Tunnel Rat, Tripwire and Sherlock are taking off from an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea just south of Socotra Island. They’re off to rescue a young activist named Lila who has been captured by the Black Keffiyeh terrorist organization. A few special ops guys are going deep into very dangerous territory in G.I. Joe--A Real American Hero #314. Writer Larry Hama continues one of the longest writing runs in the history of comices with an issue that is brought to page and panel by artist Andrew Krahnke and colorist Francesco Segala. It’s going to be an interesting journey for everyone involved. 

They’re going to land under cover of night. That’s the easy part. Once they’re in position, they need to break into a bunker that’s holding a very important hostage that they’re looking to free from danger. Of course...these things rarely go as planned and there’s bound to be some kind of a problem as the unexpected reveals itself. They know to expect the unexpected. They might not know where it’s coming from, though. Things could get really confusing in a hurry in the fog of a very dicey situation that could go haywire in a million different ways.

Hama renders a tight, little one-shot military story that delivers quite a bit of depth around the edges of contemporary politics. Things get hopelessly complicated in modern warfare as different factions are all running into each other on the field of battle...making a big, hopeless mess of everything. This is the modern battlefield where it’s never quite as easy as one side against another and things have a tendency to escalate out of control in more ways than might be prepared for by even the most elite special ops forces. Hama’s dialogue is crisp. His pacing is swift. This guy know his way around a military-based one-shot story. He’s been doing this sort of thing for decades. 

Krahnke could be a little bit tighter with his details, but the sketchiness of life on the front lines of major military conflict never looked clean. So he sketchiness arond the edges of the action fits more or less perfectly with everything that Hama is throwing into the script. The important thing is that the action launches itself across the page with the right tactical kinetics to make it all feel right. Segala’s colors to an excellent job of bringing across the right mood whether it be outside at night or inside a very secure military bunker.

Hama had been going through some pretty weird stuff with traditional G.I. Joe antagonists in the course of the past few issues. It’s cool to see him move things around a bit and allow the Joes to engage in something that’s a bit more cleverly complicated than the weird energy that comes from antagonists like Destro and Cobra Commander. It’s still a very traditional Joe story, but the tight rendering of the one-shot makes it a lot of fun.

Grade: B