accessories…I’m a habitual swapper and part-changer in these minor ways.

I had the original Shipwreck, from 1985. I loved the character the very first time I saw him, though I couldn’t tell you when that was. A toy commercial? An episode of the cartoon? On the back of a figure with that iconic cross-sell art? I couldn’t tell you. Why’d I like him so much? I’d love to tell you it was my regard for the iconic uniform and traditions of the United States Navy or some deep commitment to the semi-mystical heroism of the sailor. I suspect it was that he had a parrot, tattoos, and a kick-ass pirate’s pistol. I was seven; I wasn’t deep.

This guy knows what’s what.

I love the 2007 version’s sneer. I like that they didn’t get fancy with Polly; later versions of his parrot pal are fancier, prettier, and much less likely to stay where you put them.

A slightly stoned Shipwreck

This one looks a tad friendlier. Skinnier arms so he looks less like Popeye, which, frankly, is to his detriment. The shoulder bag comes with clever posts for a more ornate Polly to sit on, but it barely works. All in all it’s probably a “better” figure in some small, meaningless way; I think I prefer the first 25th Anniversary version still. This one looks happier to be there, less likely to complain, and less likely to chuck someone overboard for back-sass. In other words, less like the Shipwreck I know and revere.

Just a little comparison of the rank patches of Shipwreck in these 3 different uniforms. I’m not up enough on these things to know what the differences mean. The only explanation I WILL accept is that, naturally, Shipwreck is constantly gaining and losing rank because he is an irreplacable member of any unit but also a cranky asshole who gets ratings and rank taken away. On a side note, I guess we don’t yet know how the 25th Anniversary/Modern Era Joes are going to age…but the paint wear on Shipwreck’s elbow there (a figure that’s going on 13) probably doesn’t bode well.

Now, I prefer Shipwreck as a sailor. However, we all know there’s a contingent of Joe fandom that DEMANDS their plastic army men be REAL ASS SPECIAL FORCES SOLDIERS GRAARGH and toy designers tend to follow suit. So evenutally, in the 90s, Shipwreck got a redesign and suddenly became a Navy SEAL (joining Torpedo and Wet-Suit) instead of just a Gunner’s Mate and Machinist. Personally I’m not a huge fan of that development. I love Shipwreck’s appearances in the comics where he orders the rest of the Joes around at sea and think he can fit in any conception of a Joe team as a guy on the guns of the WHALE or taking the helm of any the various boats and assorted water-borne mayhem when necessary. But the next few figures are going to trend more in the REAL ASS direction, with one sharp left turn at the very end.

In order; V 15 aka Dollar General Shipwreck, V 14 from Rise of Cobra, and V 16, Arctic Shipwreck, a Toys R’ Us (RIP) Exclusive

Here we see a bit of the REAL ASS aesthetic creeping in. I’m going to speak in defense of the Rise of Cobra Shipwreck; he’s the only figure in that “delta armor” style from that movie I’ve actually kept around, I think. Why? Because they managed to keep him unique.

For instance, he’s still carrying the FN200 bullpup rifle they all carried but his, for some damn reason, has a harpoon on it. And that kind of whacky, unrealistic, silly detail is what makes G.I. Joe G.I. Joe. We’re talking about a comic/cartoon where soldiers (including a silent ninja with a wolf pet, a sailor with a parrot, and a Native American with an eagle) fight a snake-themed paramilitary AMWAY supported by punk bikers and a Scottish arms dealer with a liquid metal mask.

Shit is weird is what I’m saying.

Also he’s got a cool knife and a wicked Desert Eagle sidearm. He just needs a damn holster for it! Anyway, this Shipwreck kept some character, by Neptune. I can’t say the Dollar Store Shipwreck does the same, but it does look enough like the Shipwreck of the Devil’s Due Publishing version from the early 2000s, and that comic more or less got me back into reading comics, so. I can dig it. Even the Toys R Us (RIP) exclusive arctic Shipwreck has its moments.

