The first round of Yo-Jo Cola is on me.

The 1980s were a golden era for toy/television synergistic marketing crossovers like He-Man and the Masters of the Universe or Thundercats. And the granddaddy of them all was G.I. Joe.
It started as a Hasbro toy line of 12-inch action figures in 1964. (I remember having one in the late 1970s with a bristly sort of beard, though in terms of toy technology it was primitive compared to my Steve Austin with a small crummy magnifying glass built into his skull you looked into a small hole at the back of his head through the magnifying glass and out his bionic freakin' eye.)
And then in 1982 Hasbro rebooted the line with 3.75-inch action figures, playsets and vehicles and put the characters in these garish proto-military costumes and gave each one of them funky nicknames and a weird terrorist-like enemy called Cobra whose members had their own nicknames and '70s Studio 54 looks (I mean, Destro had a shiny metal headcovering mask and wore this leather outfit open to the navel, what was that all about aside from partying with Kristy McNichol and Norman Mailer) and the whole thing was obviously very superhero influenced. And thus was born the modern G.I. Joe line It was popular enough that in 1985 came the cartoon series. That reboot also spawned a Marvel Comics series.
And sales of that were good enough that in 1986, Hasbro and Mavel put together a second G.I. Joe title (the same kind of marketing notions behind the multiple Batman, Superman and Spiderman titles that are forever on the shelves at your local comic store, which is probably not all that local as they are fewer and farer between). G.I. Joe Special Missions was billed as telling the stories of "some missions so secret, so sensitive that even the Joes who go on them are told only the bare minimum."
Which brings us to G.I. Joe Special Missions vol. 1 (2010, 182 pages, $19.99, IDW), which reprints the first seven issues of the series and a prequel that was part of G.I. Joe issue 50.
First, the pluses. Writer Larry Hama is insane. A Vietnam vet, martial artist and longtime writer/editor in the comics world, he's been attached to numerous G.I. Joe products for years. And he clearly has a ball with this stuff, with most every story in the collection focusing on a small team of Joes on some kind of mission, some of which are amazing in their outlandishness - like disabling a toxic payload in an old Nazi bomber that never made it on its original mission to NYC and ended up frozen in a Greenland glacier but now is about to fall out of the glacier and into the sea and maybe kill millions and meanwhile Cobra troops also are after the bomber and meanwhile a SEPARATE Joe team is in Brazil to secure the help of an old Nazi who can disarm the toxic gunk bomb in the bomber but he's also being pursued by a squad of Israeli intelligence, oh and by the way one of the Joes is descended from Holocaust survivors and do you see what fantastic melodramatic fun this guy is having with all these plates going at once? Or there's this piece of primo dialogue from a group of terrorists who take over Cobra's consulate (!!!) in NYC - an incident the Joes use as a distraction to also break in: "Cobra must withdraw all support from the neo-conservative party hardliners that have turned Sierra Gordo over to the illiterate peasantry so that a Menshevikista intermediate regime can take custodianship of power until the masses can be elevated to the level at which they can rule themselves ..." I mean, even Joe leader Duke would sympathize with the Baroness as she slaps her forehead in tired exasperation at that moment.
And alongside Cobra, there's also a constant Soviet threat that creates either antagonists or the plot device that gets many of the stories going.
Artist Herb Trimpe - whose work with Marvel dates back to the Silver Age - does a decent job capturing the sort of cartoon nature of what is going on in this universe where a Joe hides in bushes in a snowy Eastern European mountain range wearing only his boots and boxer shorts as he uses his clothes and chicken blood as a decoy for the helicopter of Soviet bloc thugs chasing him.
And the Mike Zeck covers reprinted in the collection are, like everything Mike Zeck has ever done, a comic art wonder to just study and stare at, with his lines really capturing great splashes of action as well as intensity on the faces on the cover. He might be the master of guns blazing.
Some issues are stronger than others. "Burn Out," featuring the Joes in some Middle Eastern nation with a parallel story of an American pilot working for the regime there falls flat, and the artwork at one point becomes confusing in terms how one of the main characters actually looks, thus creating a speedbump in the reading enjoyment.
And the $19.99 price tag is a bit hefty (though obviously there are places like instocktrades.com where pricing is less withering.)
To be sure, Special Missions is not a place to look for character development or messages or insight into anything. It's over the topness can be draining after a few issues in a row, kind of like eating too much chocolate. But for big stupid fun, it's a good read.

From the library: The Unwritten tpb. vol. 1

Tom Taylor is kind of a loser. The son of a famous writer who disappeared when Tom was a child, Tom tried such routes as acting, writing and music, but never amounted to anything. He makes his living as Tom Taylor, son of the famous writer who wrote a huge YA series about a young wizard named Tommy Taylor (a sort of Harry Potter-esque thing), by appearing at book signings and promotional events.

Except now Tom has questions about whether he really might not be the son of Wilson Taylor, increasing numbers of people think he's either a fraud or actually Tommy Taylor made flesh, and his life is taking on weird parallels to the Tommy Taylor series.
That's the basic premise of The Unwritten, a Vertigo series written and arted by Mike Carey and Peter Gross. The monthly series launched in July 2009. The first trade paperback ($9.99, 144 pages) collects issues 1-5.
This series has gotten a lot of love in critical circles. And the premise - about the importance and power of stories - is intriguing. The highpoint is issue 5, which takes a slight digression from the main Tommy Taylor story to give us some background on the shadowy conspiracy/supernatural group that tries to control storytelling, focusing on Rudyard Kipling's interactions with them and manipulation by them. It's a smart series, with references to everything from Milton to Frankenstein, with Carey obviously being well read and doing his homework and this putting him perhaps on the same level as Neil Gaiman in terms of sheer amount of intellectual content.
The main storyline, with Tom Taylor, is not disappointing. But it's obviously a slow build. After four issues, a lot has happened, seemingly, but you don't quite know what yet.
Am looking to seeing the second and third trades of this, as it builds and as you get a better sense of what exactly is going on.