Welcome back to Strange Times & Places, where today we dip our toes back into AU crossovers of Hasbro’s biggest franchises with Dreamwave’s Transformers/G.I. Joe.
How’s It Different?
It is an Imaginary Story transposing the Autobots, G.I. Joe team, Decepticons, and Cobra into a World War II setting.
What’s The Story?
It’s 1939 and the forces of Cobra are using massive, technologically advanced war machines to steamroll their way through Europe. The United States, fearing that they will be Cobra’s next target, send an elite squad of soldiers, codenamed “G.I. Joe”, to infiltrate Cobra’s island stronghold and discover the secret of this bizarre technology.
Best of Differences
- Cobra Commander is able to order around the Decepticons because Cobra discovered the Matrix of Leadership before awakening them.
- Snake-Eyes’ World War II redesign is pretty badass, giving him a trench coat, knight’s visor, and a broadsword.
- Optimus Prime is moved to help fight Cobra (after previously refusing to fight humans, since he doesn’t know for sure the Joes are the good guys) when Cobra Commander uses slaves as human shields. Duke explains that he’s glad to see slaves, because that means Cobra hasn’t been slaughtering everyone like they’d feared.
- The Matrix means that Megatron has to serve Cobra Commander. It doesn’t mean he has to save him when his reckless strategies drop a mountain on him, though Megs does offer mercy in his handgun form.
- Optimus & the his fellow Autobots sacrifice themselves to end the Cybertronian threat on Earth, meaning that Duke & Optimus Prime end World War II all by themselves in this universe.
Worst of Differences
- It always strikes me as somewhat in bad taste when you completely replace the Nazis in World War II with a fictional entity.
- Jae Lee’s art is absolutely not suited to this story whatsoever. The shadowy, heavily stylized aesthetic leaves the story hard to follow, making the entire story appear to occur on a particularly dark and foggy night.
- John Ney Rieber’s writing doesn’t help much either, over-packing the narrative with classic characters while devoting most of the panel time to only a few characters subplots.
Come Back Next Week for a New Installment of 1 out of 5 – Would Recommend!
