A terrorist military group the size of Cobra, has a hell of a lot of tech. There has to be a great deal of politics tied-up in the manufacture of so many arms for a large organization. Particularly once it’s essentially taken over and become a fascist dictatorship. Writer Paul Allor explores some of the finer aspects of military industry in a cloak-and-dagger one-shot story for his dystopian G.I. Joe #8. Artist Emma Vieceli manages a few sharp moments of terse drama in a slow-moving issue that largely fails to embrace the possibilities of spy-based drama on the comics page. 

B.A.T.s: Battle Android Troopers. They’re very advanced foot soldiers for Cobra. And as it turns out, they’re manufactured in Canada. Cobra has a tenuous relationship with those in Canada responsible for making them. G.I. Joe spy Alyssa Stall (code name: Bombstrike) is looking to make that relationship just a bit more complicated. The Nova Scotia native might find things a bit more complicated for herself as well as real emotions cloud professional performance in a very delicate operation that finds her falling perilously into the sinister clutches of Cobra.

Allor does a pretty good job of building a simple cloak-and-dagger story that opens and closes in a single issue. Aside from the basic idea that his G.I. Joe world is dominated by Cobra. He’s introducing every single component in the story this issue. The fact that it’s not hopelessly bogged-down in backstory details is quite an accomplishment on Allor’s part. He’s shown versatility as a writer these past eight issues, but there isn’t much in this spy story that feels genuinely fresh. That being said, the story moves swiftly with some very tight dialogue. 

Vieceli has a firm grasp of drama. While the rendering feels a bit loose in places, she never bogs-down the panel in too much detail. The central drama is firmly established with a layout that includes some pretty tight dramatic shots and a few carefully-placed moments in silhouette. While the more aggressive moments of action are laid out on the page quite dynamically, the action in the panel DOES feel a bit stiff in places. The best moments in the issue are Bombstrike’s personal emotional conflicts, which Vieceli brings to the page with admirable nuance and intensity from the careful rendering of reflections across her face to clever use of body language to framing everything with just the right angle.

Allor has been bouncing around a hell of a lot in his new dystopian G.I. Joe series. While he’s making a solid case for a whole line of comics set in the world he’s creating, the series itself hasn’t built-up enough momentum to feel terribly coherent as a whole. It’s all awash in so many different moods and so many different sub-genres of action fiction. Allor doesn’t seem to have much of an eye towards the bigger picture in his particular brand of G.I. Joe, but there’s still plenty of time to bring it all together once all of the different moods have played through the opening issues of the series.

Grade: B-