Lookit that smiling bastard. He’s somewhere awful in some kind of crazy government issue body-suit; he’s got frost in his beard and all over his watch-cap, but you just know Shipwreck sniffed out whatever kind of local hooch the folks were drinking (or smuggled his own on whatever shit detail he got sent on) and has won everyone else’s hazard pay at dice and cards, lost it back, and is busy winning it again. You just know he’s got some scheme to collect extra per diems cooking, and he knows that he’s collecting chips he can later cash in for extra liberty or a TAD somewhere tropical. You can try, but you can’t hold Hector Delgado down, and figure is proof of that part of his character.

Then there’s this guy!

Yeah, okay. Put him in a tactical vest, with the same legs that Hasbro went absolutely NUTS putting on every figure they could around 2012 and onward with the integral holster. I mean, it’s fine. It’s whatever. It’s still Shipwreck so I still love it a little. And at least the t-shirt under the vest says NAVY. But the only thing differentiating this Shipwreck from a billion other Joes is his black watch cap and beard. At least this version of Polly is well painted; I don’t know if it’s actually the one that came with this figure or not, and it can only barely sit on the carry handle of his armor, as you can see. I have a lot less use for this sort of REAL ASS Shipwreck than I do our last example.

HOOTING, HOLLERING, AIRHORNS

If you’ve known me in Joe collecting circles or on twitter for a while, you KNOW I love the Tiger Force color scheme. You know I don’t care at all about how unrealistic it is to wear a bright yellow camo shirt. I care not one tiny whit for how realistic any of it is or isn’t.

And you just know when Shipwreck got asked about joining Tiger Force (or any other subteam) his first question was about extra pay, hazard pay, uniform allowance, and what kickass gear he’d get to play with.

It’s majestic, completely unhinged and ridiculous, and I couldn’t possibly love it more. One day I ought to cosplay a Tiger Force Shipwreck (I ought to do a lot of things). It should be noted that this Joe Club subscription figure is based on an amazing Brazilian G.I. Joe, “Marujo,” that I’d love to get my hands on some day, but as it’s among the most popular and expensive international Joe variants, that’s unlikely.

So, do I understand any better why I love Shipwreck after writing all this? Not really. Perhaps it’s the filecard quote about him from 1985

Shipwreck is your quintessential sailor. He can splice a line, fry powdered eggs in the tooth of a gale and eat them, tell taller tales than a Senate Appropriations committee and take a three day liberty in Thule, Greenland and come back smiling.

Perhaps it’s the parrot and the flintlock pistol. Perhaps it’s the beard and the tattoos; I’ve got a predilection for those things myself. Perhaps it’s just the idea of the early Joe years, before all of us kids who loved it went on and read Clancy and Marcinko and played a bunch of Call of Duty; that you could join America’s daring, highly trained special mission force without being some pitiless dealer of death. And it’s worth noting, of course, that the definitive Joe continuity (Larry Hama’s comics) have never, ever presented Joe this way, have never ever made them into the Jack Ryan/Rogue Warrior/Call of Duty/Black Ops bullshit archetype our popular media is suffused with now.

There’s the fact that he is a not at all subtle nod to Jack Nicholson’s legendary Billy “Badass” Budusky in The Last Detail, one of the first movies I ever saw on Netflix and absolutely worth hunting down still. There’s the fact that his portrayal in the DDP comics showed up shacking up with Courtney “Cover Girl” Krieger, much to everyone else’s shock. But at the end I’m pretty sure it’s the fact that he seems like a pirate, and pirates are frickin’ cool when you’re seven years old, especially when they’re unequivocally a good guy.

What I Read this Summer

and What I'm Reading Now

The first thing I tell students who take my elective SF/F writing class is that they can't be a writer if they don't read, and that their class-assigned reading doesn't count. When each class meeting opens I ask them to briefly recount what they've been reading in the SF/F vein that week, why, what's good about it and what lessons they can take from it.

When it comes to reading, I try to practice what I preach. And since during the school year reading is inevitably slowed down by the endless grading of papers, I have to really get after it in the summer. What follows are the highlights of what I read or reread since this summer started and am reading now that it's ending.

Nonfiction

A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman.

As an amateur WWI history buff, of course I've read Tuchman's amazing account of the opening weeks of the Great War, The Guns of August. I finally decided to dive in to her account of the daily life of Europe in the latter half of the 14th century as soon as this summer began. Instantly I wished I'd read it years ago, before I'd begun writing The Paladin Trilogy. I never went into Paladin with a particular era or region in mind, but there's no doubt that Tuchman's book would've helped to inform some aspects of the world that emerged in the writing.

My major takeaway from this book is, really, that the 14th century was damned weird. That's entirely too light a summary of such a dense (meant as a compliment) treatment of the subject, but really, what was with the pointed shoes? Tuchman is constantly pointing out how the pointed shoes, or poulaines, were constantly the subject of sumptuary laws. Apparently they were considered quite the menace, and no law seemed to bring them under control.

Tuchman fills the book with rich detail; the specifics of some rituals of feudal homage are particularly bizarre. Her account of peasant rebellion is riveting, and when she shows, via primary sources, exactly what nobles thought of the poor, I felt there were some direct echoes in political rhetoric today. Even the medieval poor, you see, had it too easy, according to the rich, and required a constant and firm hand to keep their natural, habitual laziness from ruining them.

There isn't any aspect of medieval life Tuchman doesn't touch on, from the corruption and schism of the church, medicine, astrology, diet, marriage, to the ambition and over-reach of medieval warfare. The planned French invasion of England, involving a massive pre-fabricated fortress to cross the channel in several ships seems to me the ultimate expression of how the warfare of the day was largely untenable. Armies were rarely, if ever, given achievable goals or deployed using a modicum of sense. In the case of that fortress, only pieces of it got there, seized by the English and displayed as a trophy.

If you have even a layman's curiosity about medieval history and you haven't read Tuchman yet, do it now. If you want to write fantasy informed by medieval European history, it's practically mandatory.

Fiction

This spring, so not quite this summer, I read three fantastic novels back to back; Elizabeth Bear's Karen Memory, Ken Liu's The Grace of Kings and The Mechanical by Ian Tregillis. Technically they fall outside the scope of “what I read this summer,” but all of them are worth your time. All of them are on the shortlist for “Best new book I read this year.” In fact, they probably are the shortlist. The latter, in particular, has stuck with me, as it made me go back and reread (in a largely confused haze) some of Spinoza and the other philosophers whose ideas it incorporated. If you've ever wanted clockwork golems and wildly alternate history that makes you examine the question of whether or not free will can be said to exist, go read it.

I also read the third novel of Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher Saga, The Time of Contempt. Like, I think, most American readers, I came to The Witcher via the video games, and have had to wait as the books become more widely available in English translation. In the games, Geralt of Rivia seems a pretty clear power fantasy, so it was somewhat refreshing in this book to see him much more limited. In fact, the bulk of the book really followed Ciri, and I felt it really helped inform my appreciation of her character fresh off having played The Witcher 3.

I also did some rereading this summer. I decided at some point that I wanted to do a big reread of most, if not all, of Guy Gavriel Kay's work. To my mind, Kay is probably the best living fantasist (other candidates; Ursula K. LeGuin and I'm not sure who else, but I'd take suggestions) and it had been years since I'd read any of his older work. I decided to start with the one Kay novel that I hadn't really sharply remembered, A Song for Arbonne.

Folks, I was so glad I did.

It was also fortuitous that I read this book shortly after Tuchman, whose treatment of courtly love certainly informed my rereading of Arbonne. I believe I'd read it in high school, so the intervening 20 years certainly made a difference as well. After this reread, it might just be vying with Tigana for my favorite Kay novel of all. If you haven't read it, or there's been a space of time since you did, go give it a first or second try. I kept stopping mid page in a mix of awe at the grace of the prose and frustration at my certainty that I'd never write a paragraph or a sentence as good as the one I just read.

On a side note, it's sort of fascinating how many fantasy novels out there treat or take inspiration from the Albigensian Crusade, huh? I can think of at least 2 others besides this, but I'm not going to name them; maybe you can in the comments.

At the moment, I just finished reading Django Wexler's The Shadow Throne, second in The Shadow Campaigns. Less military and more politically focused than The Thousand Names, it's a brisk fantasy take on the French Revolution. It's hard to talk about without spoilers, I think, but there are some fascinating things happening in this series. For one, it's hard to pinpoint any one character as the protagonist. Our viewpoint characters (specifically Marcus and Winter) are working for someone (Vhalnich) without often knowing many details of the overall plan or picture, much less the endgame. Certainly we're rooting for them, and their allies, but we don't really have a solid grasp on the motivations or goals of the man pulling all the strings. In case it's unclear, I mean all of this as a compliment. If you like flintlock fantasy, I don't think you can go wrong here; one part musketry, one part demonology, ½ part gender identity and woman-disguised-as-soldier narrative, a dash of history, shaken over your laughter at eye-wateringly stupid radicals. Smooth and satisfying.

Oh, and last but certainly not least, Joe Abercrombie's Half a War, the conclusion (?) of The Shattered Sea. I've loved everything Abercrombie's written, but I think this trilogy was, on the whole, probably better than The First Law books, with Half the World in particular being my favorite among all of his work. Again, it's hard to say too much in praise of it without spoiling. So the best thing you can do is go get all three books, read them, and get back to me.

Comics

Well this post is already carrying on a tad long, but I'd be remiss if I didn't include this here. Early on in the summer I read Nimona by Noelle Stevenson, which lured me in by playing with super-villainry and shape-changing in hilarious ways, only to try and punch me in the heart (it's doubtless shriveled and black, more a lump of coal than a vital red muscle, but it's there) later on. I mean this in the best possible way.

Monthly, I read fewer titles than I once did. If I had to give up all my hobbies – books, videogames, action figures – and eat only ramen noodles and boiled potatoes, I'd still find room in my monthly budget for Knights of the Dinner Table. Having just read #223 this week, my love for this comic and magazine is just as strong as it was when I bought issue #36 off a rack in a mall newsstand (remember those?) back in college. That #36 – and every single issue since – is long-boxed and carefully stored.

My love for G.I. Joe is no secret to any of you reading this who know me or even follow me on Twitter. I still read every monthly Joe comic, but my favorite, of course, is the continuation of the old Marvel storyline still written by Larry Hama. In the hands of a less interested, less competent, less character-oriented storyteller, the Joe book could have been simple hackwork meant to sell toys. I'll argue forever that Hama elevated it beyond that, and continues to do so. This month's issue, #212, features visual and storyline call backs to #36, from June of 1985. I was blown away by that. The continuity, not of plot, but of character and tone that Hama has achieved over decades of working with a toy property simply staggers me.

Also this summer I was sad to see my favorite hack-and-slash style book of all time end its amazing run; I'm speaking of Skullkickers, written by Jim Zub, art by Edwin Huang, colors by Misty Coats. If you've ever played D&D with a bloodthirsty group, you'll love Skullkickers. Many of the player-characters from the aforementioned Knights of the Dinner Table would fit right in to the Skullkickers milieu. The takeaway here is that you should be going to www.skullkickers.com and beginning to read it online right now, and then you should buy the trades and collected editions as they come out.

Also monthly (or as publication allows) reads; Saga, Rat Queens, Bitch Planet, Star Wars and Darth Vader. I teeter back and forth on reading Secret Wars but usually give in. I'd talk about all of these but I've already gone on too long and my kettlebells are calling. Their voice is the nightmare of iron; it is the song of ruin and pain unending, and the only way to cease the horrid wail is to go lift them. Repeatedly.

What'd you read this summer? What are you reading now? What are you excited to read in the coming months (besides Ordination, of course)? Sound off in the comments. Comments may be lightly moderated; I'm not here to run an argument clinic.